Rami's Blog

Like the Yin-Yang, Eastern Martial Arts and Western medicine are two halves of a whole. My mission is to preserve the ancient mind-body tools and pass them on to you.

 

Can't Meditate? Clean Your Room!

People ask me some variation of this question all the time: "Are there any tips you have for how to meditate? I just can't get my mind to sit still no matter what I try."

And the answer is "Of course I have tips for how to meditate!" I've written about them on the blog before. I've written about them so much, in fact, that I have a whole category of posts dedicated to meditation tips.

But all those tips are about how you meditate, or what you should do while meditating. What if I told you that you could do something before meditating that could improve your meditation practice? It might seem strange, but this really works.

Clean your room. Or even better, clean your whole house.

You might be thinking, "What? I close my eyes when I meditate. I can't even see if my house is messy or not." But that's not completely true. Your mind internalizes the area that you live in. Even if you aren't paying attention to the mess, when you are in a messy house your mind functions differently (and not in a good way).

In fact, there are several studies now showing that a cleaner home can lower your risk of heart disease, reduce stress hormone levels, and improve sleep. How interesting that all of these benefits are also benefits of regular meditation.

The reality is that your mind worries about the mess in your home. That mess makes you stressed and scatter-brained, which leads to an even messier house. It is a vicious cycle.

Luckily, most people find cleaning their living space to be very easy. A chore, yes, but an easy one. It isn't like meditation, which takes a while to become proficient in. Nearly everyone knows how to clean a space up.

As soon as your local landscape is more organized and orderly, you will find that your mind is more focused and relaxed. And one of the secrets to meditation is that relaxed and focused minds are better at it than messy and scattered ones. That's why many people find meditation so difficult at first. It's a lot like exercise in that way: it's difficult at first because you haven't done any, but the only way to improve is to keep practicing.

But hey, if you can get a boost just by cleaning up your house, that's good too.

Happy Stretching!

The 3 Things You Need to Lose Weight

No, this isn't a miracle cure or secret recipe. The answer isn't "olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic." The three things you need to lose weight are more abstract than that. In fact, they are all mental things, not material things.

The three things you need to lose weight are: knowledge, willpower, and a routine.

Knowledge of the Food You Do and Do Not Eat

To get knowledge, you need some experts or databases on your side. Recently, a blog-reader sent me their website nutrition calculator called CalorieQuality.com. It has a huge amount of information on the nutritional value of foods, even simplifying each food's healthiness down to a score out of 100.

If you want to expand your knowledge of what foods you shouldn't eat, and more importantly, what new and healthy foods you should pick up at the supermarket, CalorieQuality is a great tool. If you want to turn those healthy foods into unique and tasty recipes (that might even fight cancer) then head over to CancerWellness TV, the website I helped to co-found and fill with content.

If you don't know what food is healthy and what food isn't, it will be almost impossible to maintain a healthy weight.

Willpower to Control Your Automatic Behaviors

When you eat chocolate cake, the sweet and savory taste and high fat content are recognized as "rewards" by your brain. But we all know that not everything we crave is truly rewarding in the long-run. To develop the strength of willpower required to say no to that extra piece of chocolate cake, or that pizza, or that fried chicken dinner, we need to exercise our brain with meditation. 

You know when you are making a mental difference when there is a brief moment of hesitation before reaching for that food. That little space between feeling the craving and reaching for the food is your willpower trying to keep you in control. Focus on that space between your automatic thoughts when you meditate, so that you can open up the space when you are faced with an unhealthy food choice.

Train yourself to be a deliberate and disciplined thinker. That's key to becoming a deliberate and disciplined actor. 

A Routine You Can Realistically Keep

People are not good at changing how they behave. That's why willpower is the #2 thing you need to lose weight. But part of the reason why people struggle to start healthy habits is because they bite off more than they can chew (no pun intended).

How many people, after New Years, resolve to go to the gym for an hour a day, and only go once or twice? Somehow, by day three, their fatigue from the new gym routine is enough of an excuse to "take a day off," which becomes a week off, and then they realize they simply aren't exercising anymore. In fact, they don't want to exercise, they just want to be in good shape.

What you need to do is start with a routine so easy and simple that it seems like you aren't doing any work at all. Maybe you decide to do five sit-ups as soon as you wake up in the morning, or ten jumping-jacks. Something so quick and easy that it's easier to do it than to think up an excuse not to. You can think of excuses to avoid the gym all day, but taking 20 seconds to do five sit-ups isn't as easy to explain away by saying "I'm too busy." 

Obviously, five sit-ups isn't going to burn any body-fat, but if you normally don't exercise at all, five sit-ups will feel like an accomplishment. Each day that you do five sit-ups, you'll experience positive feelings from accomplishing your short-term goal. Eventually, you will want to do more sit-ups, because you will have trained yourself to be rewarded by the immediate outcome of the exercise (the feeling of accomplishment you get after), rather than the long-term goal of losing weight.

You can even apply this to healthy eating. Buy a bag of fresh bell peppers when you go shopping, and resolve to eat one pepper each day. No cutting calories yet, no avoiding donuts. Just set a tiny goal to eat a healthy thing, and experience the satisfaction of achieving that tiny goal. After a while you'll be eating lots of vegetables because you enjoy it, and you won't be as hungry for the junk food. You accomplish your long-term goal by getting satisfaction out of completing tiny little short-term goals. That's thing #3 you need to lose weight.

And that's it for this week. Happy Stretching!

Mind-Body Workout #8: Building Strength, Speed, and Health in the Arms

Great to have you back again, mind-body students. This week, we have a new installment in a series that has become a blog favorite: the mind-body workouts!

On the agenda for today: a total workout for the arms, which includes work on your shoulders, elbows, wrists, and more! The workout is divided up into three sections: strength-building, speed work, and relaxing. Let's jump right in.

Mind-Body Workout #8: Building Strength, Speed, and Health in the Arms

Part 1: Strengthening

Wall Push-ups with Fire-Breath: This exercise gets the blood-flowing into the arms and chest. Remember to do both kinds of sets, elbows-in, and elbows-out. These work the biceps and chest, and the triceps and deltoids respectively. If you find that this exercise is too easy for you, you can always take a small step back from the wall and move your hands lower. Add in fire breath to engage and calm the mind!

Panther Walk: This is a more intense pushing exercise that will truly build strength in your arms as you launch your body off the ground with each repetition. To really mix it up, do a set of 10 or so going forward, backward, left, and right. (You can always start with five each way instead, if 10 is too difficult.)

Part 2: Speed

The Washing Machine: If you do this technique slowly, it is a nice relaxing move. However, you can speed the move up to practice quick, precise movements with the arms. As you increase the speed, you want to bring the circles closer to your body and make them tighter. This technique is particularly relevant for developing effective blocking movements in martial arts.

Saber: This speed move is another technique that doubles as a relaxing technique depending on how slowly or quickly you do it. The first rule is to keep the stick as straight as possible all throughout the movement. You can watch yourself perform it straight ahead in the mirror to see if the stick is flaring to one side or the other. The motion should require less and less arm movement as you become more coordinated and proficient with it. As that happens, focus more of your energy on breathing deep. Remember: swift, precise arm movement.

Part 3: Relaxation

Iron on the Wall with Fire Breath: This is a classic exercise here on the blog. You can't believe how much of a difference simply letting go of the tension in the shoulders and neck can make. Not just for arm health, but for total body and mind health! You want the muscles between the neck and shoulders (the trapezius muscle) to become soft and moldable, kind of like clay. For most people, they start like rock. Hold the stretch for 2-3 minutes, working up to that if you can't hold it that long at first.

Reduce Inflammation: Working your arms hard can cause issues in the complex joints. The biggest cause of this harm is intense stress on the joints (like doing a heavy arm strengthening workout) followed by very little motion and range of motion use. To avoid having this happen while you are developing arm strength and speed, you should do this gentle exercise for a few minutes with both arms. There are two basic motions: vertical, and horizontal. Do both to help heal any minor strain or damage the joints naturally experience as you work them out.

And that's it! Happy Stretching!

Dissolving Your Persona Through the Face

Each person who we deal with in life sees certain faces of ours at certain times. These faces we use, usually five or six of them, help us get the things we want. Most of the way we communicate is non-verbally. The people you speak with figure out how you are feeling, and what you want, by watching your face.

Unconsciously, you know this. So you make the faces that will help communicate. Everyone does this with their face, and even though you don't notice it, you are reading peoples' faces all the time.

For example: You want your kids to do something. Maybe they need to clean their room and you tell them as much. When you are speaking to them, you will probably have an expression that communicates authority. That's your "authority face." Or maybe you have had a long day at work, so you ask your spouse for a massage. You aren't going to use your "authority face" for that, because it won't work. Instead, you use your "sweet face."

Because everyone's life is different, some more difficult than others, our faces can be molded by the expressions that we make over and over. Some people look like they are frowning even when they are not sad. Others look like they are smiling when they aren't actually happy. Sometimes people are born this way, sometimes it is because the person has spent a lot of time frowning or smiling.

As people get to know you, and as you continue to make certain expressions, your personas develop. This is how people will recognize you, because you use these personas frequently around them. When you use a different persona than usual with someone, it may bother them. They will tell you "You don't seem like yourself."

We spend a lot of energy keeping up these personas, and it is healthy and liberating to let go of them for a little while and exist as purely as possible. The best technique for doing this is the Face Meditation. To really experience the melting-away sensation in your soft tissues, combine this with the Sunset Meditation in order to cooling the energy from head and face and better relax the muscles.

By visualizing the melting of the "icy" layers of the face into water and steam, and pulling the fiery face energy down the energetic baton and into the lower energy center, you are removing the distraction that your personas create and shifting your consciousness from "persona" or "image" focused to "body" focused.

Because your lower energy center can't hold "authority" or "sweetness" or "shyness" and so on, your mind will naturally let those facades go as it moves from the head to the lower abdomen. You will be centered in your body, and experience an energetic, even enlightening feeling.

Feel free to practice other visualizations that might help you in this process. Once you have practiced this, you can even do it briefly throughout the day to de-stress.

Happy Stretching!

Tai Chi Breathing for a Beach Body

These week, I want to share an article I was interviewed for over at BeachBody.com about how Tai Chi Breathing can help you get in shape this summer. In particular, this article focuses on:

  • Why you should combine Tai Chi Breathing with your regular workout
  • How to perform Tai Chi Breathing correctly
  • 5 different ways to incorporate Tai Chi Breathing with your routine

Please go over to BeachBody and check out the blog!

It's always great to be able to share these techniques for well-being with more people.

Happy Stretching!

P.S. We are sooooo close to 500 likes on Facebook. If you haven't yet, please go to my Facebook page and give it a like. I share blogs, articles, research, and more over there. Thanks in advance!