June Solluna Four Cornerstones Power Hour Tips Show: Summer Wellness [Episode #993]

Episode Summary:

In this episode of the Feel Good Podcast Power Hour, Kimberly Snyder discusses the importance of entering June with intention, embracing seasonal changes, and understanding Ayurvedic principles for summer health. She emphasizes the significance of nutrition, body movement, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth, providing practical tips for listeners to enhance their holistic lifestyle and well-being during the summer months.

FEEL GOOD SBO PROBIOTICS 

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Episode Chapters

 

SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS

• Glowing Greens Powder™
• Feel Good SBO Probiotics
• Feel Good Detoxy
• Feel Good Digestive Enzymes
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• Feel Good Skincare

KIMBERLY’S BOOKS

• The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts 

• Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart
• The Beauty Detox Solution
• Beauty Detox Foods
• Beauty Detox Power
• Radical Beauty
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• You Are More Than You Think You Are 

OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY!

• How to Believe in Your Self Worth with Jamie Kern Lima [Episode 907]
• How to Raise Your Standards In Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey [Episode 883]
• How to Eat to Beat Your Diet with New York Times best selling author Dr. William Li [Epsiode 913]
• The issues with consuming vegetable and seed oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan [Episode #899]
• How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard [Episode #877]
• How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger [Episode #873]
• How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo [Episode #867]
• How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means [Episode 889]

TRANSCRIPT

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:00)
Hello and welcome to our Feel Good Podcast Power Hour for June. I love doing this show. A reminder that instead of having a Thursday Q &A every single week, we’re doing this really incredibly jam-packed show on the first Thursday of every month that will give you the top tips and strategies around the four cornerstones, food, body, emotional well-being, and spiritual growth to have the most amazing

month ahead and to enter the month with intention. So we will continue to build up this show so definitely stay tuned as time goes on we’ll incorporate even more ⁓ community ideas, comments, questions from you guys, we’ll do some giveaways. So definitely this is a show that is this you know has so much creative potential and I’m really grateful for you tuning in with me today. You may have been with me for many years. I know that we used to do this ⁓ Thursday Q &A show every week. I used to do it with Caitlin and our Saluna team. There’s been many different iterations. You may be brand new to our community and if so, congratulations to me and to you. I’m so excited to find each other and welcome to the community. We have so many offerings and including this very show. So I’m so excited to dive right in.

Just a little reminder that our main hub is at mysolluna.com, our website where you can find literally hundreds, thousands of recipes that are going to boost your energy and your digestion, articles, ⁓ other feel good podcasts, the show notes to today’s show, and our amazing digestion focused supplements, including our SBO probiotics and detoxi. We have courses, we have our amazing waterfall cleanse.

We have our Heart Aligned Meditation, so there’s so much over there for you to explore and to go further into our community. So here we are in June, which is such an incredible month because we are transitioning into summer. We have Summer Solstice coming up in just a few weeks, and this is really ⁓ the midway point of the year. So there’s a very important energetic transition that’s happening now.

We see it in the collective nature all around and it’s happening inside our bodies. And so one of the most important things that we want to keep in mind is to enter June with intention. And I say intention because otherwise we get swept up in the excitement of yes, there’s longer days and more light and maybe more activity outside and lots more fun. But if we are intentional in balancing our energy, which is a very, our you’ve aided concept, which we’ll talk about in a moment, it’s very important to balance our energy each season. If we don’t watch it, we can actually get more burned out, we can aggravate our pitta, our fire energy, we can deplete ourselves, we can accelerate aging, we can get our digestion, our worn down, we can feel more dehydrated, bit more irritated.

So it’s really important to maintain this balance, which does shift season to season in our practices, which is why it’s really important, again, back to our show every month, to really reflect and be intentional about some shifts that we’re making in how we eat, how we exercise, how we take care of our body, our emotional and spiritual wellbeing, and this makes a huge difference, right? Self-care is not just one and done, here’s everything I do, it’s the same thing for everybody because that’s not how nature works, right? And we’re part of nature. So we see this in evidence in terms of how there’s different fruits and vegetables in season, how there’s a fullness to the plants in certain seasons, and then there’s the shedding of the leaves. I’ve seen an incredible rebirth in the last few months in my area in California from the fires, right? Going from the scorched, of raising it down to the ground, and now there’s so much greenery.

So we really want to take care of ourselves and our vitality in this very holistic way. And I promise you, you will get the best results when you look at things in this way. Now, as I mentioned, seasonal wisdom is a core part. It’s a core tenant of Arya Veda. And I have been a student of Arya Veda now for many years, for over a decade, including a pretty intense four-year ⁓ practitioner course that I went through with Vaidya J. ⁓

And so I love incorporating Ayurvedic concepts into our philosophy here at Solluna, which by, and the Feel Good podcast, which by the way, Saluna means the sun and the moon. So it’s really this holistic approach. And I created Saluna actually in the aftermath of when my mom passed away. And it was a really intense time. And I was going through so many different emotions of gratitude and grief and just feeling really alive on a whole other level.

And so when we’re talking about feeling good, we’re not just talking about being giggly and happy all the time, we’re talking about this authenticness, this bliss and this balance that’s underneath the ups and downs of life. There is this stability and resiliency that you can start to access within your own body, within your own emotional resilience, within your heart. And so that’s really the goal of our lifestyle, to create that real wholeness, which results in more harmony and more abundance in your life. And it’s less and less dependent on other people, on what the world is doing that may not feel right for you, what your, you know, even your friends and your loved ones are saying or doing or their opinions. There starts to be this real confidence in your moving forward in your own life. And it’s really beautiful. So, Arya Veda, I’ll just give a really quick summary means the science of life. And it’s based on balancing these elements, which are the same elements in nature, the same elements that are in your body. So this is the Pancha Mahabhuta theory, air, space, fire, earth and water. So every season, there’s a different mix, there’s a different calibration of the energies outside. And each of us have more dominant energy. So you have more fiery energy, may have more pitta.

Me, I can be a little bit more spacey and that’s definitely more Vata energy, more prone to constipation and whatnot. If you’re very grounded, ⁓ maybe a little bit more prone to weight gain or feeling depressed or slothfulness and imbalance, there’s more kafa, more grounded energy. So we want to be aware of what’s happening in our bodies. We want to be aware of the greater energies and find a way to merge and create that balance. And it’s very powerful when we do this. And this is a part ofSome of the biohacking and modern living and ⁓ it kind of can miss that. And we can incorporate all these wonderful devices and products, but we also want to respect and honor the ancient wisdom, which had so much, has so much to teach us about how to truly work on an energetic level in our bodies.

Another ancient system is traditional Chinese medicine, which associates summer with a fire element as well. It’s a time for joy, connection, expression, but also staying anchored. So in Ayurveda, as we’re coming into summer, we are definitely coming into Pitta season. So there’s a lot of fire. The sun is ⁓ burning very hot and very bright for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere.

There’s a intensity, there’s an outward expression, there’s an element of manifestation. But again, without intention, it can lead to burnout, can lead to irritation, to feeling fiery, to throwing our digestion off, to feeling more anxiety. So we wanna be aware that to balance the fire outside, we wanna incorporate more cooling spices, more cooling foods, more cooling practices.

which we’re gonna get into right now with the four cornerstones. So let’s dive right in and we usually start with our food cornerstone. Although I do wanna remind us that they’re not necessarily in order of importance. All of these cornerstones anchor us into this holistic lifestyle. Food is and will always be a critical part. The foods that we’re taking in assimilate and become part of our bodies and part of our energy.

So we can use food in this very ⁓ intentional way. I kind of veer away from saying thoughtful now because we don’t want to be full of thoughts, right? We want this intuition from our hearts to rise up and to teach us how to eat, what our body needs. And at the same time, to take these learnings and ⁓ ancient wisdom and modern science and incorporate it into our lives. So we want to be in alignment with the Earth’s rhythm.

And so now understanding that there’s going to be a whole lot more sun and a lot more pitta, we want to make sure that we’re creating ⁓ this ⁓ shifting, right? Just like the earth is shifting on its axis and we shift our clothes and their seasonal foods, we also want to shift our diet. And there’s research that published that shows that how shifting your diet ⁓ and the seasonality has a big effect on your gut health as well.

So a study published in Nature Communications, for example, examined the Hadza people of Tanzania, a country that I love, and found that their gut microbiome changed significantly between dry and wet seasons. And this was directly tied to their diet. They had more berries, honey, and tubers in certain months. And this highlights how seasonal diversity really does shape our microbiome, our third brain, which of course has a huge impact.

on our health, on our immunity, on our moods. So we’re not meant to just eat the same rigid thing day in and day out, which would be boring, but also isn’t in keeping with nature. It’s not natural to do that. Research on a US cohort also showed that seasonal fluctuations in gut microbiome mirror shifts in dietary patterns.

And again, all of this research, if you’re interested, you’d like to read research studies like I do, you can check them out. We’ll have the direct links on our show notes, which again are mysaloonamysolluna.com. So resilience is a really important word and we can be emotionally resilient, we can be physically resilient, and a lot of that physical resilience builds in our gut. We become more resilient against viruses, bacteria, infections.

And also the ups and downs of life in general, right? A really steady gut can really help anchor us in life. And a study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that a healthy gut supports stronger vagus nerve tone, which enhances emotional regulation, stress recovery, interoceptive awareness, which is our ability to tune into our internal body signals. So again, if we want to have a healthy gut, which we all do, it’s a huge part of our saluna.

practices and my daily practices. I start the day with our SBO probiotics. I end the day with our detoxi. I’m always eating with digestion in mind. We want to also incorporate this shifting. So if you’re listening to this or watching this right now in our YouTube channel, ⁓ I want you to be aware that even now, even as we start to transition into summer, there are some signs of imbalance that I want you to be aware of. And some of these could include

overly craving sugary cold drinks, including really tall, huge iced coffees. This is your body saying, hey, I need something I’m craving to feel more balanced and the ice is a quick fix, right? Doesn’t mean you can’t have these drinks sometimes, but notice how intense the cravings can be.

And notice that it’s ⁓ habitual and repeated. So you may have a nice big drink and you want another one and you’re not satisfied and so on and so forth. Also feeling foggy, heavy, bloated, feeling irritable, ⁓ especially after processed or fried meals, wanting fried meals, just this general feeling of being off. And this… ⁓

Irritability is a really important energy to keep in mind through all our energies, whether it’s emotional, physically, irritability in our gut, because again, that is a sign of excess fire. When we’re in balance, we feel stable, clear, centeredness, which means Satvik in Ayurveda. We have aligned cravings. That means our body is really wanting the glowing green smoothie. It’s really wanting these delicious

vegetables, whether that’s in a soup or stew or salad, we feel good when we eat well. And we also have pretty ⁓ consistent moods and we have great smooth digestion. So there aren’t big erratic ups and downs. We’re not overly gassy. Everything is moving ⁓ consistently, shall we say. So what we want to do some protocols for this month to keep in mind is specifically

are to stay nourished, to cool your system, and to enhance that ojas, which is really that glow, that vitality from the inside out. So this is a wonderful season to continue or to restart your glowing green smoothie practice. Now, Ayurveda is big on warming foods, so I will say this whilst this is part of our morning routine, I’m still a fan of starting the day with something warm to drink, hot water with lemon, hot water with lemon and ginger.

something to get your Agni moving. And I don’t advocate drinking the Glowing Green Smoothie ice cold. Even as it turns into summer, I have it closer to room temperature if that’s palatable to you or if you need it really cold. ⁓ That’s okay, but still start with something really warm in your belly first. First thing should be warm. First thing in your belly should never be something really cold. It’s really ⁓ powerful.

to add the Glowing Green Smoothie in our GGP as I do every day to get that chlorophyll, that extra boost. There’s spirulina, there’s ashitaba, there’s amalaki, there’s wonderful Ayurvedic as well as cordyceps, mushrooms, plants that you wouldn’t have fresh. There’s seven key plants to give you that real deep nourishment. And it’s gonna result in a glow, it’s gonna result in higher immunity, it’s gonna result in more balance.

So check out the recipe if you are new to our community. You’ve never made the Glowing Green Smoothie. I can’t wait for you to try it. It’s something that I invented. Wow. 14 years ago, I think, when I was in my little apartment in New York City. This is literally how it started. And I had studied at the Ann Wigmore Institute, which is a raw food institute in Puerto Rico. Did a training there and I came back and there they make something called energy soup, which is blending greens and they add

seaweed and sprouts and all sorts of things. It’s definitely an acquired taste. And I remember sitting in my apartment and I had a bunch of spinach and I had really ripe bananas and those were the two ingredients I blended together. And I blended it and then I ate a spoon of it and I was like, this is kind of good and it’s kind of strange to ripe fruit with spinach. It wasn’t something that felt necessarily intuitive for me the way I was raised.

You know, eating a lot of Filipino foods, lots of Asian foods. didn’t make smoothies when I was growing up. My mother’s from the Philippines. But anyways, I took a spoon of it and I handed it to my boyfriend at the time who was sitting on our blue couch in our West Village apartment. I said, hey, try this. And he was like, wow, that’s not bad. And so really put me on this trajectory of consistently having blended food.

And of course now there’s a lot more seasonality. have a lot more knowledge. I do eat a lot of cooked food as well. But the glowing green smoothie is a wonderful way, a wonderful staple to get a lot of those enzymes and vitamins which are denatured with food, with cooking, excuse me. It’s also a great time of year to incorporate coconut water. And I just got a case of coconut water myself and…

I have it after my walks just to, again, cool the system mentally, emotionally, physically. And I give it to my husband. I poured him a tall glass last night as the weather’s starting to heat up. He has a lot of pitta in his constitution. And we can feel it experientially. And also, Arya Veda teaches that coconut water is one of the most cooling, ⁓ effective ways to cool that pitta. And it’s also really great for electrolytes. It’s great for our…

overall Constitution this time of year.

And then we definitely want to use some cooling foods and spices this time of year. Celery, chopped in a salad, example, cucumbers, fennel, coriander, mint. These are some beautiful cooling spices and elements that we can use in our foods. It’s an important time to avoid hot sauce and excessive chilies and onions and garlic.

which can actually really enhance pitta and avoid those as much as possible. Sometimes in the fall and winter, I’ll intentionally use some onions or garlic, but to be honest, for the most part, these foods are very reduced in my diet just because I think modern living induces a lot of pitta anyway. Now it’s even more exacerbated. So I used to rely on those foods a lot more for flavor.

But now that I’ve widened my spices and my flavoring foods and ⁓ ways in which I cook, simple, but just a lot of different variety, I feel like I don’t really need the onions and garlic, and I do feel a lot more calm. There’s an experientialness to this, which is really powerful. So.

Another thing that’s ⁓ really powerful to help you digest your foods, because again, there’s breaking down that we really want to support when things get fiery and our guts can feel a little bit more imbalanced. One of the things that we want to bring in is digestive enzymes. And I just did a whole Instagram post about this, if you’re interested and like to look at little slideshows.

But enzymes are part of our life. They’re alive. There’s anabolism and catabolism that’s always happening, that’s building up and breaking down. And so taking digestive enzymes before you eat is a really powerful practice. You can check out our Saluna ones, which have three times more lipase than other brands. I love them. They’re researched, powerful. They also break down fiber because some people can get bloated when they increase plant foods in their diet. So check it out for yourself.

Okay, let’s move on to our second cornerstone, which is body. Now think about this excess pit to outside and just think about how our bodies intuitively would naturally calibrate. So one of the things that we wanna do is to perhaps adjust our movement, moving away from sweaty, hot yoga classes in a heated room, especially in the middle of the day. We might start to incorporate more yin practices.

We might start to move our practices to the earlier morning because we start to feel more irritated or at least we get out of the really hot direct sun if we are going to work out in the middle of the day, which is still a great time. That’s when I happen to do my walks, but I wear a big hat. I carry water when I walk in the middle of the day. ⁓ We want to sweat.

It’s a natural way to detoxify. It’s a natural way to feel that release. It feels really great to release toxins and to be part of that. There’s an interesting ⁓ research paper in the study of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, resulting in ⁓ having results. This is really interesting. That shows that dynamic exercise resulted in significantly higher excretion of heavy metals.

like nickel, lead, copper, and arsenic compared to passive sweating in a sauna. So saunas are great. I’ve ⁓ incorporated saunas into my life over many years, but there’s something about moving and using your limbs and your body in this total way to ⁓ even enhance that detoxification. So something to keep in mind, get that sweat on. It feels really great.

And also ⁓ breath work and meditation. You can use different breath work techniques while you’re working out. We had Wim Hof here on the podcast a couple of years ago. He has his Wim Hof breathing technique. When we get to the spiritual cornerstone, we’ll talk a little bit about our breathing that we can do with our heart focused breaths and our heart aligned meditation. But you want to take really nice, beautiful, full breaths through your body.

maintain that balance so you don’t get overstimulated, take that fast breath work that isn’t cooling. And by the way, yoga says that there’s different energies that you pull in through the different nostrils. So the left is the pingala, the cooling, ⁓ sorry, the left is the, am I saying this right? The ida and then the pingala is the other side. So one of the breath work practices that you can do, and I believe I still have a YouTube video up about this,

And we also, can search for it on our website, articles about this, is alternate nostril breathing. And this is where you would take your thumb and ⁓ I use my pinky finger. Some people use their ⁓ ring finger and you would close the different nostrils and breathe in and out. And it balances and can cool your body if you get overstimulated in the heat.

So check it out for yourself. It’s really nice to do this guided. And this is one of the breathwork practices that I really love in the summer as well. So signs of imbalance in your body this time of year can feel ⁓ water retention, bloated, tension in your neck, jaw, and hips. There’s a relationship to the fascia. So you feel a tightening effect, that irritation again, sort of clamping down. Or on the other hand, just a low motivation to move.

But when you’re in balance, you feel really connected to your body. You feel this aliveness. There is a glow, a clearness in your skin. There’s this energy. You can feel this. Again, I use this word aliveness without feeling overstimulated or burned out. So it feels good to move, but at the same time, you don’t feel like you’re getting too fiery. So some simple support strategies is to go for a walk in the morning before you get your day started in that nice, gentle sunlight.

I really ⁓ love doing twists and simple movements. Again, on my Instagram channel, I show some of the heart movements that I do connected to different chakras. I love to ⁓ stretch a lot. So yin yoga is really great right now. You can do it in the morning, in the evenings. I do a little bit of stretching before I meditate, which is one of the protocols, these energization exercises that Paramahansa Yogananda teaches as part of Kriya Yoga.

And I am a big fan of Abayanga and oiling because I think it calms your nervous system, which is very much needed in the winter, but it’s also very much needed in the summer. But the difference is that we use cooling oils like coconut oil in the summer. So you can warm the oil a little bit. I put some in a jar and in a bowl, and then I put hot water in the bowl while I’m sort of getting ready for my shower. And then I just rub it.

through my limbs and my belly and my body, and then I rinse it off. It’s very simple, but it feels really good. And it’s an ancient practice, an Ayurvedic practice, this oiling of the body. So in the winter, we might use more warming oils like sesame oil, but now is a great time for the cooling, just like coconut water is cooling, coconut oil is also cooling to the body as well. Another thing is cooling baths. So not super hot, but taking baths that feel

⁓ Maybe lukewarm and you can even put salt. This is a really great time to feel energetically and physically that you’re cleansing your body like Epsom salts or Dead Sea salts, which I love very much. I’ve been to the Dead Sea and it just felt so cleansing and revitalizing even though it was really warm to get in there. I felt amazing and my skin felt amazing afterwards. So using the water element on your body is a really beautiful practice as well.

And as I mentioned, just thinking about how intuitively can I refine and adjust my exercise routine for this season? What feels really good to me right now? What am I drawn to and what actually feels depleting? And sometimes it can be a little bit of a practice of letting go, if something’s really working for us, we feel really toned, we feel really great. But maybe there’s other ways that we can get that.

feeling in our body but not get depleted as well. So maybe again, we shift to the times we’re working out or we shift to more walking or ⁓ different type of yoga or whatever it is this season because we don’t want to overwork our body. ⁓ Arubita does say that excess pitta is a main cause of aging, that overheating of the tissues and the cells. Okay, so let’s move and another way to flush through, can’t help but say is detoxing.

which is our amazing saloon a supplement with oxygen and magnesium and vitamin C to feel that lightness, right? This is a continuation of that cleansing from spring into summer. So we don’t feel heavy and bloated, which no one wants to feel as we go into bathing suit season and getting outside and wearing shorts, right? So detox is a powerful aid right now, especially. So our third cornerstone is emotional, emotional wellbeing.

And this is a time to lighten the load. I’m going to use the word light a lot and to just feel really in tune with there’s a lightness that happens in summer, right? We feel more perhaps introspective. We feel more things coming up in the winter, right? It’s a beautiful time to reflect and go deep. And this is a time for more lightness and joy.

It’s a time where we don’t want to get burned out. We don’t want to get overly irritable. So we want to support that lightness, which is felt all around us in nature. We want to feel grounded. So one of the things that we can start to do is to literally ground and use the earth as an anchor while we journal, while we meditate to get outside. I went through a little bit of a

like a nervous system cleanse, felt like a few weeks ago where I just felt dizzy, like vertigo, which I don’t usually feel, a little bit of tingling. So I went outside for a few days and laid my whole body on the ground, my whole spine, and just breathed and gave myself that space. And it really does feel, when you open up to it again, back to our intention, that the earth can be like this giant healing table and all those negative ions come out and soothe us.

And again, what we’re doing physically, this holistic approach, also can soothe us emotionally. So this is time to, ⁓ you know, feel that freedom, that lightness to express through our voice, through our throat chakra, even to hum, to sing, to write. There is a research out of UCLA paper that found that writing or saying what you’re feeling

can help to deactivate the amygdala, the fear center, and activate the prefrontal cortex, enhancing emotional control, clarity, and self-awareness. I’m a big journaler myself. I feel a lot of spaciousness and freedom when I am able to give myself that space to not only write, but to read and reflect on what I write. So every day almost, I am writing, I am reading.

And it does make me feel more light. It’s like you’re offloading onto paper. You’re offloading in this really authentic way, where you don’t have to feel like you’re being judged. So some signs of imbalance can mean where you’re not being authentic, where you’re saying yes when you really want to say no, ⁓ feeling emotional crashes, especially after screen time or being social, avoiding feeling your feelings, avoiding quiet or alone time.

And we can feel really balanced. We know we’re in balance where we feel more steady and consistent in our emotions and we feel inner guidance. We feel more natural joy rising up. And again, this doesn’t mean fake positivity or fake happiness, but when we feel the vulnerable emotions, like, ⁓ here’s fear coming ⁓ or there’s some shame or anger or whatever it is.

And this is where there’s really powerful practice in the Hidden Power of the Five Hearts book called The Heart Aligned Steady in Life. This is where we breathe into our hearts, into our center, and we meet emotions. This is real self care. This is not abandoning ourself. This is showing up for ourselves. And then we let them digest. And sometimes we may need emotional support if we’re going through something. you know, please, therapy, counseling, coaches, whatever it is.

But more and more we start to feel this resiliency where we’re not avoiding feelings that get pushed down and then can start to make us more fiery or more irritated. Has that ever happened to you? Because it’s definitely happened to me where I just take in, take in, and take in and then a really slight thing that my husband says or somebody does something and I, like I get a really big reaction, right? So we want to meet things along the way and this provides more steadiness. Again, this isn’t avoidance of feelings.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the spectrum as humans, but what it does mean is that we continue to metabolize more and more and feel that steadiness, which then produces this lightness and this joy, which rises up more and more as time goes on. So another thing to keep in mind if you’re a yes person, a people pleaser, is to get used to just saying, let me get back to you, instead of directly going to that go-to of yes and then taking time.

for yourself to feel centered emotionally and then discern if that is something you want to say yes to. Whether it’s an outing, a project, a get together, taking something on, right? So just remind yourself to have that space. You don’t have to rush to respond. Part of self care is also letting yourself center. Take some breaths. You don’t have to answer that text back right away. And it’s really healthy to leave

more time in your schedule, you don’t have to pack everything in as much. So you can allow more space for this processing, for creativity. And whilst the world will tell you like keep going faster and faster, the spaciousness is actually a way to feel more creative and just definitely a lot more alive to allow more of this joy to pour through. One sec.

Okay, so let’s move to our fourth cornerstone, which is our spiritual growth cornerstone. And the theme is clearly as we come into June and the summer, let the light in. Let the light in. There’s times where we feel more of the darkness, which has a lot to teach us in the darker months, literally. But this is a time for allowing light in literally into every cell of our being and our body and letting the light teach us.

letting the light come into our hearts, letting the light come into our thoughts, into our motivations. Let the light teach us to be more loving, to be more of ourselves, to be more compassionate, to choose the kind, the caring thing to do, which is harder to do when we’re fiery, right? And we’re irritable. So in terms of bringing in the light, one of the things literally, and I literally just did this right before I got on the podcast, is I got outside in the light and I did a meditation in the light.

And what I like to do is, you know, wearing a sports bra right now and it’s very rural and private where I live, but I’ll take my shirt off and I’ll literally let light get on my heart, on my belly. It feels really good to get light on while you’re doing any type of spiritual practice, which could be prayer. It could be walking in nature. It could be meditating. There is ⁓ light codes, so to speak. There’s energy in the light. We don’t understand all of this.

but I do believe there’s a full spectrum of colors. I think there’s a lot of healing that happens when we literally get into the light and it’s something that’s really ⁓ powerful. So I literally ⁓ go into the light and it feels really good. There was even a study in 2021, the psychology of religion and spirituality that found time that’s spending, or they found that spending time in nature and especially sunlight enhances

Spiritual well-being reduces anxiety and increases feelings of awe and connection. So it’s this wholeness, right? It’s the moonlight, the sunlight. If ⁓ you don’t wanna get direct sunlight on your face, wear a hat like me. And of course, for your skin type, you can use safe practices. But I’m a big believer that the light is healing its medicine, especially this time of year. It can reawaken.

It can energize and of course it gives us vitamin D. There’s a lot of vitality that can come through the light. And so it’s important that we open up to that. There’s more research from the Heart Math Institute that shows that when the heart and brain are in constant communication through multiple pathways, heart coherence, then we feel more a neurological, biochemical and energetic boosts.

And this improves emotional balance, mental clarity, overall well-being. There’s a whole lot more research that I cite from the Heart Math Institute as well as other scientists. In the new book, here, the cover’s behind me if you’re watching this on YouTube, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts, I think a lot of us intuitively know that when we connect to our heart, this power that is unleashed, this is not impractical, this is not overly emotional, but it’s the power.

of the heart to connect to the true self inside of us, to actually give us wider perceptions, to allow us to have more emotional intelligence and resiliency, to feel a more zoomed out perspective. And it is in this heart’s power that we transcend a lot of the smallness of the thoughts and the reactivity and trauma, and we can live closer to our spiritual wholeness.

I’m not talking about religion here. I know that we may all have very different spiritual beliefs, but I do believe in a higher power. do believe however we like to conceive of it, there’s energy connecting all of us. There’s oneness. There’s love, right? And so spiritual growth is about moving closer to that love, that self-love, that love of body, that love of God, spirit, however you can universe, however you conceive of it, love of each other, that connection. ⁓

And so we wanna be regular with our practices that work for us. There’s a steadiness that will bring us into summer. Again, intentionality. Instead of constantly trying different things and seeing what this celebrity is doing or getting on this bandwagon and moving around, be consistent. Choose and feel intuitively what works for you, whether it’s the heart aligned meditation or another practice. Really be consistent, because this consistency will build energy over time.

And that’s been my direct experience. I do the heart-align meditation. I also do Kriya Yoga, which I learned many years ago through the Self-Realization Fellowship, which you can learn in the lessons that are given there from Paramahansa Yogananda, ancient practice of Kriya Yoga. It works really well for me. ⁓ I feel incredibly alive and grounded and joyful.

from my practices. And let me tell you, wasn’t easy in the beginning to sit and meditate. It was very restless. But this consistency brings us these results, which isn’t linear. It can come like, wow, I feel really great. And then I have tough days. So for me, it’s the combination of the Kriya and the heart align that really change everything in my day. Another part of this ⁓ spirituality is really tuning into

stillness and silence. so part of that practically means really unplugging. ⁓ Let the natural light come in and unplugging from the artificial lights and devices, going outside, having stretches of time where you’re not checking your cell phone. There’s more time in the evenings now. You can sip tea outside if that’s available to you. Go on the rooftop if you live in a city like New York. Really taking advantage of this natural light and

bathing in it and soaking it in and getting off devices and the know, sometimes negativity of collective consciousness that’s in social media and the news, right? Just really allowing this joy and this light to come up inside of you. So again, there’s a lot more that I mentioned about heart coherence and using the power of our hearts, which I believe is so needed right now more than ever in my new book, The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts.

which you can check out for yourself. And we really want to ⁓ move into thriving. To me, summer is about ⁓ vitality and aliveness and joyfulness and harmony. And so we don’t wanna feel like we’re surviving, we’re just sort of getting through the day or the season and we’re struggling. And when we incorporate all of these practices together, the cooling foods, the seasonal foods,

adjusting our body care practices, including how we exercise and how we breathe and how we take care of our body, and really taking time for emotional support for ourselves, journaling and sitting outside and doing practices like the Heart Aligned Study in Life, which again is in the book, feeling through our feelings. So we’re not holding this burden of feelings, which can, emotions, which are energy and motion, and then results in.

Lots of negative thoughts or feeling like we’re carrying a really heavy burden. And I don’t want to gloss over that. That’s why there’s a lot more information in the book about these practices because they’ve helped me tremendously. And I think that they’re needed now more than ever. And then spiritually to ⁓ come into the light and to be open to the light and to receiving more light. And there’s this quote from Yogananda that talks about, you know, holding up our

vessel, what are we receptacle are we holding up for spirit universe to pour through into us? Is it a tiny cup or is it a huge pool? Right? And that means intention. It means openness. It means being receptive to the light, which is always available. We are never alone. Right? We are connected in this cosmos. Somehow this entire intelligence is moving through us.

And I really believe we can connect to it through our hearts and through love and through slowing down a little bit and just being more present. And this is true medicine, right? This is allowing us to feel the joy of summer, whether that’s the simple sipping of homemade lemonade or running through the grass with your kids or running your hand through the ocean or a lake and really just feeling.

the miracles of being alive. Not some big achievements you’re trying, constantly trying to strive towards, but really surrendering and receiving the joy that’s right here in this very moment that’s available to all of us. So I wish you the very best, most joyful, peaceful, wonderful, expansive of June’s into summer. And again, this doesn’t mean

Happy giddy all the time. means getting deeper and more connected. And when those tough emotions rise up, whether it’s fear, you feel really vulnerable, you feel shameful, just letting them come through and starting to feel that anchoredness more more inside of you. And again, there’s so many ways we support that. There’s so many ways we talked about today through gut health, through your spiritual practices, through the foods that you’re eating. So please continue to check out all the resources that I have for you, the courses.

the products, the articles, the recipes at mysaluna.com. If you haven’t joined our newsletter yet, please do join so you stay in the loop. And I will see you back here. We’ll continue to do our weekly Monday interviews. ⁓ And everybody that we’re bringing on now is related to the cornerstones, but they’re very heart led.

And these conversations are transformative and they continue to evolve and get deeper and deeper, whether Dr. Tracy’s talking about the vagus nerve or Karen Eldid is talking about overcoming, striving, right? There is a through line in all of these Monday podcasts. And then this show, The Power Hour, once again, will be the first Thursday of every month. So I’ll see you back here soon. Remember to write to me, to ask me questions. I’m here to support you. I’m here with my full heart.

and all my love and I look forward to connecting with you more.