Category: Balance

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Barefoot Gift Cards

This is the story of  how we came up with the best local present you can give or receive this year.

 

Two years ago the owners of Witch Haven Farms decided to give back to their community by helping  struggling families grow food. The hope was to help with rising food costs, and increase nutritious food availability, variety, and security in their community.   They helped people start their own home lots, offering everything from seeds to support. The families had success in their new gardens, so much success that they had excess.

 

Witch Haven began buying the excess and offered the veggies at cost to seniors they know in neighbouring communities.  The income created even more household security and made a real difference for the families growing food.

 

People began eagerly joining the program, and success has brought the challenge of organizing and delivering all of the food.  This issue brought Witch Haven to the Ecology Action Centre’s Community Food Leadership Certificate Program.  

We fell in love with the idea and formed the Barefoot Farmers Association and work beside our community partners Shelter Nova Scotia, the Mulgrave Park Family Centre, and Sipekne’katik Food Pantry.

We all put our heads together and came up with the perfect local gift idea:

 

Barefoot Gift Cards

 

Each gift card provides twenty dollars worth of local, organic produce and eggs to a local shelter or community pantry.  This would be a great gift in itself, however this twenty dollars also provides economic growth to our Barefoot Farmers Collective, and increases food security in Nova Scotia.  

 

You see it is the perfect local gift.

 

Get yours in person at the Brewery Market on Saturday December 22, 2018

 

Order Online @

 

Facebook@BarefootFarmersAssociation

https://osberghealth.com/barefoot-farmers/

 

E-transfer @

 

barefootfa@gmail.com

 

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Journeys

Our journey with mental health and wellness is unique for each of us.   We evolve through our life and have reached this moment; it is from here we approach the endless possibilities that makes up the future. 

Spending time in the forests where I grew up, horseback riding, fishing,  my favorite memories are of my friends and I exploring.   There is light and beauty, darkness and mystery, and a constant cycle of  joy and sorrow in nature.   It has mysteries that beg me to search for answers.

Our journey through life has the same qualities.  In every life there are bright beautiful times, dark places that scare us,  hope,  joy, grief, pain, this world leaves none of us untouched.   

For some the path is clear, for some the endlessness of choice makes it almost impossible to move.  Some have been injured, some have had all the support the world can offer.   We are alone in our uniqueness,  yet this loneliness unites us all. 

A journey with mental health and wellness has obstacles; but it’s a beautiful place and the air has a magical quality.  Every choice we make on this path leads us in a different direction.  We learn to make our choices with love and wisdom, and create the power to guide our experience.  

 SO

 

 

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What Yin Yoga taught me about goal setting.

There’s a practice in yoga called yin,  for those unfamiliar with it, it is what I remember as  yoga from my childhood in the 70s. We get in poses that stretch our body and we stay there from three to five minutes.  The point of the exercise is to let our joints, tendons and fascia tissue relax and stretch creating flexibility.   We who have had the experience of sitting uncomfortably for any length of time will be able to attest to the human’s ability to  not notice discomfort initially. As time wears on, our foot may become numb or our knee strained, it becomes harder and harder to sit still.   So when we practice Yin, we keep that in mind and we seek our edge. Our edge is not the farthest we can go,  it is enough that we feel sensation and still maintain the pose for an extended period of time.   Through the practice our edge may change, we might be able to go a little deeper into the pose we may need to pull back.

Creating wellness requires us to look at the changes we need to make as Yin poses, rather than s.m.a.r.t. (specific, attainable, measurable, realistic, timely) goals.  It is tempting to get fixated on numbers whether they be zeros in a bank account, or numbers on a scale. Living is a process that does not end when we reach our savings goal or ideal weight.  The goal is to make maintainable changes; those changes create wellness. It is effective to use minimums as achievement  standards. Now my minimum for yoga is three times a week, when I began it was one.   

The reality is that changing habits and building mental wellness requires a number of different tactics motivations and work styles.   I loved taking summer courses in university.  The fast pace in the immersion in to the material was ideal for the way that I  learn.   I like feeling I am swimming in  the subject when I’m learning about something new. If it is a subject that I am not interested in however,  I  need to learn in small chunks and then take time to process.

In our endeavor to find best practices is important to keep in mind that any best practice won’t be best for every situation.    

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The Beginning

Why are you here?   What questions do you have in your life that you came here searching for answers?  Are you here for yourself? Are you here for somebody else? If you are here for somebody else, you cannot answer the question for them.   Mental Wellness is not a gift that can be given, it is something that must be earned. Perhaps you do not know what the questions are yet.  Perhaps that is why you are here, you are looking for your questions. No matter where we come from this is where we all start.

You may want to exercise, make more money, and be healthier for your family.  You may want to enhance performance and control anxiety. You may be looking for ways to adapt to a mental health diagnosis, or recover from trauma.  That question, why are you here, that is your seed. That seed contains your experiences, resources, your support networks, but more importantly it contains all of your potential.   I quite like using seed as a metaphor, it makes a great acronym too, success explored exposes development. New endeavors are all so diverse and have unique needs. They each require a great deal of different things in order to grow.   

Now we have our seed, to stay with our analogy, and we need to look and see where we are going to plant it.  If you work, commute, have children, a spouse, maybe some, maybe none, and then have to manage to consistently keep everybody alive, you will have to be creative about how you find time.  I like to set minimum goals, we will talk more about why in next week’s post. A minimum goal is the absolute minimum time you know you will be able to devote. It is how much you have to do in order to know that you are making consistent progress, and challenging yourself.  We can always do more. I give myself virtual achievement points for each yoga class over three I take a week, when I started it was one class a week.

This is where we begin to build our foundation, on consistent progress.  It is from here that we can gauge how to plan for our next phase. Imagine now jumping ahead in time, your seed is grown, what does that look like, feel like, try to make it as vivid as possible, using all of your senses. Now jump ahead in time again, it is three years later, imagine how it has changed. Try to experience as much detail as your imagination will let you.  How do you feel about your imagined path now that you are back at the beginning?

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Current Event Anxiety “How do I fix all the problems of the world?”

Current events are waves crashing on the shore.  They are not being born, they are finishing their journey.   Waves are born long before they hit the shore. They also do not remain with the chaos that they brought.  They come, they make their changes, and then they vanish into the vast ocean to bring life to the next one.

While  working with a client this week about anxiety around current events,  I have tried to come up with an analogy that is uncomplicated. This has proven difficult since the issues surrounding us are incredibly complicated.  Very few of us limit media, including social, and news, leaving us consuming unfiltered amounts of global suffering. Every moment and event happening in the world today is its own little whitecap.  Creating, as it crashes, its own beautiful or not so beautiful chaos.

The things that are going on around us at this very moment are the results of all of the ripples in time.  The results of all the events through time interacting with each other, constantly creating breakers, cascades of new beginnings.   Hurtling through the universe, on a rock that can wipe us all out with one big burp we, at sometime, realize how small and fragile we are.  How we feel about this information will be complicated and different for each of us. Some of us will despair for our lack of control, some of us will feel relief for our lack of ownership.  We may choose to endeavor to find what we are responsible for, we may proclaim the futility of it all. How we choose to feel, to act, to react, to all that is outside of your control, greatly determines how we experience the chaos of the universe.  

I have chosen to try, as much as a person can, to enjoy the waves. Sometimes it is a lot easier than others, thankfully I have a tribe who lets me be myself.   We may not agree with each other in all things, but we believe in each other, offer support in both attempting new things in the world, and providing a safe place to land when things are rough.  We need it all to have a full and rich life.

This is your journey, your ship, you are the captain of your life, set your course and ride your waves.