them to perform. These initial thoughts led me to pursue “health coaching” as something valuable to offer as a health professional.
A simple phone call had such great benefits. What could similar health interventions do for yoga students? What if all we did was ask one question of our students per week about their health?
In studying Yoga Health Coaching, I learned about books and courses that explained the behavioral science and neuroscience behind habits. In yoga and holistic healing communities, many people rely on going to get help from a doctor or a practitioner. This works well when you are sick or not feeling well. However, there is much you can do to bolster health before you get ill. In Japan, preventative medicine is the model of care and it is no accident that the country has the highest life expectancy in the world. Preventative medicine or lifestyle medicine means integrating healthy daily and seasonal habits into your life. Understanding the connection between daily habits and preventative medicine deserves much more attention in western medicine and in many holistic practices. When you are sick, it is important to check with a doctor. However, cultivating healthy habits needs to be discussed more often by yoga teachers, acupuncturists, medical doctors, and the like. The assumption that change is too difficult for most people needs to change. Health coaches are trained to help people effectively change habits and enhance lifestyle choices for optimum health.
Body Thrive
Yoga Health Coaching was founded by Cate Stillman as a way to help yoga students and people interested in a holistic lifestyle optimize habits based on Ayurveda and yoga. She wrote the book Body Thrive, Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Ayurveda and Yoga. Body Thrive, which applies the most essential teachings of Ayurveda into a modern life by decoding the teachings into habits. Ayurveda is the perennial body-wisdom tradition that co-arose with yoga, the path of awakened living. The book describes a curriculum that every person can learn as a child, master as an adult, and refine as an elder for their body to thrive. The habits described in Body Thrive are simple and have been demonstrated to increase healthspan and lifespan, habits such as going to bed early, eating a hearty midday meal, exercising, eating more plants, and giving yourself regular oil massages, known as abyhanga in Sanskrit. To find a Yoga Health Coach to work with or for more information on Yoga Health Coaching visit https://yogahealthcoaching.com/find-a-coach/ to learn to put habits into place.
Twenty Years Younger
Jon Butcher, founder of multiple companies, including Lifebook and a Mindvalley Academy class, “Turn Your Life into a Living Masterpiece,” credits daily habits and purpose with helping him and his wife to look twenty years younger than their biological age. “The key is the habits that you put in place and then being true to those habits. And the way that you are going to get that done is to have a strong purpose and that’s what it always comes down to.” Jon Butcher didn’t set out to look twenty to thirty years younger than his age, yet his habits set him up for the life he leads today, teaching others in how to transform their health, have more joy, and have solid relationships, along with aging well. He gives classes at www.mindvalleyacademy.com.
Habit Guidelines
Start small. Stanford behavioral scientist B. J. Fogg has branded the practice of starting new habits small as “tiny habits.” Watch his popular YouTube video, “Tiny Habits.” When we start small, we make change doable. We can use the small steps to create momentum. As a Yoga Health Coach, I have seen the opposite happen so often. People want big changes very quickly. They are so sick of their current situation; they want out immediately. Or sometimes it’s the “Dream Big” syndrome gone horribly wrong. It’s like creating a dramatic, bad break-up with their unhealthy habit. Instead, things can be much easier and healthier. And those sudden abrupt break-ups seem to almost always lead to the rebound effect. As the person finds that their big dramatic change doesn’t work, it confirms negative thinking. Often the client decides to go back to the old relationship with their unhealthy habit. They seem to believe that they really can’t change after all. I have seen this pattern of self-sabotage in myself and in others over and over. It is what has made me so committed to small, focused, doable, incremental changes.
Another habit-changing concept called kaizen comes from a Japanese word that means, “small, continuous improvements.” Kaizen was adapted by Japanese businesses which needed to rebuild and restructure following the chaos and destruction that had occurred during World War II. Kaizen can be applied to habit change in thinking about the smallest tiny improvement that can be made. I have often noticed my health coaching clients wanting to change too much, too soon. This behavior creates a self-defeating loop. When a person wants to change a habit and then thinks about taking too big of a step in that shift, when it doesn’t work, the person trying to change often gives up and believes that changing is futile. An example would be going to bed earlier. A futile step would be to try to change one’s bedtime by one or two hours. While this may occasionally work for some people, most will fail and then give up. Instead of small steps, the person may consider the experiences as cement for their theory that they are a “night owl.” Branding oneself a night owl instead of making smaller steps towards an earlier bedtime is not helpful. A kaizen step towards a new bedtime would be to set bedtime back fifteen minutes for an entire week, then increasing the earlier bedtime to thirty minutes earlier than the previous bedtime on the second week. In this scenario, it would take a month to shift bedtime by one hour. Kaizen has been proven over and over in studies, and I have seen it work as an effective and simple strategy in my coaching clients.
Habits and patterns are like roads that we have carved out in our life. The big habits may be like paved freeways, creating shortcuts or fast ways of doing things. Our habits may be useful and serve us in many ways. It’s important to be able to objectify our habits. I like to think of my habits as roads. When a habit is brand new, it’s like an off-road trail. I am walking or in an off-road vehicle. Change is scary. New territories are novel and intimidating. I am very present in my emotions on the new road. I may want to give up. Eventually, I cut a trail. Sometimes I pave it and make it real, as in, “I will do this every day for the rest of my life.” Other times my habits may have been great superhighways in my twenties, thirties, or forties, yet as the years roll by, I realize that maybe I need to take a train or walk or dismantle that superhighway. Maybe the destination doesn’t appeal to me anymore, or I don’t need to go so fast. Maybe I can take a bullet train instead. I think you are getting it now. As we age, it is so easy to look back and be supercritical. Why did I do that for so many years? Or I have messed myself up? In this book, we are learning that we can cut new trails and pave new habitual roads. No looking back. No, rather, I mean: look back and appreciate the journey. After all, there have been people that have lived to be 100 who smoked, drank, and swore all their lives. There is no right way. There is only your way and the Wild West of the rest of your beautiful and precious life. Your life is a work of art. How will you live it?
Dinacharya
Dinacharya means “daily routine.” In Ayurveda, synchronizing daily activities with daily cycles is one of the most important ways to support health. Western medicine has finally begun to understand the importance of the synchronization of human physiology with daily cycles, especially the rising and setting of the sun. Dinacharya includes activities such as waking time, elimination, hygiene, self-massage, bathing, meditation, study, work, and sleep.
Science has validated that within our brain, we have a master clock that regulates biological processes. Eating and sleeping at the wrong times can throw off this clock and cause chronodisruption. Other, secondary cellular clocks can be found in the liver, pancreas, and other organs. Chronodisruption or disconnection from the natural rhythms of daytime and nighttime has been linked to cognitive decline, diabetes, obesity, substance abuse, heart disease, and some cancers. In 2017, three researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for understanding and explaining the role of circadian rhythm in health and in treating disease. Scientific American declared that circadian medicine “may revolutionize medicine as we know it.”
Traditional Dinacharya
Morning:
•Wake before sunrise
•Scrape