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4 Tips to an Abundant, Joy Filled Life

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4 Tips to an Abundant Joy Filled Life

We all want to live in a rich, fulfilling and abundant life. But sometimes it feels like it is far out of our reach. We can get bogged down with the daily struggle and sometimes it feels difficult to turn life around and create abundance, health, time freedom, wealth and happiness in our day to day lives. There are several tips that you can follow to create the best version of your life from no matter where you are starting from.

1. Gratitude

The most important aspect of creating an abundant, joy filled life is having an attitude of gratitude. By focusing on the most positive aspects of our lives, we are able to increase what we focus on. Find gratitude for even the most small things in our day – the gift of being able to move our limbs and walk! Or the gift of having food to eat throughout the day or the ability to be connected to everyone we could want simply at the touch of a button on the device in our hand.

If you are struggling to find something to be grateful for, just sit with your breath for a few minutes. Follow the inhalations and exhalations and have gratitude for the rich oxygen flowing into your body to nourish and fuel your cells and brain.

When you are able to focus on small pieces of gratitude, your overall abundance of gratitude grow and spills over to be your main focus during more of your day.

2. Detachment

Detachment from the outcomes that you are hoping for is an essential part of living a life that is balanced and healthy. It is the ability to not focus on how events will play out and how it will affect you, but how you can thrive every day no matter what happens. Things have a way of working themselves out, and by trying to stay neutral to outcomes, both good and bad, it helps you to stay level and not follow the highs and lows of life.

3. Attraction

Use the Law of Attraction to your benefit and use the magnetic attraction of like and like, to draw things into your life that you would like to see. Create space in your life to allow new things to come into your life, but again, stay somewhat detached by knowing that either way, life is good when you are filled with gratitude.

4. Refuel

Take time to refuel your body, mind and spirit and know that the time you spend with yourself, enjoying your own company is a worthwhile investment into your health. Enjoy hobbies that you have long forgotten about and devote a few hours per week to you own mental health and clarity, to clear the way for feelings of gratitude and to become clear on what you would like to attract into your life.

Spend time with your family and friends, those who make you feel good about the world and focus on the positive parts of your life and they are sure to multiply.

When you hear “retirement strategy”, what do you think about?

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retirement strategy

I’ll bet you think about some sort of financial strategy that you either are using, paying attention to, focusing on, or thinking about in order to be able to retire with enough money/financial resources to live out the remainder of your life.

I’ll bet that you, or someone in your family, has spent time, energy, and money, learning about and consulting with people who give advice on retirement strategies.

The concept is always the same: “How do I ensure that the efforts that I make NOW can positively affect me in the future.” 

It’s interesting to me that this seems to be universally important for people. In fact, we have an entire industry focused on this topic. You see books about it, commercials for it, advertising in print, articles online, blogs and even podcasts on the topic of preparing for retirement.

Here’s the thing: when I think of retirement strategy, I think of having ALL of the resources that I’ll need, not just money. In fact, I think that there is one resource that I’ll need when I retire that is more important than money – MY HEALTH! 

What good is having early retirement with sufficient money if you don’t have your health?

I have met hundreds of patients over the years that had the financial resources to live when they retired, but were near bankruptcy when it came to their health. It’s almost like people just assume that health will still be there without effort.  Not true!

If you want to still have your health 10, 20, even 40 years from now, what would you have to do NOW?

What type of INVESTMENT would you need to make NOW? 

What specialist would you need to consult with, hire, and learn from in order to have health in the future?

What would you need to prioritize today in order to have what you want decades from now?  When is a good time to start investing in your health?  At what point would it be too early to stop investing in your health?

As a chiropractor, I can share that getting adjusted regularly lays the foundation for your body to be able to FUNCTION (work properly), DEVELOP (make new healthy cells after stressful times in your life), and HEAL (overcome damage from stressors in your life) as efficiently as possible.

If your body can to that (function, heal and recreate new cells properly) you lay the foundation for the kind of health that you want to have in the future.

Eating well, exercising, thinking positively, growing yourself spiritually, etc are all things that you can do to INVEST in your health. You can do any (or all) of these things starting TODAY!

Or you could do the latter. 

You could be like the person that NEVER saved a penny their whole life, and then ended up in financial crisis. This is the same as the person who never invests into their health, and then loses all of their money trying to recover it in the future.

There is a recent example of a patient that I saw this week. Over the last 10 years, Jerry has started and stopped chiropractic care 6 times. Every time he restarted, he was in crisis and needed extra care to recover back to functional levels.  In that time, because he was inconsistent, his health status has gone up and down like a yo-yo. Not OK! 

If he just stayed consistent, we calculated that he would have had 25% fewer adjustments in that time (saving him about $3,600) and his health would have been consistently better. In that scenario, had he been more consistent, his future health prognosis would have been much higher too.

What’s the bottom line? Just like financial investing, if you want your “health account” to be full in the future, keep consistently investing in your health now.

You, and your family, are worth it.

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Guest Blog by Dr. Ryan French

Dr. Ryan FrenchDr. Ryan French is a family chiropractor practicing in Bolton, Ontario. Together with his team of incredible support staff and associate doctors, he has built the largest family chiropractic practice in the area.  He is a health coach, mentor, teacher, and writer.

He is blessed with an incredible family, including loving wife Suzanne, and 4 beautiful children, Jessica, Jackson, Jordyn and Jacob.

Dr. Ryan received his doctorate from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto.  His other academic accomplishments include a Degree in Kinesiology from McMaster University in Hamilton, a post-doctorate fellowship in pregnancy and pediatric care rendering him the title FICPA (Fellow of the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association), certification in The Webster In-Utero Constraint Technique (better known as the breech-turning technique), certification to practice Clinical Acupuncture, and many other courses in nutrition, exercise, and preventive health care.

His hobbies include coaching, hockey, fishing, golf, and never-ending learning!

He offers one-on-one mentoring to other chiropractors to help them grow and achieve more.  If interested in more information, send an email to [email protected].

He can be reached at Inside Out Family Chiropractic, 27 King Street East, Bolton, Ontario. OFFICE PHONE: 905-951-9911.
WEB: www.insideoutchiro.org
EMAIL: [email protected]
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/DrRyanFrench
TWITTER @DrRyanFrench

 

Master The Psychology of the Supermarket

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This information is courtesy of bon appetit and the research they have put together from a massive study on how we buy food.

Here, we summarize the most interesting pieces of information discovered about how supermarkets are designed, how and why we buy what we choose, and how it’s all a trap!!

I want you to be aware of these things the next time you go to the grocery store so you can be mindful about why you’re walking the direction you are, what you are choosing to put in your cart (with which hand!) and how many items you are walking past to get to what you actually wanted in the first place!

The five experts who contributed to the original study are:

• BA senior food editor Dawn Perry
• Environmental psychologist Paco Underhill and author of What Women Want: The Science of Female Shopping
• Architect and supermarket designer Kevin Kelley, of the firm Shook Kelley
• The director of the graduate nutrition program at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University, Sharon Akabas
• Efficiency expert Gwynnae Byrd

• “Upward of 50 percent of what we buy in a supermarket we had no intention of buying as we walked in the door,” psychologist Underhill says.

• The average supermarket has 64,000 products (you’d have to eat or use more than 175 different products every day for a year before you tried everything once).

• There are too many choices!! With this vast array of options, our brains overload and instead of the two items on our list, we come out with 20! Marketers are really good at getting us to buy stuff we don’t need.

• The primary goal of supermarkets is to subtly convince shoppers to spend more time inside, to give products more opportunities to fly into your cart!

• Very similar to casinos, it is rare to see many indicators of the time, like clocks, skylights, or even windows.

• Dairy is generally in the back corner—the deepest section of the store, because virtually everyone who walks in has some dairy product on their list. (aka stop buying dairy!! check out this blog for the reasons why!)

• About nine in ten people are right-handed, and a counterclockwise route through the store makes it easier for right-handed people to put stuff in their carts. (really!! can you imagine who studied and realized this!)

• Most stores work better with a counterclockwise circulation pattern because you tend to push your cart with your left hand and pick things up with your right hand.

• Of every ten people who walk through the entrance, only one will go down the soda aisle, so supermarkets hijack shoppers’ subconscious to linger in these aisles, often by literally slowing them down with bumpier or tackier floor surfaces. (or giant bins in the centre of the aisle that need stop lights to navigate)

• It is not a coincidence that brightly coloured, sugar-laden cereals with the new kiddie-cartoon craze is on the shelf at knee level – it’s in the perfect line of sight for a six-year-old kid.

• The point of those bite-sized food samples is not only to get you to buy a particular product. It’s to trick your body into thinking it’s hungry. And we all know what happens when we shop hungry!!

These are really interesting points to consider when you are navigating your grocery store. Be aware of these subconscious tricks to get us to buy more, eat more, spend more and consume more and be sure you are only buying what you set out to buy! (Stay in the produce section as much as possible!)

With Sources From:

http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/how-to/article/supermarket-psychology

Do You Want to Kill Your Stress Once and For All? Do This.

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Kill Stress Once and For All

Stress has become an epidemic in our society. When someone asks “How are you?” the majority of people now answer “stressed”.

This is now a normal, accepted answer to which the reply is a nod in understanding, “Yes, me too.” It’s like we’re keeping up with the Jones’ to see who can be busier and more stressed out.

This has got to stop!!!!

There are obviously major reasons why we would feel stress, and this is our body’s way to kick on our adrenaline processes and potentially our fight or flight so that we can get through a trauma, injury, major life change or passing of a loved one.

But the daily stresses that are climbing and adding up need to be seriously revised.

The first problem is not having enough time to get everything done that life demands. The answer is that you need to ask for help.

Your children can be a great source of your home stress, so ask them to help you. Depending on their ages, give them special tasks to complete to help out around the house.

There is no reason your teenagers should hit the couch when they get home from school. They can help to start dinner, get their lunches ready for the next day and help to care for their siblings.

This is not taking away their freedom and childhood, it is giving them life skills and responsibilities that I promise, they will thank you for in the future. (What student wants to get to college or university, away from home for the first time and have absolutely no idea how to feed themselves? Let’s give them a chance!)

The most important thing you can do is to live in the present moment.

Right here in this moment (the only moment we actually have) there is no stress. We are consciously present. We are just working on this one task. There is no worrying about getting it done in time, ohh I only have 2 more hours, etc. because that is not living in the present moment. The stress arrives when we think about the future and think about how something will affect us when it arrives. But if we try to stay just in the moment we have, your stress will diminish drastically.

The other important thing you need to do is to detach from outcomes.

Put no weight or importance on the outcome of any event. This is again, living in the present moment. For many things, we literally have no control over many situations and worrying about them can make us crazy. The outcome will unfold over time and we will deal with whatever happens at the time. Because we will be practicing being present in each moment and taking things minute by minute.

We must begin to consciously decide how our lives want to look and feel.

I’m sure that you are in agreement with me, we’ve all experienced enough stress for the rest of our lives just in the past few years. It’s time to let go of the panic of worrying about the future and fretting about the past and choose, decide today, to make every moment one of joy and contentment.

It’s so much nicer to live in a mindset that you actively choose, rather than to be sucked into the societal pressure of being stressed all the time. Your health will be so much better, and your personal and family life will be much happier. Share this new mindset with your family and friends to help them reduce their stress. Obviously it takes some time to train your mind to stay present but over time it will get easier and you will have a much more serene life.

I’m Single. Why Does Valentine’s Day Matter?

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Valentine's Day

It doesn’t matter if you are attached or single on Valentine’s Day! The message that should be portrayed goes much deeper than getting chocolates from a secret admirer.

Sadly, the confectionary and stationery companies have gotten ahold of this once-sacred holiday and turned it into another opportunity for consumption.

If you are able to look past spending money on teddy bears, chocolates, flowers and lace, you will begin to see that there is a beautiful side to the now-commercialized holiday.

The message that shines through from the deeper side of this holiday is the importance of taking a moment to appreciate love, the wonderful people in our lives and to take a minute to shower each other with gratitude.

In present day, that gratitude can equate to purchases, but at the roots of the holiday, the message is love and appreciation.

However, the most important aspect of the love and appreciation we share on this day can sometimes be forgotten.

Self Love!!

What are you doing today to celebrate your SELF?? Your incredible value, your consciousness, your health and your life? Often, it’s too easy to forget about our selves and care for everyone else, showering them with all of our love, kindness, support and help, and we forget to leave some for ourselves!!

It is very difficult to fill someone else’s cup if yours is empty.

This week, in honour of Saint Valentine, spend some time with yourself, working on your self care, and noticing how you feel.

Spend time doing things that you love to do, take a time out and close the door. Remember back to less stressful times, or maybe when you actually had TIME! and think of things you used to love to do. If you have a hobby that you haven’t picked up in awhile, return to it and experience the joy of doing things you want to do, rather than things you have to do!

Maybe your self care is making time to have a luxurious bath without your children banging the door down. Ask for support when you need it – and have someone help you out so that you can take a bit of time for yourself.

Or maybe you love yoga and rarely get the chance to go to a class. If you have responsibilities at home that make it difficult to go to a class, bring one to you!! There are many amazing yoga classes on YouTube that you can do right at home. Look for an online teacher that is at your speed and make time to enjoy this practice. Get lost in your breath and breathe joy and love back into your life.

Whatever you choose to do to create space for some self care, it’s also important to focus on self love. Develop a mantra that you can say to yourself every day that makes you feel important, appreciated, beautiful, loved, healthy and supported. It is so important to develop a deep love for yourself and treat yourself how you treat your best friend – with kind, supportive words and overflowing love and kindness.

Sitting Too Much is the New Smoking

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sitting

The amount of sitting that we do in a day has quickly become a concern for our health and longevity.  Studies reveal that the health impact of sitting for too many hours a day can be compared to the effects that smoking has on our health.

A sedentary lifestyle has been linked to;
  • Cancer
  • Diabetes
  • Obesity
  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Weakened immune system.

Let’s explore some ways to ensure that you don’t fall symptom to these diseases.

Shocking!  How Many Hours Of Sitting We Do In A Day

There is the time in the car on the way to and from work.  The 8 hours at the office.  All in addition to spending time each night on the couch in front of the television, computer or on your phone.

The winter months in Canada can be particularly difficult to get motivated to work out or to be more active.  But there are some simple things that you can add to your daily routine to increase your activity level without having to brave the elements of winter.

Set A Goal To Be Active 10 Minutes Each Hour That You Are Awake!

If you wake up at 6 am and go to bed at 10 pm, then you have 160 minutes to fill with activity.  Don’t panic.  Activity doesn’t mean that you have to be actively exercising.

Activity could be as simple as;
  • Standing at your desk while you make phone calls
  • Tidying your house
  • Preparing dinner
  • Walking to the car (I suggest parking at the far end of the parking lot at work and the grocery store to increase your activity) 
  • Taking a walk on your lunch break
  • Taking a yoga or pilates class, or any other form of exercise that you enjoy

Click here to read, “10 Desk Exercises You Should Be Doing Every Day”.

If you are pressed for time to fit in exercise, try multitasking.

When you drop the kids off at their extracurricular activities, rather than sitting and waiting for them to be finished, use this time to do an impromptu workout.  Walk around the block or if the weather isn’t nice, go to a nearby shopping centre and do a quick lap around the store.

If you are prone to watching a lot of television during the winter, then during the commercial breaks, get up and do a small work out.

Do three reps of 15 squats, lunges, push-ups, sit-ups, or go through a quick yoga flow of stretches.

Get a fitness tracker and aim to hit around 10,000 steps per day.

Especially if you are the type of person that needs to visually see your progress throughout the day.

The benefits of an active lifestyle are far reaching and include;
  • Higher energy levels
  • More restful sleep
  • Lower body mass index
  • Detoxification
  • Better mental clarity

By bringing awareness to our level of activity we can easily make adjustments to our lifestyle.  All this to ensure that we are taking care good of our health and maximizing our longevity.

With Sources From:

http://www.nchpad.org/403/2216/Sedentary~Lifestyle~is~Dangerous~to~Your~Health