Sunny Side Up
It's summer! I feel our warmest season was a bit bashful for the first few weeks where I live. Only this week has the air had that persistent warmth, and we don't feel chilly while in the shade or if it is breezy.
Photo by Andre Furtado from Pexels
Since my thirties, I have had a love/hate relationship with summer. In my teens and twenties, I loved to lie prone in the sun and slowly bake my skin to a golden brown. 'The hotter, the better!' I would gleefully say while adding lemon juice to my hair and oil (with some SPF at least - I wasn't a lunatic) to my skin. I loved swimming, cycling, drinking sweet fruit-infused juice and waters, and eating salty and spicy foods. I was a quintessential, feisty Pitta dominant personality that revelled in the sun. Like most young people, I didn't have too much concern about freckles, wrinkles, and sunburns. Fortunately, I managed to avoid any severe burning even with my Northern European peaches and cream complexion. Still, I can tell you that overlooking your knee pits and allowing those to get burned is a humbling experience.
The Pitta Dosha (I spoke a little about the Pitta Dosha here too) fuels Summer with fire and water. People who are Pitta dominant tend to be naturally athletic, freckled, and golden or red-haired. They also don’t have a lot of hair - baldness and fine hair are quite prevalent among Pittas. Pittas tend to be short-tempered, goal oriented, and competitive. They are natural leaders and easily inspire others. They seek adventure and challenge, and dislike being bored or idle. They have high expectations, and tend to overwork and overplay. They are highly focused and organized. In North America, Pitta dominant people are the most commonly found, which could explain a lot about our competitively driven culture. Summer is the same; it is highly productive encouraging everything to bloom and grow. Longer days mean longer work hours. Warm temperatures mean that everything is running at its maximum efficiency.
So what changed in my thirties? Vanity, for one. I had my children late in my thirties, and my body didn't bounce back from that stress. Wearing fewer clothes was unappealing to me. An even more impactful event was developing rosacea. Rosacea is a skin condition that usually affects your face. It results in redness, pimples, swelling, and small and superficial dilated blood vessels. Often, the nose, cheeks, forehead, and chin are most involved. A red, enlarged nose may occur in severe disease, a condition known as rhinophyma. When my rosacea was at its worst, my nose was very red and swollen, and I had blemishes and redness around my nose and mouth. (I still have a broken blood vessel on the tip of my nose, which I keep meaning to look at having removed, but I never seem to get around to it.) I quickly realized that my rosacea became a lot angrier on hot, sunny days.
It didn't take me long to have symptoms akin to a warm-weather Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Most people I know who experience SAD symptoms suffer in the winter, which may be a result of too little sunlight and a Vitamin D deficiency. While many were happy to frolic in the sunshine and sweltering heat, I found myself thinking that binge-watching tv in a darkened room was a pretty great idea. My dream vacation was no longer an exotic beach getaway, but instead, I fancied enjoying spring in Paris or admiring the colour of autumn leaves in Eastern Canada.
Don't get me wrong; I don't love the depths of winter either. My 'goldilocks' state of mind was problematic because I used to consider myself pretty easygoing and quite tolerant of my surroundings. To develop an intolerance, where my mood and emotions were affected by the weather, it was untenable.
So can you cure rosacea? Nope. But after ten years with this condition, I have figured a few things out. Learning some solutions sent me on an adventure to understand more about my skin's overall health, autoimmune diseases, and the real reason (I think) that people suffer from ailments like this.
The two things that trigger an autoimmune disease are:
a disruption in our bodies' microbiome;
how we speak to ourselves internally.
Improving your Inner Monologue:
Autoimmune disease happens when the body's natural defence system can't tell the difference between your cells and foreign cells, causing the body to attack healthy cells mistakenly. There are more than 80 types of autoimmune diseases that affect a wide range of body parts. A lot of research on a variety of autoimmune disorders like Hashimoto's Disease, Lupus, Psoriasis, and Rheumatoid Arthritis showed that although individuals have physical differences contributing to their condition, there is one universal link between all of the patients: Negative Self Talk.
I talked about my inner critic, named Dorkas, in a previous blog post. Dorkas is exceptional at holding me to very high expectations and criticizing me when life does not meet those expectations. Dorkas's favourite word is "Should." I should wake up earlier. I should eat more green leafy vegetables. I should be practicing yoga more vigorously. I should be able to a headstand without a wall. I should meditate longer. I should start running again. I should not love chocolate so much. I should lose more weight. I should be a better wife. I should be a better mom. I should be a better person. Dorkas has spent years eroding my self-esteem and self-worth, and when the rosacea appeared, the effects became as apparent as the nose on my face.
Quieting a voice like Dorkas takes a lot of work. It is undoing years of habit and ritual that your mind and body have formed. It takes a level of self-awareness that I haven't mastered yet because I recognize that "should" statements still come into my mind, and I can't always remove myself from that conversion to stop it. I can see my error after the fact and can use an internal voice of kindness to correct or override the negative statement, but not all the time. I want to stop Dorkas in her tracks and not even allow her to finish her nasty comment.
Self-talk is tricky because there is no medical test to confirm if your frame of mind is improving. It is a life skill that one must foster and work on every day. There is no pill or quick fix to sort this problem out. Negative self-talk is often inherited. If parents are hard on themselves, they have almost certainly passed that skill down onto their children inadvertently through their words and actions. Breaking these habits and cycles is a life's work, sadly for which many people feel they don't have time or interest.
Managing Your Microbiome:
Our microbiome is a strange and mysterious place that I feel modern medicine is only beginning to unravel. I am definitely not an expert on this subject, but here are some things that have consistently improved my skin condition and overall health.
'We humans are mostly microbes over 100 trillion of them. Microbes outnumber our human cells ten to one. The majority live in our gut, particularly in the large intestine. The microbiome is the genetic material of all the microbes - bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses - that live on and inside the human body. The number of genes in all the microbes in one person's microbiome is 200 times the number of genes in the human genome. The microbiome may weigh as much as five pounds. The bacteria in the microbiome help digest our food, regulate our immune system, protect against other bacteria that cause disease, and produce vitamins, including B vitamins B12, thiamine and riboflavin, and Vitamin K, which is needed for blood coagulation. The microbiome was not generally recognized to exist until the late 1990s.' (Source: Centre for Ecogenics and Environment Health)
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels
Tips for good gut health:
Consume fermented food and drinks. Good choices are:
unsweetened yogourt*;
kefir, which is a sour milk drink with five times as many microbes as yogourt*;
raw milk cheeses*;
sauerkraut;
kimchi, a Korean dish made from garlic, cabbage and chilli;
soybean-based products such as soy sauce, tempeh and natto
Avoid the following:
Sugar
antibiotics
environmental toxins
stress
artificial sweeteners like aspartame, sucralose and saccharine
highly processed foods
overusing antibacterial soaps and cleansers
Encourage these habits:
Increase your fibre intake, particularly in vegetables.
Eat a variety of fruit and vegetables, and try to eat seasonally.
Consume nuts, seeds, berries, olive oil, brassicas, coffee and tea – especially green tea. These foods are full of polyphenols, which are antioxidants that act as fuel for microbes.
Spend more time outside. Dig in the dirt if you can. Gardening and doing outdoor activities are supportive of your biome.
Pet some animals - Studies have shown that people living with dogs have more microbial diversity.
Speak to your doctor and ask to be referred to specialists. If you aren't getting the answers you need, seek a second opinion, or even alternative medical practitioners like Acupuncturists, doctors of Naturopathic Medicine, and Osteopaths.
*My personal experience is that consuming goat milk products instead of cow milk products is generally much better. If you want more information about goat milk products and fermented goat milk, 'The Good Skin Condition' by Shann Jones may be an excellent read. She has a fabulous website that has some good habits to foster great skin.
Yoga Practices for supporting a sunny attitude:
Meditation - with a focus on mantras full of self-love. Here is a meditation practice from the Chuckling Goat (Shanna Jones):
“A lot of the stress we experience in our daily lives comes from our inability to assimilate our feelings properly. Your heart is an organ designed to assimilate feeling and sensation, just as your gut is an organ designed to assimilate food. This is why your heart has an electromagnetic field about 60 times greater in amplitude than your brain. Feeling and digesting our feelings is what our heart is designed to do. But we spend most of our time trying to work out different ways to avoid feeling things. We watch TV; we over-eat, we drink, we shop, we do drugs, we gamble, we have affairs – all to avoid feeling our feelings.
So here is my suggestion, if you are brave enough to try it: feel your emotions by breathing them straight into your heart. This is so radical, so revolutionary, that people are actually afraid of it. We spend so much time trying to deaden the pain that we are unaccustomed to walking directly into it.
The next time something happens that makes you feel sad or afraid – don't try to numb the feelings, or avoid them, or distract yourself. Instead, imagine yourself turning directly towards the feelings. If you were a compass, the feelings would be magnetic north.
Orient yourself facing towards the feelings, and then BREATHE THEM DIRECTLY INTO YOUR HEART. Inhale your sensations straight into the centre of you.
Take a long, deep breath through your nose and suck those feelings right into your heart. When your heart – and your lungs – are full, pause for a brief instant to think of all the people around the world – millions of them, probably – who are feeling the exact same thing as you, right this minute.
Then breathe out relief, for you and for all those other people. Breathe out through your mouth.
Do this three or four times, or until the feelings begin to shift slightly. You may feel a new set of emotions emerge. Now you may be feeling angry or sad in a different way.
Re-align your mental compass so that your new magnetic north is this new set of emotions. Face towards them in your mind. And again, breathe them straight into your heart.
Pause for an instant to think of all the people around the world who are feeling the exact same emotion as you, right this minute. And breathe out serenity for yourself and for everyone, out through your mouth.
Once more, turn towards the sensation. Again, breathe it straight into your heart.
Pause for an instant to think of all the people around the world who are feeling the exact same emotion as you, right this minute. And breathe out wisdom for yourself and for everyone, out through your mouth.
The Buddhist practice of Tonglin inspired this practice. I find it the most active, necessary part of my toolkit in dealing with emotions. I use it every day, and I teach it to my team on the farm. I used this when I thought my husband was dying. It can be used in the most extreme circumstances, and it is battle-tested. I recommend it to you. You always have your breath with you will never be abandoned as long as you do not abandon yourself.”
Ananda Balasana (Happy Baby Pose) - While laying on your back, draw knees to chest. Push your heels up parallel to the ceiling, then draw knees back towards armpits. Bring your arms in between your legs and take hold of the outside of your feet. Actively press your hips, spine and shoulders into the mat. If holding your feet is uncomfortable, you can hold onto your ankles or calves or thighs. Another sign to release your ankles is if your hips, spine and shoulders are not meeting the floor. Rock from side to side. Hold for five to ten breaths.
Ardha Pawamuktasana (Half Wind Release Pose) - Lying on your back, hug your right knee toward your ribcage's right side. Press your straight left leg away from you as though you were pushing your left foot into a wall. Clasp your hands around your right shin to pull it closer to the floor. Hold for ten breaths. Repeat on the other side. If it is not comfortable holding onto your shin, you can clasp your hands around your thigh instead or wrap a strap over your shin to pull your leg towards you.
Supta Matsyendrasana (Supine Twist) - From Ardha Pawamuktasana (Half Wind Release Pose), release your right knee to the left, stacking your hips and working towards resting your right knee on the floor. Stretch your right arm straight out to the right. Repeat on the other side. For a deeper stretch, use your left hand to push your right knee closer to the earth gently or take your left hand to your outer right foot and extend your leg straight out. If your knee doesn't touch the floor, place a block, bolster, or pillow under your knee.
Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutations) - Taking your time in each pose, or moving through a flow using your breath to guide the movements, Sun Salutations are a great way to quiet your mind and focus on being present in the moment. Sequence:
Focus on your breath in mountain pose with palms together in front of your heart
Inhale extended mountain or salutation pose
Exhale - deep forward fold
Inhale - right foot back to a lunge
Exhale - step back to plank
Inhale - shift the weight forward
Exhale - knees, chest, chin to the floor Inhale - sphinx or cobra
Exhale - downward facing dog
Inhale - right foot forward to a lunge
Exhale - deep forward fold
Inhale - sweep up to an extended mountain or salutation pose
Exhale - back to mountain pose
Repeat sequence, moving left leg for lunges.
So how is my summer going? After about ten years, the last two summers have been the most pleasant for me. I feel I am happier and welcome the warm weather. I enjoy sitting in the sun (Intelligently - I am not a lunatic), and appreciate the warm glow my skin has developed. My rosacea flare-ups are much less frequent and managed with a topical cream from my dermatologist, a high-quality sunscreen, and the good habits I have developed in my daily routine and diet.
Wherever you are, I hope that you stay well-hydrated and appropriately protected from the elements this summer. The hits in 2020 just keep coming with unseasonably rainy weather for some and dangerously hot temperatures for others. Regardless, this is a time (in the Northern Hemisphere) when nature is working on overdrive growing, blooming, and producing beautiful things. I hope that you thrive too, and let that passionate Pitta energy keep you full of energy.