Yoga is an excellent way to energetically tone your body (it's also a great way to build strength, flexibility, balance, and mind/body connection). The traditional yoga asanas (or poses) were created by monks as a way to prepare the body for mediation. Each asana directs the energy flow of your body in different ways, balancing out the chakras, strengthening them, removing energetic blockages, toning your chakras and your body so that energy flows most efficiently through you. Regular yoga practice using various asanas is beneficial on many levels (I recommend looking at this link). If you ever feel like you're out of your body, go to a yoga class or practice a pose or two on your own.
A few of the many yoga asanas that are particularly good for the first chakra and grounding:- Padmasana-Lotus Pose
- Tadasana- Mountain Pose
- Baddha Konasana-Bound Angle
- Utkatasana- Chair Pose
- Virabhadasana 1,2,3- Warrior 1, Warrior 2, and Warrior 3
- Any Balancing pose (Vrikshasana-Tree, Garudasana-Eagle, Ardha Chandrasana-Half Moon, etc.)
- Bikram Yoga Series
What you eat and how you eat effects how well you function. I know this sounds like a silly thing to mention, but so many people don't realize that what they eat is actually effecting their health. The cells in your body need nutrients to function, the only way they get those nutrients is from what you feed them, and they then go about fueling your body and creating new cells with whatever it is that you gave them. Therefore, paying attention to what you eat is very important.I'm not going to go into nutrition at this moment, but basically, try to avoid processed items, eat mostly vegetables, meat, and whole grains. Eat a variety of foods. This is something I'm working on this month, I tend to eat the foods that make me feel good (which is a great thing to do), but then I tend to only eat them and not a variety of other foods that might possibly make me feel good too but I just don't know about it yet. I've also gotten to the point where most of the time I eat I'm doing so just to eat, not for the taste of the food but because I need to eat. I still do like eating, but sometimes I get a little bored with it and it should be more enjoyable.
I love Thai Curry, it's something I eat because it tastes good. So, I learned how to make traditional Thai food at home. Instead of going to the store and picking up pre-made curry paste, we picked up the seeds needed to make the curry powder, added ginger and garlic and made a lovely curry paste. Because we were making it at home I could add as much or as little (as little in my case) of the chilies, making it the perfect level of spiciness for my taste. Making the curry was much more involved than this, making it a wonderful first chakra task, breaking up the process into it's elemental pieces from the beginning (opposed to getting a plate of food at a restaurant or using pre-made curry sauce, powder, or paste).
My favorite website for recipes is www.epicurious.com, and of course some of the gluten-free cooking websites that are out there.
It's also a good idea to make sure you're eating enough calories during the day. Sometimes when I get really busy I forget to make time to eat & I'll just eat a number of little snacks through the day to get me through. It's important to make sure you give yourself enough calories or your body will go into starvation mode and not be able to give you the energy you need to function, not to mention it'll start storing whatever food you do eat as fat and reserve it because it thinks you are starving (then it goes about eating your muscle tissue for energy). Also, if you're not eating enough protein you may not have enough energy. This website is great for letting you know if you're eating enough calories and what percentage of your calories are coming from proteins, carbs, and fats. I discovered a lot about my eating habits when I actually kept track of them for a short time.
Grounding Foods for your First Chakra
- Meat
- Protein
- Root Vegetables
- Nuts
- Whole Grains
- Herbal Teas such as Pau d' Arco, Rooibos, Hibiscus, Raspberry Leaf, Uva Ursi
Many Yogis are vegetarians, this is the traditional yogi diet. Meat grounds you and "weighs you down," therefore if you practice yoga on a regular basis (way more than me), you may want to limit your intake of very grounding foods in order to send your energy to other chakras in your body. However, if you are a yogi, practicing yoga on a strict regular basis, you also have an extremely grounded first chakra, meditation routine, and sense of presence, so that you can focus on other chakras now. You're still doing grounding things, such as mediation and yoga, you just don't need food to be part of your grounding routine. I personally am not to this point yet, and I really love my grounding foods, also the other activities I'm currently doing (like weight training, climbing, etc.) require me to have a higher protein intake than I would if I wasn't doing these activities. Always adjust your food intake to what your personal needs are.
Exercise- everyone should do this. The key to good exercise is to do a variety of things. First off you don't want to get bored with the exercise you're doing, and also if you only do one type of exercise you just become good at that one thing. Your body gets used to the movements you make to perform that activity and then your muscles just aren't challenged anymore-they stop growing. There are tons of bikers in Portland, lots of them bike to work everyday, however, some of them still aren't in great shape because they don't do anything else, they haven't become physically fit, they've just become awesome bikers. (This is something I'm working on at the moment as well, I do like to do the same things when I exercise, but I'm changing them up more and more now.)
Listen to your body-eat when you're hungry, rest when you're tired, don't try and do an insane amount of massages when your hands start to hurt.
Get enough sleep, sleeping is when your body repairs itself. I would go into this more, but right now I need to sleep...listen to your body...
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