How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life [Episode #832]

This week’s topic is: How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life

These energies coming through your body very much do affect your physiology. They affect your physical health. They also affect our experience of life. They affect our ability to maintain good relationships, to feel peace, to feel harmony, to feel energy.

We all know that certain emotions, incoherent emotions like frustration, irritation, anger, and so on can be very draining. And we want to feel lighter because lighter is closest to our natural state, which is light and dynamic energy, and we don’t want to feel weighed down. I’m very excited to get into this show with some really practical evidence-based tips and tools for you to take away today.

Remember you can submit your questions at https://mysolluna.com/askkimberly/

[Question Answered]

Kelsie – Idaho

I’m really struggling to show up for anyone outside my immediate family (husband and kids), and even with them I sometimes feel like I am emotionally spent. What can I do to help me find more balance and get to a place where I’m able to manage the day to day grind, but still feel happy and content?

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:01 Namaste loves and welcome back to our Thursday Q&A show. Our topic this week is a practical one, a very important one for our overall wellbeing, which is How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life. This energy, these energies coming through your body very much do affect your physiology. They affect your physical health. They also affect our experience of life. They affect our ability to maintain good relationships, to feel peace, to feel harmony, to feel energy. We all know that certain emotions, incoherent emotions like frustration, irritation, anger, and so on can be very draining. And so we want to feel lighter because lighter is closest to our natural state, which is light and dynamic energy, and we don’t want to feel weighed down. So I’m very excited to get into this show with some really practical evidence-based tips and tools for you to take away today.

01:16 Quick reminder, if you’d like to submit a question like this for a future q and a show, you can do so over on our website, which is my sauna.com. And over there you can check out our many other courses, articles, meditations, digestion focused supplements and recipes and more.

Question around the topic of: How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life: I’m really struggling to show up for anyone outside my immediate family (husband and kids), and even with them I sometimes feel like I am emotionally spent.  What can I do  to help me find more balance and get to a place where I’m able to manage the day to day grind, but still feel happy and content?

Okay, so our question today comes from Kelsie, who lives in Idaho. Thank you so much, Kelsey, for your participation in the community. Thank you for bringing this topic to our forefront today. I know a lot of people today are struggling with feeling quite heavy, especially with what’s going on in a collective scale in the world. And you’re right, I’m really struggling to show up for anyone outside my immediate family, husband and kids, and even with them, I sometimes feel like I’m emotionally spent. What can I do to help me find more balance and get to a place where I’m able to manage the day-to-day grind, but still feel happy and content? So Kelsey, both hands on my heart. Thank you so much. I know that there is a lot going on. There’s a lot that we’re all trying to juggle and work with in a day, and then we want to be there for our loved ones, of course, and then we want to be there for others and it can feel like a lot.

02:45 You mentioned some interesting words here. You mentioned balance and finding this sense of contentment as well, and we really need to remember that we need to find that in ourselves first before we give it out to anyone else. We really need to nurture ourselves, and this is where the power of the holistic lifestyle comes in.

The Four Cornerstone Approach on How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life

This is where our four cornerstones are so powerful because we want to approach this with the support of the other cornerstones, how we eat and support our emotions. For instance, exercise and our bodies, microbiome and health for instance, and our spiritual growth, our connection to the wholeness, the true self inside of us helps us to rise above and transcend the day-to-day happenings so we don’t feel so weighed down. We want to make sure that we are starting the day with a really healthy context where we can step back and we can enter the day.

03:49 Every day is a new chance for awakening with this really broad, expansive perspective where we are zoomed out. Because if we start the day in the minutiae, let’s say you start the day with the TV on and the news on or on social media, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day drama or the Sanskrit word, which is Maya. All the delusions happening around all the surface dramas, right? And I’m not saying that they aren’t happening, but I’m saying that there is a greater context. There is greater energies like love and unity and appreciation and gratitude that we can start to connect to through our hearts, through our own bodies, and we want to enter the day from that place.

How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life: Meditation and mindfulness

So the first thing I would say, and we’re just going to dive right in here, is to anchor your morning. I heard a lecture from a monk yesterday actually, who said, people are coming to him and they’re feeling all this anxiety because they’re seeing what’s happening on the news, and then they tell him that they’re on the news morning, noon and night and he said, you should be meditating morning, noon and night and then wait till later for the world to come in.

05:14 Don’t give your power away to the happenings of the world. And when we are in a centered stable position within ourselves, we’re actually able to support more just by our energetic presence and coming up with solutions for ways that we might be able to help and support. So it doesn’t help anybody or the world if we’re drained and we really need to remember that. So I encourage you to wait as long as possible in the morning to get on your phone. You may have to check some texts, emergencies, just make sure everything’s okay with your family or whatever. But I encourage you to wait until you get on the news and media, social media as long as you can, and that way you really give yourself to come into that state of balance, feeling nourished on the inside, drinking your hot water with lemon, the things that we’ve talked about here for so many years.

06:15 Taking your Ss b o probiotics, nourishing your gut health, getting some fiber in your body which helps to make you feel more clear in your mind, more energized, meditating. Ideally, you would do these things before you go on the news. So you are in your stable center. And a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine back in 2014 found that meditation led to significant reductions of anxiety, depression, and overall psychological distress. It’s easier to start the day in a stable place, able to be then be able to deal with what comes our way versus getting derailed first thing and then trying to backtrack and recorrect so we will feel lighter. As I mentioned, if we really work to create that beautiful consistent morning practice and we keep the rest of the world at bay for a little while, social media is going to be fine. Whatever’s happening on the news is going to happen whether you check when you wake up at six 30 or you delay it until eight 30 or whatever your timing is, but it will make an enormous difference in your own energy and your own health.

07:38 And this is something I very much live by myself. I am largely off the news. In fact, altogether I’ll check headlines or I’ll know generally what’s happening. If there’s something I need to dive into, I will. But I do not let it rule my life because there was a time when it was a habit to go in first thing, and I found myself getting really emotionally down a lot. There’s just so much out there and we don’t want to disconnect. We all want to do our part and we want to be informed to an extent, but we don’t want to get dragged down. And there’s a big difference. There’s a big difference. We don’t want to get depleted because that doesn’t help anything.

How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life: Physical activity

Another part of feeling lighter is to feel lighter in the body. And this is where exercise and physical activity comes in, because when we’re stagnant in the body, if we’re sitting all day, we’ve all heard the term sitting is the new smoking.

08:35 We sit in our cars, we sit at our desk, we sit in front of the tv if you watch tv, and that’s just a whole lot of stagnation of our bodily cells, which are meant to be dynamic and in fluxx and flow. And one of the things that Dan Buettner illustrated so beautifully in his Netflix series on the blue zones and also in his books, is that the healthiest people in the world, the highest rate of centenarians, the longest lived people are really active. And it’s not just that they’re setting aside time to go to the gym, but they’re gardening, they’re walking to their friends’ houses, they’re walking to their churches, they’re going to run errands, and it really becomes part of their lifestyle. And so physical activity was found in a research study in 2023, and the Institute of Medical Sciences, even in small amounts, were found to have a positive impact on mood.

09:38 So if you’ve felt a little bit stagnant, and we want to be especially aware because winter is around the corner, and it can be easier of course to sink down on that cozy couch is to keep moving, right? And we can keep walking around, maybe that’s around your office building or if it’s too cold outside, you can walk around an indoor mall to get to different stores or to do errands. You can have a yoga mat and do some indoor activities or whatever it is, but we don’t want to get slothful and stagnant when we’re moving. We’re moving our digestion, it’s helping our bells, it’s helping our overall circulation. And this is so great for our emotions to feel light. Everything affects everything else.

How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life: Diet and nutrition

Speaking of which, that takes us to our first cornerstone, which is food. And a study found in a study published in B M C Medicine in 2017 found that eating a Mediterranean style diet characterized by high consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains was associated with a lower risk of depression.

10:56 So it’s funny, on this very podcast, Dan Ner has come on here and talked about, I believe his name is Ancel, and I don’t remember his last name, but the doctor, the physician who studied and discovered the blue zones, and he said that it really wasn’t about the fish and about the oil, olive oil people extrapolated that it became part of these news stories. What Dan said was it really was about these other factors, the high amounts of fiber and the whole grains and the slowing down and enjoying even drinking red wine with meals and so on and so forth. And so sometimes we get fed information that’s a little bit tampered with, shall we say, or extrapolated. But what we want to keep in mind getting beyond labels is that natural foods are going to really nourish your body. And this is true all year round.

11:58 We want to eat fruit all year round. We want to have our glow and green smoothie all year round. It doesn’t have to be super cold. I do not use anything really cold in my G G s except for maybe some frozen banana. There may be one frozen fruit component, but the rest of it is fairly close to room temperature. And I also drink my power protein smoothie close to room temperature. The only thing that’s cold in it is my acai packet. So I’ve gotten really used to having root temperature smoothies and it feels really good to me. So I think you can adopt the same and of course incorporate lots of different vegetables. My family has a lot of quinoa, lentils, we have lentil and quinoa pasta. My kids eat it all the time because it’s easy. I’ll make veggies, cucumbers, cauliflower, whatever. And then lentil pasta and sourdough bread.

12:58 So these are staples that are tried and true. They have been around in very cultures that have been practicing these dietary or been using these dietary practices and eating this way for hundreds of years. And also the blue zones doesn’t have the same rates of depression and they’re active back to the exercise they’re eating simple whole foods, natural foods. So we really want to get away from convenient foods. If you start to notice things creeping up and you’re getting some packaged snacks more often. I mean, I admit we go to Hawaii every month and that’s the time where I get my bags of potato chips, which I really enjoy, and it’s my travel tree, but I don’t consume them at home. I don’t buy them at home because then I would eat them at home and I don’t want to have things packaged foods too much of my life.

13:57 But at the same time, we don’t have to focus on trying to be perfect. We want to have some flexibility. We want to have some leniency and some treats, but the majority of the time we want to eat from the earth. We want to have these colorful whole foods simply prepared and freshly prepared as well.

How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life :Sleep and anxiety

So the next thing I want to talk about is sleep and anxiety and related to sleep. So what I mean by that is no surprise here. A study published in the J M I R Mental health Review in 2019 found that sleep quality had a profound impact on mood regulation and poor sleep led to emotional distress, good sleep led to emotional wellbeing. We know that when we sleep well, we feel great. A lot of us don’t sleep well because of anxiety, because of our thoughts. So we want to quell our thoughts before we get to bed.

14:56 And so I want to share with you what’s really helped me in this regard is journaling, getting things out. Sometimes that’s talking to a trusted partner so long as it’s not reinforcing anger or annoyance and saying, can you believe this happened? And getting yourself riled up, but more solution oriented about what’s the best pathway forward? And if I journal about things that are unresolved and then what I may do about them the next day, it gives me peace of mind. So I’m not awake in the night thinking about things. And this is coming from a former insomniac. I used to replay things a lot and I would also do things too late. I would study too late to be worried about tests. Sometimes I get into discussions too late at night. If we’re on screens too late at night, that can certainly rile us up.

15:55 If you do that, please do invest in a $30 or so pair of blue light blocking glasses, which will help to reduce the stimulation for being on screens too late at night. Sometimes we can’t avoid it. So it’s really important to calm things down. And our new heart aligned meditation that we’ll be publishing will be really great for you in this context about getting out of the thoughts, getting into your heart and into your body. And I’m very excited to announce that we did just do a study in LA with 30 participants with the HeartMath Institute over four weeks. And the participants meditated did this audio attract, which I will be publishing similar ones, the same technique on our website soon for free. So you can practice them yourself eight minutes long, four to five times a week, and there is a 29% increase in heart coherence and 10% baseline, which basically means more syncing up of the rhythms of our body.

17:06 We are still calibrating the percentage of how that affects stressing and anxiety, but the more coherent you are, the less those anxiety and depression goes down. Sorry, anxiety and stress. So I don’t have the exact numbers yet, but it’s really amazing to see the impact of this type of meditation. And I practice it in the morning and evening. And I highly recommend if you’re one of someone that has a lot of thoughts in your head and you find it difficult to sleep, you feel anxiety creeping up at night, it’s really wonderful to do this in the evenings to really enforce and support beautiful sleep.

How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life: Positivity and gratitude

17:54 And the next aspect of feeling lighter emotionally is to focus on positivity and gratitude. A study in the Journal of Occupational Health in 2021 and other journals as well have explored the benefits of gratitude in adopting a positive psychological approach to improving emotional wellbeing. So this becomes a choice. We can yes, look at what’s wrong. We can pick out what’s lacking in ourselves, first of all, and in the world around us. And if we look, we will find things that can always appear wrong and lacking or we can shift. We can say, you know what? I want to feel lighter today and I choose to be grateful. I mean, if you just put your hands on your heart for a moment right now and you sink into this core place inside of you, let your heart teach you what gratitude feels like. And for me in my life, it’s become less specific and less around gratitude lists, although that can be helpful.

19:10 And sometimes it helps us call to mind specific things if we’re in a negative rutt, if our mindset is dragging us down and it feels hard to get out of, sure, gratitude lists can be really helpful. But for me it shifted into feeling looking around and being here in this moment and just tuning into this miracle of presence. We hear about the power of now, we hear about being present, but the more we really truly come into this moment, and I hope that my heart aligned meditation will study in this. The practical enlightenment meditations we already offer my last book can be helpful too. You are more than you think you are. I want you to feel that because I’ve gotten a level of that. And I can tell you that it’s priceless. I can tell you that when we don’t have to feel grateful for a particular thing, but just because we’re here alive and breathing, it’s a game changer in our lives.

20:15 And it opens up so much. It changes our energy, it changes our magnetism, it helps more to flow in. People are drawn to us. There is more greater success that starts to come in healthier relationships, more harmony and more. So it’s a really beautiful practice to open up to more aliveness in this moment. And again, of course, practically speaking, if we can create regularity and consistency in our meditations, we start to touch that stillness inside of us. Our true self is always untouched, undisturbed by outer circumstances. So the more we go into that place and we bask in that inner place, the more we will benefit, the more our lives will open up.

21:14 So the next part that I want to talk about, so anyways, just to wrap that up, we can take an attitude of gratitude and trying to be positive. We don’t have to get into complaining mode, want to be aware of those around us that love to complain and maybe spend less time or move away from that particular topic because it drags us down. We don’t feel light when we’re complaining or when we’re around people that are always complaining. So it’s always better to shift into more seeing things in a lighter, brighter way, which very much is a choice. So another part of this which segues perfectly into our social relationships, and since Covid, this has been highlighted very much, we’re meant to be in community. We’re meant to be in collaboration with one another in connection. We’re not meant to be off on our own all the time, except when we’re in very high states of consciousness.

How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life: Social connection

22:20 I would say the great yogis who reside in the Himalayan caves like Babaji don’t really need social connection. But for those of us here on the earth plane, our friends and community gives so much support. So first of all, we want to lean on our friends and we want to choose our friends or choose who we spend the most time with. It doesn’t mean we ditch our friends, but there are certainly, as I mentioned with the complaining aspect, there are people that will help us to feel uplifted more than others. And that’s really simply the way that it is. So social relationships and wellbeing was studied in pss one journal and study in 2015, found that the importance of social relationships enhanced wellbeing. No surprise there, we don’t want to be off on our own. Then we can go into a negative spiral in our thoughts.

23:21 So yes, lean on your friends, whether that’s calling up friends, having walks together, meeting up for tea, get togethers in a spiritual environment. I certainly love seeing the families in the family room at our meditation center. And I have a group of women that I spend time with in my community. We have women’s circles, which are really wonderful and so on. So however that looks for you, and again, I believe we’ve also heard, and it’s worth repeating, the Jim Rohn who’s an entrepreneur, his saying that we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with, which highlights that those around us, their energy, their attitude is very much adopted by us. So we want to be mindful, we want to be aware, and we want to choose carefully and lean in more towards those that are of the energy of the mindset that we do very much want to adopt.

How to Feel Emotionally Lighter in Your Mind and Body in Day-to-Day Life: Stress reduction

24:26 And finally, we want to talk about stress reduction. And there’s a study in the International Journal of Preventative Medicine in 2018 found that yoga has an effect in reducing stress, anxiety, and depression. So I have a lot to say about stress actually, which I want to say here. And this goes deeper. And there’s a lot of this in my new book, which I am wrapping up now. But stress is not the traffic. It’s not the annoying comments from your mother-in-law or the news necessarily. Stress is our internal response. So on one hand, we want to reduce stressors. That helps. We want to leave enough time for commuting so we’re not down to the wire. We want to pack less in our day. And number two, as this study mentioned, we want to constantly release stress through practices like yoga, breathing, meditation, or we can feel get in touch that oneness and that profound expansive wholeness inside all of us, which is the true self.

25:40 But also we want to understand as well that we don’t have to get pulled in. We don’t have to react in the same way. We don’t have to have expectations for life. It has to be right on time, or this road has to be totally clear. The meeting’s going to start right on time. These are expectations which are very rigid. So the way we stay stress-free in a larger sense is that we stay fluid and we’re able to pivot and be flexible with what life brings our way. So if we stay in that deep presence that we mentioned earlier, we stay in our hearts, we know that our center is inside of us, then whatever life brings us, we’re able to pivot and flow and move in a certain direction and say, oh, this didn’t work out. This person didn’t show up, or my friend’s late, I’m going to do this, or This road is blocked.

26:35 I’ll go this way. And so this ability to constantly pivot and flow with life is how we stay stress-free. The external circumstances don’t have to control us. We do not have to be prisoners of our circumstances. And in fact, the more that we’re able to pivot and flow and be flexible, we create more success because we’re able to work with what shows up, which is really powerful. It’s a very powerful place to be in. And this is something that I have experienced a lot myself because I used to get really quite rigid and want things to be a certain way and certain timelines to work out exactly right. And when we get into that mindset, we realize that we would limit ourselves so much. And life doesn’t have to be just so life can really be

Kimberly: 27:30 Open because we’re here, as I mentioned, this more expansive way of looking at gratitude. It’s not so specific means I don’t need this one thing to work out. I don’t need this person to feel love and peace. I can enjoy life, but if that person goes away, I’m still okay. This comes from inside of me. And so it is the more centered we become, the lighter we feel because it starts to dissolve the attachments and this feeling like, I need

Kimberly: 28:01 This job, or I need this relationship, or I need to be in a relationship, or I need to be a certain weight to be happy, or whatever it is. We feel lighter when we connect to that wholeness inside of us and realize there is no real lack and we are wonderful just as we are. We don’t need to add on. We just have to connect and realize. Or as the great yoga guru Paramahansa Yogananda says, we need to increase our self-realization. We need to realize who we really are more and more.

Kimberly: 28:37 And then all these beautiful things, the joy, the peace, and the love and the lightness, including the emotional lightness will come forth. So please check out the show notes over my sauna.com if you’d like to take a deeper dive into any of these studies. And we will also link in the show notes as always, to other articles, podcasts, I think you would enjoy. And to the aspect of the dietary aspect of feeling lighter, there are many plant-based recipes for you to check out the meditations. Please join our mailing list as well if you haven’t yet already over on our site to keep on top of all our breaking news. And we’ll be announcing when that heart aligned meditation section is up, including publishing the results of the study, which are very exciting. We’ll be back here Monday for our next interview show. Until then, sending you so much love, so much gratitude for being in our community and simply for being you. Look forward to connecting more. Namaste.