Exercise Archives - Nirvana Diet

So how do you ‘grow’ creative ability and lose your appetite for the things that do not serve you in life?

So we are born creative, to be creative and then we seem to lose it. To grow and reconnect with the creative spark within you must be willing to make mistakes, and laugh at yourself. Einstein’s quote is relevant here: “A person who has never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

Creativity can be re-cultivated. Creativity comes from using the “whole brain” that is left and right working together. Believe it or not meditation has been shown to increase creativity helping to connect left and right brain. Meditation and creativity go together and both can become your daily practice. To begin your daily practice check out the meditation made easy program I developed. You can also look at Julia Cameron’s groundbreaking book on creativity The Artist’s Way. Growing creativity is like exercising you have to do it everyday as a daily practice.

Something happens in school that shuts that down, favors and rewards left brain thinking. I remember with my own children growing up and how different it was moving from kindergarten to first grade. My daughter came home from school one day very upset complaining how the first grade and school was not fun anymore. There was the big push to learn how to read and from then on creativity was not honored but marginalized. I also think it has a lot to do with playing… children spend so much of their lives playing. If you can bring more play into your life you may find yourself more focused to achieve your lifestyle goals whether it be to lose weight or find your passion.

Ultimately creativity involves the capacity to see relationships between things that are not related and to “think out of the box.” The problem is if one lives in a box, how does one think outside it? I also think creativity comes from the muses. It is about inklings, flashes of ideas that just pop into one’s head that may not even be one’s own.

Creativity is also about change and transformation. It is the process of bringing something new into being and making something of it. Does that sound familiar? Isn’t that how we change a habit? To that I would also like to add Amit Goswami’s definition: “creativity is the discontinuous exploration of new meaning in new and old contexts(s) of value. Looking for the link between creativity, change and values is a creative act.

What do you want to create? When you give some focus and attention to this drive, you may see that eating healthier food and exercising daily comes more naturally to you and watching TV are no longer interesting. Ultimately tending to our creative side makes us more stress hardy as well.

Tell me how some ways you can begin to activate and tend to your creative side.

Goswami, A. (1999). Quantum creativity. Creskill, NY: Hampton Press.

We all know that exercise is one of the single best things you can do to lose weight, stay at a healthy weight, boost your mood, reduce stress and even sleep better. Exercise is also the best preventive medicine to ward off the life- style induced diseases that are now treated with prescription drugs…high blood pressure, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome and adult onset diabetes. This list goes on and on as to how beneficial exercise is to be healthy happy. Why do so many people resist exercise?

The first reason is that when you get out of shape, overweight, or have not exercised in a while it does not feel good when you exercise. So people resist it. The key is never to let yourself go, never to let more than two days go by without at least going for a walk.

Once people are out of shape, they tend to overdo getting back into shape and this creates negative stored memories or associations with exercise. This is also the key of how you get back in. Build positive stored memories and let that work for you and not against you. This can be done using visualization and while lying in bed.

Athletes use visualization to rehearse their movements. Research has proven that the brain doesn’t make different between an imagined event and a real one, providing that you are able to visualize things with clarity and intensity. What you have imagined or visualized in your mind can have the same value as a real experience. This why you can mentally train for any ability and even for physical changes in the body, it was demonstrated by studies at the Manchester University that people were able to have muscles growth during one week of sessions of hypnosis, during hypnosis sessions the group were asked to visualize themselves having bigger muscles.

For sports performance enhancement, an athlete will use visualization to correct his weaknesses, improve his game and increase his motivation. Dr. Murray who wrote “The Essence of Imagery in Tennis says “Imagery, also called visualization, is described as a mental technique that programs the human mind to respond as programmed, by using all the senses to recreate or create an experience. Imagery has also been described as one of four categories of cognitive skills important in athletic performance.”

So here’s how to start getting motivated to exercise. Wake up each morning and before you get out of bed imagine yourself doing some form of exercise you have chosen that you will enjoy. Focus on the immediate payoffs of not only how you will feel after exercising, but all the benefits you will receive as a result of incorporating exercise into you life on a daily basis. That is the key… doing some form of exercise every day.

To get started I recommend walking. You can download my E-Book The Key to Successful Weight Loss for a great plan to start walking every. Once you start doing it I guarantee you will feel so much better you will want to continue. The visualizations will make it easier and have been proven to have a physical effect on the body. Why not give it a try and let me know what you think? You can also download my MP3 hypnosis on motivation for exercise. Here’s to your health and well-being.

Feeding your creativity. What are you really hungry for?

Motivation tips for exercise