If you feel blue in the winter, there could be an easy explanation unrelated to your emotions…. low Vitamin D! Those of us who live in Rochester, blessed with incredible lakes and rolling hills, and 200 days on average of overcast skies… may be more susceptable to Vitamin D deficiency than we realize. Approximately 80-90 percent of the American public is deficient in Vitamin D. Deficiency results in loss of memory, depression, weak muscles, tender bones and frequent infections, to name just a few items. Check with your physician (or dentist) and have your Vitamin D checked. A healthy score from a Functional Medicine perspective (what the body needs to function optimally) is between 60 – 80. Contact us for more information.
Self-care
A Leader is a Reader…
A leader is a reader, and a reader is a leader!
To develop the leadership skills of your children begin reading to them at a very young age.
To fill your leadership shoes, create a goal of reading minimally one to two books per month.
Start with topics about which you feel genuinely interested.
One of our favorites, “The Art of Possibility – Transforming Professional and Personal Life” by Rosamund Stone Zander and Boston Philharmonic Conductor Benjamin Zander, will surely keep your attention!
Let us know what you think!
The Power of Vulnerability
Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness. She poses the questions:
How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognize that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?
Click on the link below to hear her speak!
Click on the link below to hear her speak!
(Source: TED: Ideas Worth Spreading)
Emotions
Emotions are our most common experience of being moved by forces seemingly beyond our control. As such, they are among the most confusing and frightening phenomena of everyday life. People often treat them as a nuisance or a threat, yet failing to experience them straightforwardly undermines sanity and well-being.
How can we begin to relate to emotions in a more direct and fearless way? Can we ever befriend our emotions and accept them as part of us? Why is emotion so hard to come to terms with in our culture?…
…If we could let ourselves feel just what we feel, instead of reacting against it, condemning it, or trying to manipulate and suppress it, perhaps we could develop greater confidence about facing whatever life confronts with.
Excerpt from Awakening the Heart by John Welwood
Self-acceptance
The proper nourishment for personal growth is a loving acceptance and encouragement by others not rejection and impatient suggestions for improvement. Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection. We have said that personal growth resembles physical growth: all the energies and tendencies are there.
But there is in most of us a civil war that stunts our personal growth. It is our inner struggle for self-acceptance.
Excerpt from Will the Real Me Please Stand Up? by John Powell, S. J.