While the pursuit of wellness seems harmless, there’s one catch: 

Self-pressure. 

If your pursuit of wellness is built on a foundation of subtle pressure to change, improve, or be better, you might be adding unnecessary stress to your mind-body system.

This is counter-productive to your pursuit of wellness. 

Are you pressuring yourself to be fitter than you are?

Are you pressuring yourself to eat healthily all the time? 

Are you pressuring yourself to do stress-reducing activities like meditation?

That pressure creates stress. It forces you to think about failures. It makes you focus on what you need to do to instead of celebrating what you have already done. 

Culture teaches us to push ourselves toward success and judge ourselves into better versions of ourselves. 

It just doesn’t work. True wellness is an intrinsic motivation to enjoy a positive relationship with your body. It’s the freedom to trust yourself and how you need to take care of you. It’s letting go of the “shoulds” that don’t feel right and the idea that you have to be perfectly healthy to be a better person. 

True wellness leaves room for play, laughter, joy, and fun. 

Drop the pressure and watch your wellness improve naturally. What motivates you more; taking a walk by a beautiful river because it’s gorgeous and fun, or pressuring yourself to get a certain number of steps so you can be fit and healthy?

When you stop pressuring yourself, your natural desires have room to emerge and take you on an entirely different wellness adventure. This adventure takes your spirit into account, not just the latest measurements of good health.

Start with a fun experiment:

1. For one week, ask your body what it wants to do, what it wants to eat, and how much it wants to rest. You don’t have to act on all of this immediately. Just start gathering intel.
3. When you’re ready, you can try living this way for a few days and see if you experience more fun, freedom, and wellness. 

Before you know it, your stress levels will be going down, not up…and that’s a very positive shift when it comes to your wellness.  

Hugs,
Abigail

P.S. Want support with more mind-body tools? Join my Mind-Body Magic Facebook Group!

So most of my clients are quite surprised when I assign homework that involves doing absolutely nothing.  They are astonished when I tell them NOT to focus on mind-body work for hours at a time.  They start to smile and relax when I suggest they do something outrageously fun.

The most surprising thing about mind-body healing is this: your most effective healing tool is your inner ten-year-old.  I imagine your inner ten-year-old as a playful being who has yet to start putting immense pressure on herself, who still loves herself and enjoys being in her own skin, and does what feels best to her in any given moment.

Maybe you never felt like that at age ten, so for you it might be your inner eight-year-old or five-year-old.  You might have to simply imagine what it would be like to just play, carefree, with abandon and joy, not caring one whit about what others think.  However you do it, entering into that space of freedom within your own mind and body – in other words, taking the pressure off yourself, focusing on what you love about you, and really tuning in to what feels right to you – is an enormous health creator.

You might not do it perfectly today.  Or tomorrow.  Or ever.  It doesn’t matter one bit.  Even if you can tune into the slightest element of that inner joy within all of us, you are creating health.  It will add up, I promise!

Today, pure, unabashed fun and joy might be resting.  It might be swimming.  It might be hanging out with a friend.  It might be coloring with crayons.  It might be breakfast for dinner or dessert for lunch.  It might be your favorite new book.  It might be shopping.  The only requirement is that you love doing it, want to do it, and have fun doing it.

My inner ten-year-old and I have had a fun week thus far.  Together we have run barefoot in the grass, played baseball, played with my dog, laughed, played music, started learning a new instrument, and taken a nap.  Nothing feels more freeing, more joyful, or more alive than tapping into this part of me.  Nobody has to approve.  I don’t have to do one thing right.  My entire focus is enjoyment and joy.  I’ve been playing my violin, which is something I used to do as a ten-year-old, just for fun.  Then, over time, studying to be a classical violinist and my thoughts about needing to play perfectly took away my enjoyment. Recently, I have rediscovered my passion for playing by giving myself permission to play whatever the hell I want, however I want to play it.  I now play Irish fiddle music, and I only play tunes I love.  It feels great to give myself this kind of freedom.

So here’s your assignment for this week:  Do something that feels like fun, for no reason whatsoever.  Do it however you want to, rules be damned.  Now really – is there any better homework than that?

And just for fun…here’s a video of me doing my homework! (Please feel free to share yours in the comments section below!)

I had a good laugh yesterday, and the day before, too.  I seek out laughter as much as I seek out play. The two go hand in hand, so in looking for one, I find the other.

Scientific research has shown a correlation between laughter and health, but this one is a no-brainer.  I know I feel better when I laugh, both physically and emotionally.

When I was first struck with agonizing pain, I let laughter and play leave my life.  I was serious and dedicated to solving my health problem.  Laughter and play were frivolous, useless things that only people who were free of pain could afford.  My focus was entirely on my rotten luck, the terribleness of my situation, and my panic.

It took me several months to realize my victim stance was harming me instead of helping me.  Seeing myself as the victim made it true, and then I felt powerless.  I decided to stop being powerless, and so I became powerful.  Sound too simple?  It’s not.

I decided to become healthy by listening to my body and learning how my mind and body work together.  Never underestimate the power of intention!  As soon as I started listening to my body, I could hear all kinds of wisdom.  I felt compelled to find ways to play and laugh again, and realized that I’d had it backwards – I didn’t need to wait until I was healthy to have fun; I needed to have fun to create health.

Humor and play make life worth living.  What are you waiting for?  Find a way to play today, find something to laugh about, and share your story in the comments area below.   Decide what you’re going to create in your life.  Tell us about it!

It’s time to change the cultural belief that work comes first.  Play makes you laugh, laughing makes you feel good, and feeling good makes you do everything with presence, awareness, and love.  Now that’s the way to make the world a better place!

Here’s my playlist for today:

An intensely fun hour of hilarious talk with four great friends.
A ten-minute reading break over lunch.
A Mozart backdrop to my writing time.
A date with my husband.

Tomorrow, I’m taking my monthly play day.  That’s right – an entire DAY of play.  I no longer wait until I’m sick to take sick days, because sick days are no fun.  Now I take play days.  Which, come to think of it, has drastically reduced the number of sick days!  I’ve never been healthier in my entire life.  I used to have some kind of illness every couple of months – flus, bronchitis, sinus infections, etc.  In my journey to learn how to hear my body’s wisdom, this is the final piece of the puzzle.  When my body wants to relax, to play, and to hang loose, I listen.  I no longer constantly override its messages and put off playtime.

Here’s my playlist for my play day tomorrow:

A massage.  (Heaven!)
A leisurely swim.
Yoga.
My favorite TV show. (Bones!)
A pile of good books.
Snuggles with my dog.
A nap.

What’s on your playlist today?

I’m talking about play.

It’s an innocent, childlike, often overlooked magic weapon.

When you’re continually stressed out, your body is producing a lot of hormones and neurotransmitters associated with the fight or flight response.  Lots of things happen as a result – you get muscle tension, increased heart rate and blood pressure, shallow breathing, less blood flow throughout your body, digestion slows to a crawl, your body stores fat more easily, your metabolism slows down, and many of the biochemical processes in your body are in breakdown mode.  No healing happens, no recovery happens, and you begin to feel muscle fatigue and pain, overall exhaustion, and your immune function plummets.

When you are playing, it is quite the opposite.  A playful energy energizes and relaxes your body, allowing it to shift into the rest and digest response, fight or flight’s fraternal twin.  In rest and digest, your body is deluged with healing processes and everything takes time to repair, regenerate, and recover.  Your metabolism speeds up, your digestion speeds up, everything becomes more efficient, and you feel better.

Emotional work, thought work, mind-body work, and all those other things I talk about are all vital to your health.  But play deserves its own spot, front and center, as one of the most critical elements of healing.

Sometimes we have to do a lot of emotion and thought work to get to a play space, but once we’re there, it’s time to play like kids.  Literally.  Find a kid and study their play patterns.  Notice how they abandon themselves entirely to play.  Watch how they could care less about outcomes – it’s the actual process of play that brings them to life.  Delight in their vibrant good health as they play.

Then, bring play back into your life.  It’s much more valuable than we realize, so I’m banking on the experience, the feeling, the life energy flowing through you as you play to convince you that it is just as important (in fact, more so) than work.

This week, just ask yourself the following question to begin moving toward more play:

What feels or sounds like play to me?

Keep adding to this list all week long until you’ve got a page full, at least.  Then challenge yourself to come up with two more.  I’m serious about play!