Special Delivery (someone needs to step away from Amazon.com)

I love snail mail. My friend Alison, whom I affectionately call (Love) Bug, and I try to send each other letters of the old fashioned variety on a somewhat regular schedule. It's tough to beat coming home to a letter or package from someone you love.

If you had been sitting in my office this week, though, you would have thought that I have an obsession with Amazon.com. You would be right. After a quick survey of this week's packages alone, I vow to take a break from buying books for a while. We'll consider it working towards health goal #3, getting a grip on my finances. I will, however, act as an enabler. Links to everything can be found in the Bookshelf toolbar at the right.

Here's what my friend Tick, the UPS guy, brought me this week:

and

and

I've just started Meditation as Medicine, and am already fascinated. Dr. Khalsa has a beautiful, lyrical way of writing about meditation and its impact. Expect more updates as I work my way through. Maybe then I'll make my way to Michael Pollan, which I've been dying to read.

Some of you probably know how skeptical (read: extremely) I was about the Louise Hay DVD. It was assigned as part of my homework from Women to Women, and boy was I reluctant. I was sure it would be all crystals and pastels and happy clappy touchy feely mantras. Was there a little bit of that? Yes. But mostly it was straightforward, well-produced, encouraging film featuring commentary by some very in-tune, loving, optimistic people. It made me want to add mantras to my daily routine, but I haven't yet struck on one that feels right to me. If you have one that works, I'd love to hear about it. And for now, I'm just glad I got over myself and was able to be open to all the great information in this DVD.

Not done yet. I saved the best for last. While I was at the zoo on Monday, my warm-up materials for the Institute for Integrative Nutrition arrived! Couple that with my tuition payments, and I'm starting to feel like a real student. I haven't delved into these materials much yet, but am looking forward to getting started in the next few days.


For the record, I'm glad I went to the zoo on Monday, even if it meant waiting another day for my materials. We had a blast, and saw lots of amazing animals...

My Three (Health) Things

The Institute for Integrative Nutrition has a series of Warm-Up Classes for enrolled students to work on before classes start in January. It helps harness our enthusiasm for holistic health and helps prepare us for class. Many of the assignments are geared to raising our awareness of our own health, as well as getting us to see first-hand what an impact these changes can have. Puts us in the client's shoes, so to speak, so we'll have a better understanding when we start to counsel folks. The Warm-Up Class I did last week asked us to list three things we could start doing immediately to improve our health. Here are my three.

1. Begin a meditation practice. In progress.

2. Resume my yoga practice. I've made excuses for not doing this yet (time and money...), but am committed to reintroducing yoga this week. Even if I decided to sleep in instead of going to the 7:15a.m. class today.

3. Get a better grip on my finances. It might seem strange to have this under health goals, but money causes me more stress than just about any other piece of my life that I can think of. If I can get enough of a sense of control over my finances, I suspect I will feel a new sense of lightness and have more energy and mental space to devote to more healthful, joyful things. For starters, I'm going to spend some time this week getting better acquainted with the Quickbooks software I bought back in March.

There you have it. Three manageable health goals to focus on. I found this exercise quite helpful, and would encourage you to try it. Once you start making goals, you'll probably come up with a list of more than three things you can do to improve your health, but I'd encourage you to limit it to three. Beyond that it can get overwhelming and unrealistic to tackle all at once. Prioritize, and as you feel you accomplish different things on your list, then rotate in the next one.

Feel free to share your list in the comments section!

Making the Jump

I'd been thinking about it for a while, last week I decided for sure it's what I wanted to do, and today I pulled out my debit card and made it official. This afternoon I enrolled at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and will graduate in July of 2009 as a certified holistic health counselor. After all my back and forth, I know I made the right decision -- I don't know the last time I was so sure and so excited about something.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up my day job (yay non-profits). Not yet. I just started a new job at my alma mater, and it feels great to be back on campus, working with kind, whip-smart people. The benefits ain't bad either. But enrolling at IIN feels like the first big step to creating the life I know I want. One filled with delicious, nutritious food. One that has balance and wellness at its core. One that lets me help other people figure out the big confusing mess that "getting well" can be.

Because it's not enough to not be sick, to have blood work come back normal if you go through life and still feel blah. Everyone deserves to experience vitality. After almost a lifetime of feeling not quite right/healthy/energetic, I'm finally getting close to that goal. That's what pushed me to make the jump, to enroll at IIN, and commit to making my life about what matters.

Here we go!