meditation

Somewhere about the age of 2, I remember sitting on the front grass with my mom in front of our duplex Cumberland Road. It was a sunny day. I had my toes in the grass.

I noticed a different plant growing in the grass and touched it. It was prickly. I tried pulling it, but it was steadfast in the ground. My mom helped me dig it out. What came out astonished me. A bright red-purple ball with a tail.

Of course, like any toddler would, I examined it… in my mouth. What came next was a taste I will never forget.

I don’t particularly like #radishes, but I do eat them occasionally for the bitter variety. That memory remains strong as a moment when it was just me and my mom.

As I recently shared, salt can have some pretty catastrophic impacts on the brain. Tau is an essential protein for helping form axonal neurotubules. Too much dietary salt leads to neurodegenerative effects from a build up of tau plaques. Increasing nitric oxide may reverse this.

When we add taste variety, we help shake things up, even build new networks, and strengthen #neuroplasticity.

We’ll be increasing our #nitricoxide through a breath work practice in the upcoming #meditationchallenge. But a big reason it’s a radical #self-love practice is because of how we will use mantra to shut down our inner critic.

Research shows we need 3 times as many positive statements to counteract our negative inner critic. @kotler.steven in his whirlwind flow trip audio book, — Mapping Cloud Nine: Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience— suggests 10 is better and to really feel into those 10 (like in a solid daily #gratitude practice). These kinds of practices are based in neuro-technological sciences developed by yogis and gurus like Guru #Nanak Dev Ji, celebrating 550 years this month. His monumental work is the Japji Sahib, a sacred chant of Sikhis said to instill illumination.

In #meditation using #mantra (repetitive statements, chanting) and mudras (a special hand posture) we can create transient hypofrontality (temporarily slowing down our prefrontal cortex). Quieting the inner critic sets us up for great #flowstate hygiene rituals. Join us! www.ixchel.love