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Creating a Home Gym
Three factors keep many Americans from joining a gym: they’re crunched for time, cash strapped, or self-conscious about working out in front of others. One solution is setting up a home gym.
But where do you start? And does that old, rusty dumbbell tucked away in your closet constitute a home gym?
Because one person’s definition of a home gym differs from another’s, let’s consider several approaches to establishing your own personal workout paradise.
Dance of Energy
Light streams through the window. In that ray of light, the dust in the air, ordinarily invisible, dances. There is a dance going on around us constantly—a dance of energy. The leaves on the trees dance in the wind. Our thoughts dance in our mind.
Imagine for a moment that nothing in this world is solid. It is all a big field of dancing golden particles of light, like the dust in the sunlight. You are surrounded by energy in motion even as you think you walk on solid ground.
Moving Through Life Toward Health
We’re busier than ever with longer workdays, less leisure time, shorter lunch hours, longer commutes, and more demands than ever before. We may even be in a job that doesn’t fulfill us, yet we spend most of our time there. When the day ends, we have almost no energy left to do what we enjoy. We live in a society that gives us ongoing mixed messages: one message has us aggressively achieving success, another collapsing in front of a TV or computer screen for “relaxation,” and another working out to achieve a perfect body.
Resisting Peer Pressure
When Friends Aren’t Friends
When Rachel lost more than 150 pounds on her diet, she thought her husband would be ecstatic. At 46, she felt better physically, gained confidence, and enjoyed her slimmer size-12 figure. Imagine her surprise and dismay when her husband rewarded her progress at Christmas with a four-pound box of chocolates and a size 4X blouse. She divorced him.
Teach Your Body Some New Moves
Humans are creatures of habit, and one of our most enduring habits is the way in which we move our bodies throughout the day. Generally, we move without even thinking about it. This can be a good thing, in that we don’t have to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. But moving mindlessly, without conscious body awareness, also allows us to perpetuate dysfunctional movement patterns that can negatively influence our health and well-being.
Unfolding Ourselves
Becoming Who We Are Meant to Be
All life is movement. We experience movement in our lives in three ways: as expansion, contraction, and integration.
Expansion in our lives expresses itself as moving to a new city, starting a new job, or meeting new people. We are opening ourselves to change, to something new. We are risking getting out of our comfort zone.
Contraction is experienced in how we feel after a busy week, after reading a good book, writing a report, or completing a course or training. Contraction comes from having gone through an expansion and completing that cycle.
Get Back in Balance with Hellerwork
Structural Issues Can Be at the Root of Imbalance and Back Pain
If you’re like most people, you are looking for ways to bring more balance into your life. When we think about creating a balanced life, we might start by cutting down on work, enjoying more pleasurable activities, and spending quality time with family and friends. These are all wonderful things, but they may be ignoring the obvious if your body is struggling to find its own balance, too.
Sugi Yoga
Being Comfortable Through Movement
Sometimes the simplest things are the most complicated. Like trying to make sense of the “like begets like” philosophy behind homeopathy, or knowing that you really need to do better about relaxing and de-stressing at day’s end.
When it comes to simple, the concept of being comfortable is right up there, or so we would assume. But noting statistics on the numbers of stress-related illnesses, work-related injuries, and growing use of pain medications, being comfortable is obviously a lot more difficult than we might think.
"Jangled" Adults
Touch and the Stress Response System
Soothing touch, whether it be applied to a ruffled cat, a crying infant, or a frightened child, has a universally recognized power to ameliorate the signs of distress. How can it be that we overlook its usefulness on the jangled adult as well? What is it that leads us to assume that the stressed child merely needs “comforting,” while the stressed adult needs “medicine”?
— from Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork by Deane Juhan