Positive Health Online

Let’s start off with a universal truth - you are entirely the creator of your own reality. Life unfolds around us but how you perceive life depends entirely on your thoughts, feelings and beliefs.   

With this in mind we need to be aware of what we are saying, thinking and believing to make sure they are in line with our goals and desires.  But this can be difficult as these things can be programmed patterns from our childhood and as such have become mainly unconscious so our challenge is awareness.

The Hawaiians had the right idea when they created their language.  For instance the word Aloha that means hello and goodbye also means Love and the ‘breath of life’. In this way wherever Hawaiians go and whoever they meet, they are spreading this love through a simple word. In addition to this idea, the philosopher Ram Dass talks about how thoughts alter our facial expression and therefore how you are perceived from the outside world when you walk into a room. Kahlil Gibran touched on the same idea when he said, “Beauty is not in the face, beauty is a light in the heart”.

So remember if you have love in your hearts and coming from your lips it will shine from your face. 2015 in numerology is an 8 which means this year is a year of manifestation so there is no better time to put into action what we discuss in this article and manifest what you desire.

Keeping our thoughts pure and positive is something we all struggle with. We find ourselves in what the Buddhists describe as Samsara, a continuous cycle between death and rebirth, happiness and unhappiness through our attachment to things in our lives. This leads to a desire to grab hold of things in our life, like our youth or our relationships rather than going with the ebb and flow, in and out of life, valuing each step of the journey as an opportunity for growth and choosing to enjoy the moment.

A fantastic and empowering way of focusing and letting go of our desires, rather than holding them so tight they can’t bloom, is to create a manifestation board. Spend time looking through magazines for words and images related to how you want to look or feel and stick them to some card as a collage. Keep it in a place you will see it each day and watch how your dreams become a reality over the coming months. 

Our challenge is to keep our awareness and keep our connectivity to our heart.  This means constantly checking in with ourselves when we experience emotions and feelings that we don’t like. The root of these feelings nearly always has its root in either fear or memories, as they are linked with either the future or past, never the present. Our challenge is to go beyond emotion whatever kind it is, and make the all our friend rather than our foe. By acknowledging our emotions in each moment we don’t react to them habitually and instead they dissolve.

In relation to beauty strong emotions often arise in the form of fear due to our anxieties of wrinkles and spots and getting old.  These are things that are not in the moment; they are all worries of a future that does not yet exist.  Our need for the latest creams and gels and techniques stem from a desire for a quick fix, and this comes for our inability to give ourselves the time and attention in the moment that we need, and also our comparison to how we looked years earlier.

We need to let go and let love in. When we can truly feel love towards ourselves then nothing else matters. Love begets love and when you feel it in yourself the world around you will reflect it back a million times over. With self-love comes a natural self-responsibility and this is where we can make the right decisions for our health and beauty. Drinking water is a prime example of this self-responsibility. A simple, easy and effective solution for reducing wrinkles, but it takes the effort to plan (fill up a bottle) and attention to drink it throughout the day without forgetting. We don’t want to have to be responsible so we give the responsibility to the often-useless creams and gels or to the plastic surgeons!

There are two good aids to keeping us on this path to an enlightened state of being: 

Meditation

This forces us to slow down and be on the spot and in touch with our emotions and feelings, enabling us to watch them without judgement and choose to move beyond them if they no longer serve us. Through regular practice we can bring the sense of calm and clarity we experience into our everyday working life, putting what we learn into practice.

For healthy vibrant skin try the following each day for a month: 

• Picture in your mind how you wish to see yourself. Maybe it’s an image of you with no blemishes, with brighter skin and a sparkle in your eyes? Maybe it’s you running around with a lot of energy?
• Picture this vision in your minds eye whilst focusing the attention between your third eye (eyes shut);
• Feel in your body the sense of happiness and joy that you know you would feel from looking this way, allow it to absorb into all parts of your body from the area of your heart, feel your heart expand;
• Breathe deeply in and out and go back to your breath if you have trouble sitting still;
• Sit in this space for 10 minutes each day;
• Each time a thought comes into your mind go back to that picture.

Daily Mantras

Alongside this throughout the day you can repeat one of these affirmations to yourself:

“I am happy and grateful I am beautiful with perfect clear and radiant skin”;

“I am full of energy and vitality” or you can come up with your own.  Mantras or affirmations focus our mind on what we desire.

In addition here are some tips for a great skincare regime

1. Cleanse daily with a natural chemical free face wash;
2. If you are prone to acne then cleanse morning and night and exfoliate with a chemical free exfoliator (you can make a good one out of ground almond and soaked oats); 
3. When you feel tightness on your skin, you know your skin is perfectly clean;
4. At night use a chemical free toner and you can use light night oil if you are prone to dry skin;
5. In the morning use a chemical free moisturizer or pure oil like Rose of Mosqeta;
6. I love the Suki range as my skin tends towards dryness; they do some great balancing products;
7. Use chemical free makeup;
8. Chemical free is important as most of the products we are used to using and are readily available contain parabens and petroleums, which are drying long term and toxic to your body;
9. When out in cold and wind use a scarf around your face to protect it!

I leave you with the words of Confucius that “Everyone has beauty but not everyone sees it” and in all cases “beauty starts from within”

We are going to be putting up some great and easy recipes over the coming months for homemade facial exfoliators and nourishing masks and creams for you to make at home on our website www.primroseskitchen.com