Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit [Episode #860]

This week’s topic is: Winter Wellness Practices : Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

We all know that winter can be a bit challenging in different ways. It’s cold outside and not as sunny. We may not be able to get outside as much. We’re not as naturally active. And from a mental and emotional standpoint, when we feel more stagnant in our bodies, we can tend to feel a little bit more stagnant in our minds, and we want to keep this flow of creativity and inspiration going through the whole year. And it’s really important that we talk about specific practices.

In fact, winter is the time and the natural cycle of the universe, of the seasons of nature and within us, since we are also a part of that beautiful, powerful cyclical rhythms and routines of nature. Winter is the time for us to plant seeds that can germinate and spring forth into the spring, summer, and fall. What I mean by that is that because there’s less light outside and it’s more cold, the winter is a time that pushes us into our inner wisdom, our inner light, and into more self-reflection. We can start to be more clear about what it is that we do want to create in our lives, where we want to put energy, maybe things that we want to cut off or take our energy out of, physically in our workspace, in our personal goals, and so on.

Winter is a really powerful time. We want to nurture that energy and we don’t want to feel stagnant because in many ways it starts to pave paths for the year ahead. Whether we realize it or not, we’re starting to create those seed intentions, which can start to roll out for the rest of the year. Today, I’m very excited to get into our winter wellness practices to share best practices for your overall wellness.

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[Question Answered]

Pam – New York

Kimberly – I struggle in the winter with the short daylight hours as I leave and come home in the dark and find myself with low energy mentally, emotionally and physically. What can I do to get me out of the winter doldrums?

 

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Transcript:

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Kimberly: 00:01 Namaste. Loves and welcome back to our Thursday Q&A show where I’m very excited for our very timely podcast today on Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit. We all know that winter can be a bit challenging in different ways. The obvious, it’s cold outside. It’s not as sunny. We can’t get outside as much. We’re not as naturally active. And also from a mental and emotional standpoint, when we feel more stagnant in our bodies, we can tend to feel a little bit more stagnant in our minds, and we want to keep this flow of creativity and inspiration going through the whole year. So it’s really important that we talk about specific practices. In fact, winter is the time and the natural cycle of the universe, of the seasons of nature and within us, since we are also a part of that beautiful, powerful cyclical rhythms and routines of nature, winter is the time for us to plant seeds that can germinate and spring forth into the spring, summer, and fall.

01:24 What I mean by that because there’s less light outside and it’s more cold, the winter is a time that pushes us into our inner wisdom and our inner light into more self-reflection. So we can start to be more clear about what it is that we do want to create in our lives, where we want to put energy, maybe things that we want to cut off or take our energy out of, physically in our workspace, in our personal goals, so on and so forth. So winter is a really powerful time. We want to nurture that energy and we don’t want to feel stagnant because in many ways it starts to pave paths for the year ahead. Of course, we know New Year’s is in winter, but besides that, energetically we’re starting to hold those. Whether we realize it or not, we’re starting to create those seed intentions, which can start to roll out for the rest of the year.

Watch the show on YouTube!

02:20 So I’m very excited to get into our winter wellness practices today. It’s a very practical show as always, but I also want to give a little reminder first to remember that over on our website, there is so much, there’s so many tools to support you and to help you integrate the information for our podcast today, it’s mysolluna.com, S-O-M-Y-S-O-L-L-U-N a.com. And over there we will have thousands at this point of articles, recipes, which are delicious and simple, and meditations which are guided and to follow, and other podcasts I think you would enjoy. In the show notes, we will do direct links as well as to the studies in the show. So I really encourage you to go the step further and take advantage of all these other tools. Now, if you are watching this, we are just starting to tape the show. If you are new to the show and you’re listening to this on Apple or Spotify, which is great as well, it’s easy to do that when you’re walking around, but I just wanted to remind you that now you can also watch the show on YouTube here in my personal office.

03:33 This is where I write my books. This is where I meditate down here, so it feels very intimate to have you guys in the space. So I’m very excited about that as well. It’s nice to connect visually, so you can check that out on YouTube as well.

Question around the topic of: Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit: Kimberly – I struggle in the winter with the short daylight hours as I leave and come home in the dark and find myself with low energy mentally, emotionally and physically. What can I do to get me out of the winter doldrums?

All right, all that being said, let’s get right into our show today. Our question comes from Pam, who lives in New York. Thank you, Pam, so much for writing in. I know it gets very cold in New York. I used to live in the city before I moved here, and man, does that winter feel super long, long? It was from November until April, I think sometimes even May. I remember just feeling so excited when we’d have those warm moments start to come back. But again, especially for those of you listening to this where this is a percentage of your year, we want to really optimize how we can feel our best in those months.

04:32 And so Pam, thank you for highlighting this. As always, thank you for being part of our community. And you write Kimberly, I struggle in the winter with the short daylight hours as I leave and come home in the dark. I find myself with low energy mentally, emotionally, and physically. What can I do to get me out of the winter doldrums? I like that term doldrums. And yes, of course, because of the timing, it is a lot. When we leave for work and it’s still dark outside, and then we get home from work and it’s still dark outside, it can feel oppressive. So not to worry, Pam, there’s a lot that we can do within that. And of course, as I mentioned before, shifting into seeing winter as this time for going within and getting clear, and it’s a lot of inner focus right now versus just seeing winter as a lack of summer or something that we’re trying to get through.

Tips and Research on Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

05:34 It’s drudgery to get through. There’s a lot of beauty and benefit to winter when we switch to looking at it in that way. So there’s a lot of research here, and it’s going to correlate to some of the different tips. So I think what we’re going to do today, instead of separating the research and the tips, is we’re going to dive right into the tips, and then I’ll flip back and forth into the research so it correlates because the tips are across our cornerstones. So again, food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. In order to have the best experience in winter, in order to have the best experience with everything, our approach is always multidimensional when we’re talking about food, we’re also talking about our spiritual practices and our emotional wellbeing. We’re talking about our bodily physical health. We’re also talking about our spiritual practices and our emotional mental wellbeing.

#1. Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit: Hot Soup

06:30 Everything interrelates so beautifully. So all the cornerstones are going to be touched today with a show. The first one is very intuitive, very practical, but something I want to bring forward, and that is hot soup, right? We’re going to take it right back with something very granular. Eating hot liquid in the winter is a really powerful way to enhance your vitality. This is rooted in Ayurveda, which talks about soups, stews, and liquidy foods. Winter is a time where our digestion agni can become more stagnant. This is a time from an elemental standpoint. The wind, the Vata is kicked up, and when there’s extra wind in our body, our colons and our GI tract tend to slow down. So we want to eat foods that are particularly nourishing and easy to digest. Soups and stews being one of those foods. Also, there’s something very comforting and hot about having soups and stews.

07:37 There’s actually research around it. This is from the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute Journal, found that soup actually has been shown in research to make you feel better when you are sick. So there’s the physical components. It’s almost like a decoction in terms of the nutrition going into the hot liquid while it’s being cooked for easier assimilation and digestion, things like ginger that are put into the soup. The cummin, the different element, the different spices and herbs have an easier way to assimilate with your body. There’s also the emotional, the correlation of the hot soup. Maybe your grandmother made you when you were little or your mom when you were sick. There’s something very comforting about it. There’s that focus and the presence of eating hot soup. You can’t just inhale it really quick like you can. Certain foods like a sandwich. You have to slow down.

08:30 You have to be present with your food, you have to take your time to eat it, and there’s something about that in and of itself being a really wonderful form of self-care. So hot soup is also really great for Agni, especially, as I mentioned, if you include those digestion focused components, and we have whole podcasts dedicated to that alone. So you can check them out in the show notes we will link to of those shows like the ginger, like the black pepper, things that you can add that are really easy to help you feel more invigorated in the winter. Now, naturally you might be called to heavier soups and stews, coconut based curries, things of that nature that help you feel more grounded, that help you add more sustenance, which will help you feel warmer in the winter. And that’s totally fine as well. I’ve been having a lot of coconut lentil soup myself.

09:26 I just feel called to it naturally. I love to eat it with quinoa, broccoli sprouts, sometimes sprouted rice. It feels really wholesome right now to have that hot food in. If you’re someone that is busy like we all are, you can still make soups very easily. You can make them in batches. You can even freeze portion sizes. There’s ways to make it convenient. You can even purchase pre-made vegetable stock or there’s hacks. There’s ways you could make it a little bit easier. So again, I encourage you to check out our recipes, but I promise you if you start to make soup, it doesn’t have to be complicated. I make soups, kitcher, I put them on the stove, I simmer them at low for a while. There’s something really amazing from a self-care standpoint about stirring in your love for your family, for your loved ones that will help to nourish you.

#2. Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit: Vegetables and Fruits

10:20 Now, on the other end of it, and I want to put these back to back here, is vegetables and fruits. So whilst we may definitely be called to the warm soups and stews in the cooked foods in winter, the baked vegetables, the roasted veggies, things like that, having a lot of awakened food, what I mean by that is aliveness with enzymes and vitamins is also going to help you feel more alive in the winter. So it’s the balance, right? We want to also make sure that we’re still having some raw components, which as I mentioned, could be taking sprouts, micro greens, throwing them on your soup, having a little salad first, having your glowing green smoothie still, yes, in the winter, closer to room temperature. I mentioned this on social media recently where I’ve cut out the frozen fruit. I’m not having frozen acai in my prowler protein smoothie right now.

11:18 I’m having room temperature GS, but we still, I believe, need that closeness with nature. A lot of vitamins become denatured when they’re cooked, and so we still want to keep some raw in there. My kids, yesterday they were building Legos. I put out a bunch of carrots. They were just chomping the carrots while they were making their Legos, and then we had hot meal together. But I do this with my kids to keep that aliveness, to keep that freshness in their diet because I find the times where I eat everything cooked for me, and some Ayurvedic practitioners may feel differently. I start to feel a bit more heavy. There’s this aliveness in raw food. We want to take our digestive enzymes for sure. We have our amazing feel good digestive sauna enzymes to check out or to maintain. If you are taking them, I take them at least twice a day, three capsules each to bring in that amazing energy, right?

12:25 It’s breaking down the food, it’s synthesizing. There’s an alchemy with enzymes. So when we’re doing that, we’re not just relying on our body to break everything down, which would really take a lot of our own vitality, a lot of our life force. So we want to take our enzymes and separate to that, again, we want to make sure that a component of percentage is going to be the raw and the fresh. Now, it’s naturally probably going to be less. I definitely have bigger salad meals in the summer when it’s hot outside, but I still always have, I keep saying the broccoli, they’re always in my fridge. I think they’re really powerful. They have about 50 times more antioxidants than mature broccoli, for instance. You get a lot of bang for your buck. I still have pears, classic part of the GGS recipe, and I snack on winter fruits a lot.

13:14 The whole family does. I still have raw fruit in the winter, and so I’d encourage you to keep that alive in your diet. So part of that aliveness is coming through that vitality coming through even in the winter months, and again, play with the percentages for your particular body. So the next thing I want to talk about here is aga. I’m talk about the body for a minute. So AGA is something I’ve been talking about since my radical beauty book with Deepak Chopra. It was around this time I started to take a really deep dive into Ayurveda, and I feel that Ayurveda, the beauty of this ancient medical system is that it goes really wide and really holistic. And usually when we think about skin or slapping makeup on our face or there’s something that’s patchy and dry and we’re having to care for it.

#3. Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit: Abhyanga

14:08 But Abhyanga is known as the number one ana practice, which is the number one rejuvenative practice, bringing vitality and youthfulness and creative energy flowing through the body. It’s really great for circulation. It’s basically a warm oil massage, and you would do this before you shower. You could do this in the morning to reinvigorate yourself, invigorate yourself for the day. I do it in the evenings, and I find it really soothing. So when we’re working with the skin, which is incredibly vad, we’re working with the nervous system, we’re soothing the nervous system, and when we do that, it means that we are benefiting both the endocrine system and our

Kimberly: 14:51 System. What Ayurveda has found over thousands of years important for winter is that when we’re doing this whole body self-care approach, we actually can heighten our immunity in a way that comes from our own hands. It comes from our own touch, it comes from our own power. What you would do, and this is the way I do it, there’s different ways to warm the oil in my bathroom. I keep a kitchen bowl about this big and a jar, super easy. I take some of the oil, which could be sesame seed oil, typically prescribed in the winter because it’s warming. Coconut oil would be cooling in the summer or some kind of Ayurvedic herbalized oil you would pour about a tablespoon or so into the jar. Then I fill the bowl around the jar with hot water from my tap, and I leave it there for a few minutes while I’m doing other stuff.

15:42 I’m futzing around or folding clothes or rushing my teeth or whatever, and then it just warms the oil a little bit, and then it only takes two minutes. You’re going to take that oil and you’re just going to massage it in upward strokes towards your heart. Now, you may have heard that this is really good from a dry brushing perspective because it helps to move the lymph. It provides support for your lymphatic system, which is an amazing detoxification system, helping to move that excess material out of your body. It’s really great for circulation. It feels so good when you do it, I promise you. You’ll think, oh, I felt like I went to the spa or something, but it was free and it was only two minutes. And to be honest, I don’t do it every day, but the times when I do do it, it feels really, really calming and soothing, like I’m doing something really great for myself.

16:34 And this is really powerful in the winter because there’s pockets in our body that can start to feel stiff and hardened. There’s parts of our body that start to feel like they don’t have that energy in them anymore. And then we start to just feel like again, that stiffness translates into not feeling creative, feeling stuck in our life, feeling blocked in our job, whatever it is. So we want to keep the body supple. We want to keep the skin moisturized. We want to feel this practice, which again is ancient. And Dr. J, we’ll link to some of his podcasts. My Ayurvedic teacher is so full of life, he’s bouncing all over the place. He’s in his mid fifties and he has the energy of a teenager. He always, always talks about BGA as being a central practice in his life, and he does it every morning.

17:27 So I always say that we want to go to the teachers who aren’t just telling us what to do, but they’re really embodying it. They’re really living it. So it’s simple practice that you can do to keep that energy alive. And again, it could just be warm to sesame oil, really beautiful practice to keep yourself, especially in winter feeling really great. And then afterwards, after you finish and the oil will absorb a bit, then you can take a warm shower and rinse it off so you don’t feel super oily before you go to bed, but you will feel nourished from an energetic perspective.

#4. Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit: Indoor stretching / Yoga

Okay, so the next one here that I want to talk about is indoor stretching and yoga. So this pairs what we were saying with Ayurveda and keeping everything more supple. We want to avoid tightness and stagnation, and the coldness that happens in winter creates this effect where we tighten.

18:28 When I used to live in New York, I noticed that I would hunch, literally, I would hunch. I’ve seen pictures of myself where I’m wearing this big jacket and everything and I hunch over. It’s almost like I’m trying to keep myself warm. So this really does something to your posture. This does something to your skeleton, your skeletons, your skeleton, if you were to look at yourself and how you start to curve. It does something to your spine. It does something to your breathing. It does something to how much oxygen you’re taking in. So you want to stretch because that coldness can provide that frigidity where we literally tighten up inside of our bodies. And there’s a lot of research around the importance of stretching. We’ll link to this in some of the show notes. The Journal of Circulation from 2023 found that in order to live longer, it’s about longevity here.

19:22 Moderate physical activity was really important, which we know walking, weightlifting, lower intensity exercises and also stretching and moving our muscles to balance the vigorous exercise was important to maintain health and to extend our longevity. So we all have our go-to ways of moving, right? This is funny. Again, this makes me think about my husband who has converted our gym, our garage into his gym. He has racks of weights. He loves it. He makes him feel strong, and he is really strong. So he’s lifting all the time. He’s doing CrossFit. He’s a boxing trainer, very masculine all these ways. And then he always says, I know I need to stretch. I know my back wouldn’t hurt, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s not his go-to, because he has his go-tos that feel really good to him. But in the evenings part of our time as a couple, we get the yoga mats out after the kids are in bed and we stretch together.

20:26 And often I’ll help him with his twist, and I’ll sort of lead him through. And I say, aren’t you grateful you have a built-in yoga teacher? And he is, but it’s sometimes not the go-to thing. It may not feel natural or exciting to us per se, but I promise you that stretching even for 10 minutes, five, 10 minutes, can change your whole life. It can change your outlook, it can change your body. It can change your creativity. When we’re stiff again, that stiffness translates to all the different layers of the body, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, sexually, all through. When we twist, for instance, and we’re twisting our liver and our kidneys, we can facilitate so much deeper release and we’re stretching our hips. Where the yogi say is a place where we tend to hold fear and insecurity. Then we’re opening up different pathways of energy when we’re doing back bends again, which I think is so important in the winter.

21:32 Even simple ones where we’re holding our elbows or we’re stretching our chest open to be more heart forward in the coldness. We don’t realize how we hunch. We don’t realize how our posture constricts our breath, our breath, this vital to feel that fullness of life. We’re literally taking in life with every breath, and to be more heart forward in our lives, to be more heart centered, to be more loving and to be more compassionate. The energy of stretching and these simple asanas, these poses can bring forward different energies in the body. Of course, practically speaking forward bends can also help to relief, to release back pain sitting. We know the new smoking sitting too long in our office can make us feel stagnant or sitting to watch tv. You don’t feel that life coming through as much. So we want to try to move around.

22:28 And so I encourage you to get a yoga mat. Invest in one that doesn’t have to be super expensive. Could be like 25 bucks. Keep it in your area where you like to hang out in the evenings. Most of us, I could say for myself, are far too busy to stretch in the mornings, but of course depends on your schedule. My friend Michael here says he spends, he has a couple hours in the morning to stretch and hang out. So if that’s good for you, then that may very well work for me. It’s the evenings. So wherever you hang out in that time, keep it around so you see it so you remember to actually stretch so you remember to actually use it. None of this is really useful unless it’s put into practice. I have a couple other stretch videos on YouTube that you can check out that we’ll link to in the show notes and that we’ll link to here.

23:20 And also, if you try our waterfall cleanse, which is a wonderful time of year to do that, it’s cleansing your body with smoothies and hot elixirs and juices and supplements, and also meditation, journaling. And there’s a stretch video because we can hold limited beliefs in the body. And there’s more of these trauma experts and these psychologists talking about these days. Bessel VanDerKolk, who I love his work very much, and I’m blanking on his name right now, but there’s so many psychologists talking about the imprint of trauma in our nerves, in our literal body. So when we stretch, especially if we want to get to a breakthrough, especially if we’ve had some sort of realization about ourselves, our partner has been a mirror and we’ve seen something about ourselves, and we want to change a pattern when we stretch and release physically or even shake a little bit and move old energy in the body, it can help to move it physically out and we can start to pave a new path forward in our lives.

#5. Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit: Hot teas

24:27 So everything really works together and it’s so beautiful and it’s so powerful. So the next practice that I want to bring up, again, we’re getting back to this one, is hot tea. And what I love about tea, we call it tea here in the west, I like to say elixir. Ayurveda would also say decoction, which is a way to heat up flowers, stems, roots, herbs, other important ingredients, and then allow the properties of those ingredients to go into the water. So it’s a source that’s very easily integrated into the body is that we can get really specific about certain benefits and certain energies that we want to bring up in the body, and then we can go to specific teas that can do that.

25:20 This is where the intuition, intuitive, holistic, self-care comes in. So in the evenings, if we’re feeling a bit frazzled and our nervous system has been reacted, it is reacted to different things during the day. This is a wonderful time to bring in those a meal teas, the nettle, certain teas that are just known to help soothe and help us feel more relaxed. Even Rebus and the tulsi teas, the basils that come from India, certain properties can help us to relax acts. And in the morning, if we’re having teas that contain ab bgo or some of these medicinal mushrooms and plants and more invigorating properties, we start to be more in tune with our bodies. We start to be more in tune with nature during the winter, which is a time where we can naturally feel cut off from nature in a way. If we’re bundled up inside our homes made of all these materials and we’re not grounding and we’re not walking barefoot, and sometimes we’re not even getting sunlight on our skin.

26:30 So we want to stay in tune with nature through these amazing teas and elixirs, and it’s very simple. I keep lots of different herbs and spices around. I love to make different recipes. I love ginger tea, simple ginger, lemon water, lemon water in the morning. Something as simple as this can help to bring you back because lemon is almost like the sun in a physical form. It’s this vitamin C. It’s very potent, amazing fruit, which you can squeeze right into hot water and put into your body. It’s like taking sunlight nature right into your body at the beginning of each day. So we have many elixir recipes for you over on our website. I encourage you in the winter especially to think about how to utilize these to boost your energy, soothe your nervous system, promote better sleep, promote better digestion, to use them in a really intuitive self benefit driven way. And you can start to continue. It’s like stoking the fire, especially in the winter. You can continue to stoke that fire of your life force as you go through winter and continue to feel amazing.

27:45 So another amazing, and I want to say this. This wasn’t one of the points, but I wanted to mention because I was thinking about sunlight there for a moment, how important sunlight is. So if you live in a place that doesn’t get sunlight for many months, if you were in Northern Europe or parts of the United States, I really do encourage red light therapy and some of those lights that you can even get for your desk. There’s so many different ones now that mimic sunlight. I can even help with vitamin D exposure and just light in general is a really natural thing for us to ingest, take in as a form of nourishment. So you might want to invest in some of those different devices because I think that’s a really important part of mental health and wellbeing that we can’t just drink tea for. But if you can get some of these devices that help with the light, it’s really, really important.

#6. Winter Wellness Practices: Effective Ways for How to Nourish Your Body, Mind, and Spirit: Stair Climbing

28:45 So we talked about indoor stretching, which could include the yoga poses, but another one that I wanted to mention is making sure that you’re getting cardio in the winter as well, because it’s easy to not say that it’s too cold outside. So whatever that takes for you to get, there’s apps, there’s indoor stair climbers, there’s obviously rowing machines and treadmills, but there is something about, I’m all about the stretching. I’m all about the yin yoga. That’s a big part of my practice. But I also walk uphill for an hour here in the mountains where I live and I am blessed. I don’t have icy days, so I can pretty much walk every day that I want outside, but you’ll start to feel stagnant if you’re not that heart pumping, that circulation, which is so good for your brain, your mind, digestion, creative power, going to a gym.

29:52 But if that doesn’t feel like something you’re going to stick to, we need to carve it out at home. So again, it could be investing in a couple of weights and doing a workout class at home, getting that stair climber, whatever machine works for you, or doing a more vigorous vinyasa yoga class through one of these yoga apps. But I just want to highlight that is a very important part of winter wellness because it’s easy to let it go by four months or weeks at a time, and we’re just not going to feel as good. We are meant to move. We are meant to be dynamic beings. Now, I don’t think it has to be stressful. It has to be something that we don’t like to do something that’s quantitative, like a machine where we’re just focused on counting the calories, but we want it to be something that we’re naturally drawn to.

30:37 It could be a dance class, something fun, but we are all meant to move. And this is something that of course, modern research and science has shown, but it’s something that the great yogis have always taught as well, including Paramahansa, Yogananda, and the whole lineage of monks who brought yoga here to the west. They always encouraged the monks and the ashrams to play games and sports and go to the beach and to get outside as an important part of healthful living. So we want to maintain that, especially if we’ve live in a place where winter is three months, six months, four months. It’s a really big part of the year. So we want to have hot soup, specifically food mixed with liquid, which is considered an ideal digestive form in Ayurvedic medicine to take in and support Agni, particularly in winter. So play with different recipes, play with soups, stews, make it fun, incorporate some of your favorite vegetables and so on.

31:42 And at the same time. Number two, don’t forget that we still need vegetables and fruit in their raw form. We don’t want to go six months without having any raw fruit at all. It doesn’t have to be freezing, right? Those pears and apples can be on the counter. We don’t have to have our smoothie super cold, but that aliveness of nature is going to help refurbish our energy, help to reinvigorate us. Number three, we want to do, we want to play with ab Bianca, warm oil massage, self touch, connecting back in, even if it gets as paired down as just doing your feet. But self touch is really great to help promote immunity, especially in the winter. And next, we want to have hot teas, which can also support a immunity energy, strength, what Ayurveda calls Bala, that’s strengthening herbs like ashwagandha. We need physical strength.

32:35 We also need mental resilience to get through winter. And so there’s a lot of plants that can support us, and we can reconnect to nature through these very simple ways. Having hot teas so that we don’t go 3, 4, 6 months where we feel cut off from nature, like we’re on our own island. Remember, isolation leads to depression, lethargy, slothfulness, which we don’t want. So we want to keep that vital connection with our body and the nature that’s all around us. That’s always available to us. We want to maintain our cardio. Oh, stretching I talked about. First. We want to keep things fluid and flexible in the body. We don’t want patterns in our physical bodies, the way we walk, the way we hunch to affect our posture, our deep breathing. We don’t want to create stagnation in our shoulders and our neck, which leads to us feeling less excited about life.

33:31 So stretching is a wonderful practice that I highly encourage on a daily basis, or at least a few times a week. And then also keeping up with your cardio for that circulation, for that mental benefit, and feeling more clear, feeling more excited in your life. And as I mentioned, we have lots to support you, practically speaking. So please head over to the website. We’ve got the recipes, we’ve got lots of elixirs, we’ve got the stretch videos over there. We’ve got the meditations to help you feel clear. So in winter, some of those seed ideas can start to come forth up and out of you for the rest of the year. I’m really excited because I do think winter wellness is such an amazing time to really get clear about what we want to create for the rest of the year. And as always, I am here to support you.

34:21 So please keep your questions coming. You can leave them here. Wherever you’re listening or watching this, you can find me on social media at _KimberlySnyder. You can also leave questions on the website for things you would like me to answer for upcoming shows, find Me on social media. The other channels, it’s at Kimberly Snyder. So as always, I am so excited and honored and grateful that we are connected here on the journey together. I look forward to connecting with you more, and we will be back here Monday for our next interview show. So until then, sending you so much love and so much support. Namaste.