Every few months I like to take a personal inventory of how I am doing in varies areas of my life.  Heavy stuff,  I know.  But several years ago I was given a simple tool to make this journey easier… the wheel.  Whenever you go on a road trip of any kind, it’s always best to have your wheels in tip top shape.  The same is true when we look at the big picture of our realistic current state, ideal current state, and long term goals.

How does this wheel work?  The wheel provides opportunity to define eight major areas of our lives, including: money, health, relationships, spirituality, creativity and hobbies, our environment, parenting, and school. To the left is an example of one of these wheels. We can define our eight major areas beyond the basics of financial, health, and alone time.

One visual way to gauge how you are doing at maintaining a balanced wheel is to draw spokes onto your wheel. Begin at the center, draw a spoke out toward the edge in each section. The more time you put toward developing that specific area, the closer to the edge you will draw. If it helps, you can think of it as rating each section on a scale from 1-5 (5 being the edge of the wheel). Ideally, all areas would be somewhat equal. It’s always interesting to identify the areas we put more energy towards and those we neglect.

If there is an imbalance in your wheel, I would love to develop a clearer picture of how to develop some of your “lower” spokes. I’ll be writing two posts in September and two additional ones in October as we bring in the often stressful holiday season (I can’t believe another holiday season is almost here!), so keep your eye out for those articles with tips and ideas of how to increase and combine our “spokes” to get back on track with our lives and goals!

The following explanation of meditation and how to perform a five minute mediation was taken from Alexandro Junger’s book on nutritional cleansing, “Clean.”

Sit up in a chair with you back straight. Place your feet under you knees. Rest the palms of your hands on your thighs and relax you arms. Look straight ahead but try not to focus anywhere in particular, instead, notice everything in the room at once. Take a deep breath and start feeling your feet. Feel them touching the floor or the inside of your shoe. Feel the temperature, the humidity; feel the texture of your socks. Feel your feet intensely from inside. Do not “think” about them, just feel them, sense them.

After a few breaths, move your attention to your calves and legs. Feel and sense these in the same way for several breaths. Then move your attention from body part to the body part, first to you thighs, then you bottom against the chair, then to you abdomen and lower back, you chest lastly your head. Then let your awareness cover you whole body at the same time. The idea is to “scan” your body with your attention, stopping for a few breaths on each part. This practice will strengthen your ability to intentionally direct you attention and hold it in place.

You may notice that the moment that you sit down, you start remembering things and feel the urge to act on them. This is part of the process. When those thoughts come and try to steal you attention away from your body, simply say silently to yourself, “Thank you for sharing” and direct your attention back to your body. If you feel discomfort or frustration and want to stop, just keep sitting calmly. Know that the discomfort you feel is not caused by the exercise itself. It’s what happens when you become aware of you baseline state, that underlying anxiety of which you are typically not aware when the outside world is at full volume and you attention is far from you body. Becoming aware of this underlying state is the first step toward dissolving it, and claiming back the energy it consumes.

When you find yourself consumed in thinking, if for a second you can separate your attention from your thoughts, ask yourself, “Who is deciding that these thoughts appear? If I had a choice, would I be thinking the?” If your answer is no, and you understand that these thoughts just “popped” into your mind, grabbing and consuming your attention to the point of taking you away from where you are and whom you are with, say to your thoughts, “Thank you for sharing!” and immediately direct your attention to go somewhere in the present. For example, you can put your attention you feet this time. Again, this does not mean “think” about your feet, but “feel” them. This small “shock” of awareness erodes the habitual pathways of attention that lead away from the present and into the distracted thoughts. Do it randomly and as often as you can.

This technique can be also be used in the middle of any stressful situation in which you are not alone, like a business meeting or a job interview. Nervousness comes from the unconscious thinking process of interpreting, judging, measuring, and expecting. this process takes attention. By directing you attention into your body or breath,, you reclaim this unwanted use of attention and eliminate the effects it causes. It may be hard to remember to do this in difficult situations. Start with easy ones. Then try to do it in harder and harder ones. My personal experience is that if I have the presence of mind for a split second to remember and start doing it, immediately the energy of the situation shift, usually for the better. When you become more present, the others in the room feel it as well. They may not be aware of exactly why, but they feel a sense of relief. More trust and more respect is the consequence. And the business meeting has a better chance of going well.

In this video we look at some of the treatment of migraines that we offer at Compass Chiropractic. At the end of the video we hear from a long time migraine sufferer who received relief from care at our office.

For more information about headache treatments at our office, visit our Headache Page

This patient suffered from constant migraines since she was 13 years old. At the time of this video, she has been a patient for four months and coming into the office on a once a month basis to keep her migraines from returning. We used chiropractic, traction, exercises and nutritional therapy to help this patient.