Back when I was diagnosed with vertigo, one of the first things that occurred to me was that it was going to put a massive cramp in my training. For the past three years I ran in the Bluenose Marathon weekend that takes place every May long weekend here in Halifax.The first year I ran the 5K race. I had been on the cross-country running team back in my high school years, but I hadn’t gone for a single run in over two decades. I trained and…
I guess I jumped the gun a bit in my last post when I casually mentioned my vertigo and that it wasn’t going too badly. Since then it has progressively gotten worse to the point that having to get into work was nerve-wracking to say the least (running for a bus, being on said bus while unsteady, walking to my office, etc). On top of that, it was starting to affect my ability to do my actual job because apparently it can be quite difficult to concentrate when…
So. It’s been awhile. And you could take that to mean my blog and you’d be absolutely correct. I know a lot of things happened between the first day of school for my kids and today, but none of it was recorded here. I was overwhelmed at work and dealing with one bout of illness after another and I couldn’t muster up the motivation to blog about anything. Facebook made it so easy to post quick snippets and Instagram let me share photos, and the blog collected…
It almost sounds funny, to think that there might be a need for instruction on how to breathe. Breathing is something that we do naturally and automatically every single moment of every single day. In each moment, we are either inhaling or we are exhaling (and maybe we’re occasionally holding our breath if we’re watching a thriller of a movie or ducking underwater!). Breathing is what we do without thinking and it helps us stay alive; after all we don’t have to think about making our hearts…
I’ve been asked a question so many times that I wanted to state the answer very clearly right here: Yes. Yoga can help anxiety. For a great deal of my life, I found myself plagued by anxiety and by panic attacks that would quite literally leave me gasping for breath, feeling like I might faint or vomit, and worrying that I would never ever feel normal again.(You can read my description of what a panic attack felt like right here)I never took any pharmaceutical medication for it…
Time to dust off the old blog right? I know I will regret not tracking my training here, but I’ve been working towards my first half marathon in this year’s Bluenose Marathon weekend on May 18th. It may be called a half marathon but it’s a WHOLE 13.1 miles/21 km. It’s definitely nothing to sneeze at and when I signed up for it, it was much farther than any distance I had ever run before.I set forth with my training, not really following…
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from paying attention to what is happening around me it’s this: Life may not always be fair or work out exactly the way we want it to, but constantly complaining and being negative about it only makes things worse.I’m not exactly a full-blown Pollyanna; sometimes a little venting is actually useful. No one should bottle everything up all the time or you can start feeling resentful. However, I’ve found that if I spend all my time complaining…
We are a culture of busy. It’s all you hear some days. “I’m too busy to get the sleep I need.” “I’m too busy to go out with my friends for a drink.” “I’m too busy to read.” It might even be something that comes out of your own mouth regularly.I get a lot of questions about how I manage to make the time to have a yoga practice or how I fit in exercise. Aren’t I busy too? After all, I work full…
I was a coffee drinker for a very long time, from my late teens until my late 30s. I usually only drank one cup of coffee per day although I sometimes had two cups on a weekend. (I only tried three cups twice in my whole life and I reacted so badly to that much coffee that I am in awe of people who can drink a pot and keep going.)In all of those years I tried to give up coffee several times. Each time it worked, sort of…