The D Word

For those who think detoxing is boring

 by Serena Nathan

(as seen in the summer issue of Flourish Magazine) 

When the word ‘detox’ is introduced into the conversation I am the first to get a glazed look and reach for a bottle of wine. Some people just go on and on and on and quite frankly, while it seems like a good idea, there are just too many changes to make and life starts to look…..well…..hideously boring.

So I talked to some interesting people, tried some fun ideas that were easy enough for me to fit into my busy life (which includes lying on the couch with a book when I can) and decided to let you in on a few free and easy ways to make life gentler, easier and just as fun as the bad old days. When I say ‘free’, I mean it. You’re welcome to add some gorgeous expensive oils and foods to your efforts and it can really help the whole pamper experience, but it’s not necessary. There are a couple of things I would suggest you buy, but none would make a difference to the weekly grocery bill.

Why detox at all? Why is it only when suffering a killer hangover does it seem like a really good idea? Detox guru Jane Scrivner sums it up on the first page of her book Detox Yourself:

“Two more hours a day, glowing skin, weight loss, high energy, high threshold for stress, no cellulite and a feeling of being relaxed,” she writes. This all sounds pretty good.

The biggest reason for me to try a few easy detox steps, the best answer to the “why should I?” is this: Why not?

Adding instead of Subtracting

We all know what we should give up, but if the whole idea of detoxing is repulsive to you because you are just not in the right headspace to do without your morning coffee, evening wine and a couple of ciggies at a party, then consider just adding some good stuff and not ‘giving up’ anything you really don’t want to right this minute. Sometimes the unintended side effects of adding a few good habits is the growing lack of desire for some of the less healthy things we indulge in.

Breathe – and clean your insides right this very minute

The first and easiest thing to do is breathe. If this is as far as you get for the rest of your life on a detox programme, you’re doing well. The lymph system in our body is activated by a combination of two things; deep breath and movement. This doesn’t mean getting into an impossibly hard yoga pose and saying Om (although that will do the trick too). It simply means taking some deep breaths and having a stretch at the same time. You can do it while you’re flicking through the paper, on the phone with the mother in law, watching House….the opportunities for breathing are endless!!

The lymph system is the body’s rubbish bin. It is also the only system in the body not powered by the heart. The body naturally produces toxins, waste, and the lymph system sweeps it all up and gets rid of it. Sometimes it gets overloaded and we feel a bit sluggish and off centre, so we need to either reduce the toxins we put in or get the system working better. Let’s assume for now that we’re not going to reduce our toxin intake. The best way to give it a jump start is to breathe as deeply and slowly as we can and do a few simple stretches at the same time.

If you’ve ever been to a yoga class, you’ll know what to do, if not, try reaching your arms up very high as you breathe in, then bending at the waist as you breathe out and hanging there for a bit. It’s that easy.

Calm your Ritti’s

Now we have lovely clean blood we can have a little rest! Resting is something we all think we do, but how often while we are ‘resting’ are we going over what we really should be doing, worrying about the kids/grannies/fleas on the dog/the fact that it’s 39 degrees out and the dryer’s on/the cost of the item ending on eBay in ten minutes…..?

Tamara Graham (tamarayoga.com) calls these “ritti’s” – fluctuations of the mind. When we are unable to still the mind at all, we are in danger of producing too much adrenaline, which in turn can cause recurring episodes of sweating, headache, and a feeling of high anxiety. Not nice. It’s better to learn how to turn the stuff off so we have it at hand for when we really need it, such as getting the kids ready for school in the morning, or going for the run you said you would go for eight years ago.

The easiest way is to sleep. Sleep is actually a form of meditation. Even better, learning how to switch off during waking hours is very helpful (something that men are excellent at when you ask them to do the gutters). It’s easy to do it in very very small portions. Try looking at a candle (or a star) for a few seconds and just see the star, empty your mind. If you can manage three seconds you can do it! Just practice for a little longer each time. Or a little more often. It’s when we think that in order to relax we have to meditate for hours that it becomes unattractive. Tiny portions of time is all it takes.

Add Good Yummy Stuff

Going on the premise that we’re detoxing without removing any of the fun stuff (whether it’s killing you or not; that’s not the point right now) lets look at food.

We are told so many contradictory things about what foods are great, what aren’t that we’re in a total spin. Eat no carbs, they say; eat more fibre, they say next. My philosophy is that different foods suit different people to differing degrees, but there are a couple of good basics that we all seem to get some benefit from.

·         Chuck out all your food oils that are not cold pressed. The toxins that get into heat-treated oils are dynamite on your poor lymph system. And use your cold pressed oils daily.

·         Drink your water – and use a water filter if you can. I have a Brita jug that sits on the sink (saving up for an under the sink thingy).

·         Switch your white sugar to raw.

·         Switch your other white foods to wholemeal/brown. I swear they taste just as good.

·         Buy your chocolate dark as it carries some antioxidants.

·         This doesn’t fall into the category of “yummy stuff” however if you can possibly bear it, take Cod Liver Oil every day. I mix mine with apple cider vinegar and honey in a shot glass to make it not so completely disgusting (okay so it is still completely disgusting). It is SO good for you, I won’t bore you here with the details (Google it), but it’s a super brain food and can even help when you are called upon to help with your little darling’s times tables or algebra (feed it to the kids and they won’t even be needing to ask you).

Scrub

I have become a fan of Dry Skin Brushing. It feels wonderful and I am certain that my skin is looking fresher and younger than it was three days ago. You can get s body brush in most health food shops (you can grab your cod liver oil at the same time).

If that doesn’t grab you, have a good scrub in the shower (just mix some salt with sorbolene or whatever’s handy and maybe some honey). You will feel like a dead layer has been released from your body—because it has—and a weight has lifted from your shoulders. This adds about 45 seconds to your routine so no excuses.

Smile

You’ve probably heard that it takes more muscles to frown that it does smile. If you’re not totally botoxed to the eyeballs like a couple of my girlfriends...you know who you are, you can practice this and see that it’s true. The other wonderful side effect of smiling is that it sends a message to the brain telling it to release endorphins into the system. This is that fabulous feel-good stuff that people have been trying for centuries to copy and sell in a little pill (see, I said every detox suggestion would be free….).

The amazing thing about this free high you get from smiling is that it doesn’t even have to be a real smile. A fake smile will do the trick just as well. It’s the movement of the smiling muscles that trigger the release. So if you’re having ‘one of those days’ just fake it and let the endorphins do their thing.

Sleep On It

Lastly the mama of them all. Without a good nights sleep nothing else seems worthwhile. There is little more depressing that trying to face the daily trials of life while exhausted. We all know that so again, I won’t bore you by preaching. There are many suggestions around for helping with getting to sleep. For me the very simple act of Making The Bed has helped. I know; it’s crazy! But whenever I get into a made bed I feel much calmer.

When we go into REM sleep we actually process much of what has happened in our day and sort a whole lot of stuff out. After a traumatic loss I learned that a great deal of Grief Work is done while asleep – and this is the same for Life Work. Sleeping pills knock us into a state that can bypass REM sleep, so while we do sleep, we don’t do the un-conscious work that enables us to feel rested the next day. It’s that old saying: “sleep on it” – it has a strong and important basis in science, not just what your Mum kept telling you.

While there is a place for sleeping aids, it shouldn’t be done blithely or without thought and medical advice. If there is something (or some one such as a small but powerful member of the family) who is keeping you up, you will have to put some processes in action that encourage everyone to stay asleep.

If you are still with me (and not doing Oms or another load of laundry by now) you have some seriously easy and seriously free options here to make a significant difference to how well your body works for you and how to detox without the boring bits.

Time for a chardonnay, darling.

 

The Compassionate Life

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

-          The Dalai Lama

 

From time to time we hear of unimaginable sadness, pain and loss. None of us remain untouched by it, just as none of us remain untouched by joy and happiness. While responding to others’ joy is often spontaneous, responding to great pain, whether physical or emotional is often more complicated. To flourish means to embrace all that life offers; the wonder, the challenges, the delight and the sorrow. Learning to accept and sit with the delight as well as the sadness in others rounds us into gentler, stronger, wiser women, flourishing through life’s ups…and downs.

 

We are partly drawn to our friend who is suffering and partly repelled; perhaps frightened of not knowing how to support our her, afraid of saying ‘the wrong thing’, perhaps even wanting to hide an unpleasant feeling of schadenfreude; relief that it is someone else going through this pain.

 

The slings and arrows of misfortune do get flung at us all—regardless of age, financial position, how well or poorly we eat—if not today then one day. Tomorrow, next year. Some arrows are small annoying little pings, others a massive stainless steel barbs that cause great damage.

 

”We will be called upon to act,” says writer, Nancy Rigg, who lost her fiancé in a flooded LA river in 1980, and has since dedicated her life and career to educating others about sudden death grief and trauma and promoting the development of swiftwater and flood rescue programs throughout the world

 

 “I say 'act' rather than 'react,' because living a life of compassion, focusing on loving-kindness, is a means to prepare us to act, rather than merely react.  To act with intent.  To act with compassion,” she says.

 

Compassion is a word that gets bandied around a lot. It is a combination of two words; co, meaning together, and passion, meaning strong feeling. What it doesn’t mean (and often gets confused with) is sympathy.

 

To look at the difference between ‘compassion’ and ‘sympathy, let’s say you have just separated from your husband. You call two friends.

 

The first, Sophie, is sympathetic. She tells you how sorry she is, that as awful as you must feel it happens to nearly one in two people these days. Sophie tells you that if there’s anything she can do to please let her know, that she knows someone who got divorced last year and is doing fabulously. She tells you she always thought your husband was “a bit dodgy underneath it all.” Sophie repeats again the offer of ‘something; anything’ you need, tells you that she doesn’t know how she would cope at all if she and John were separating and says she has to go in order to get dinner prepared.

 

None of that seems unreasonable. It is a sympathetic response to a crisis. You call the second friend, Louisa.

 

Louisa is compassionate: She asks how and your husband are doing with all that you’re going through, and lets you know that she feels very sad for you. She waits for you to find the words you want to say about where you are in this crisis and listens carefully to you. Louisa offers no advice. She lets you know that she is always available to listen and is there a time that you would like her to come and hang out with you? She waits for you to be the one to end the call and asks if you’d like to meet for lunch in a few days time to talk again.

 

Can you see the difference of how you feel in the two similar, yet quite different responses?

 

Anyone (and this is most of us) who have been through a trauma or crisis know the differences here. Sophie’s sympathetic response is kind in its own way. Sympathy, however, has undertones of pity. And pity is something that never fits comfortably. To be pitied is to be reminded that you are in a place that is frightening and uncertain. It smacks of “thank the Lord it’s not me…” Pity makes the pitier feel better and the pitied one feel bad….pitiable.

 

Cynthia Wall (counsellor and author of The Courage to Trust) sees sympathy as a kind of shield, allowing us to separate from others’ pain by placing us away from it. She writes that sympathy “means that suffering is viewed as a tragedy beyond bearing…sometimes it is denied or minimised.”

 

When comparisons are brought in (“oh I know how you feel, my dog died last year and it was terrible”) or advice about how to feel (“oh, you poor thing; try not to let it get to you”) it means the person offering the sympathetic words can separate from the person in pain, remove themselves a little from it all. It “prevents the giver from entering into a shared state,” says Wall.

 

Compassion, on the other hand, requires us to open our heart to the pain of another and share it, even if that causes us great discomfort. It doesn’t mean knowing ‘what to say’; it means having the courage to say nothing, let silence become its own communication. This way the giver is able to keep their heart and mind open to what the sufferer could need.

 

“Often the most loving thing we can do when a friend is in pain is to share the pain – to be there even when we have nothing to offer except our presence and even when being there is painful to ourselves.” ~ M. Scott Peck, American Psychiatrist, Writer

 

When someone is facing a significant crisis, the last thing they need is to feel that their situation is unbearable. When my son died, there were many people who told me that they “would just DIE” if they were in “my situation” which was a terrifying thing to hear. I felt like I could die, but death isn’t quite that simple! It also made me feel ashamed, that I could continue to live, change the toilet roll, shop for milk and bread, while other (nobler) mothers would just DIE.

 

Compassion springs from being able to connect with someone without fear. Most of us fear death, and those of us who are mothers fear the death of a child even more. We fear getting sick and not being able to take care of ourselves and others. We fear the breakdown of an important relationship, of losing our job, of not being able to fulfil our goals. And yet every one of us faces at least one of these fears during the course of a lifetime. As Nancy Rigg says, “calamities are equal opportunity visitors: sometime along the way, some life challenge will disrupt our comfortable reality or the comfortable reality of someone we care about.”

 

Fear is a very natural response to suffering and it takes courage to sit with someone suffering great pain without some fear. The compassionate friend will acknowledge her own fear of what is happening (or has happened) and move beyond that to offer an honest connection. The only way to move past this fear is to accept that we are not immune from immense suffering ourselves.

 

“It is lack of love for ourselves that inhibits our compassion toward others. If we make friends with ourselves, then there is no obstacle to opening our hearts and minds to others.” ~ Pema Chodron, American Buddhist Nun, Writer

 

So compassion has to start with ourselves. We can’t offer anyone our honest open self unless we are prepared to offer it to ourselves first. This is the hardest step.

 

First we have to see that we are not super-beings, we are just human and as liable to make mistakes, experience despair and suffer tragedy as the person next to us. We are completely fallible.

 

What makes us compassionate with ourselves is the ability to accept this as part of the human condition. Eventually we do pick up, dust off and carry on, and all that we feel in a crisis is usually a normal response to the situation. Understanding that suffering is normal, human and universal is a good first step to practicing compassion.

 

Stephen Levine, author of several books including Unattended Sorrow has a simple approach to learning how to honestly practice compassion:

“Mercy is defined by some as pity, but pity is born of fear—it wishes not to experience the pain of another or of oneself. When we touch pain with fear; that is pity. When we fear our own pain; that is self-pity. But when we touch pain with love—that is mercy. Mercy is a blessing. Pity is a hindrance.”

Not pitying others means first not pitying ourselves. This is hard! We can’t all be the Dalai Lama or Stephen Levine; however we can take steps to get closer to how each live in their heart.

By observing those places inside ourselves that are fearful, angry, closed to others, unloving, we slowly learn how to change and become kinder, more compassionate, more giving, less judgmental. Observing one’s self is the very first thing to be done.

Consider how you feel when someone pushes your buttons – are you angry? Fed up? Insecure? You don’t even have to do anything about these feelings at that moment, just watch them in you and you will be surprised at what else begins to bubble up (and they are never dull) as well as a result of simple and honest observation. Writing in a journal from time to time helps with clarity.

There are some practical steps that can be taken in order to practice compassion, both to ourselves and each other.

 

No expectations: When you make contact with someone who is suffering, even if you think it’s trivial, try not to have any expectations about how they might be or how you might help. Just be there and take it from there. Don’t assume you will be useful or important (or on the other hand, useless) in their struggle.

 

Try not to judge: This sometimes requires active concentration; we are geared by our upbringing to bring our own judgments to others’ situations. We naturally benchmark other people’s actions and situations with our own. Leave your judgments about the situation behind.

 

Use deep breathing to gain pause: If you’re not sure what to say, take a deep breath and be honest (say that you don’t know what to say) or try saying nothing and listening both to your own heart and the voice of the other person. Much more gets said in this way.

 

Know that the sufferer isn’t helpless: “Most of us prefer to do things at our own pace rather than be treated as needy” writes Cynthia Wall in her essay “Beyond Sympathy”. It takes more energy to receive than it does to give. Think about the level of compassion you bring with you to the person you want to help and try not to bring with it your pity: “When the giver brings pity, the exchange depletes precious energy,” says Wall.

 

Don’t Fix it (or try to): This applies to compassion towards you too. In long silences it is always tempting to offer advice, and very hard to hold it back and let the silence continue. It seems to be part of our DNA to solve things, but allowing them to unfold, or allowing others to come to their own conclusions about where they want to be—as hard as it is to do—allows compassionate relationships to flower and flourish.

 

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.

~ Pema Chodron

 By Serena Nathan