Deirdre Walsh – Integrative Health Coach

One of my favorite local yoga teachers is Gina Faubert at Serenity Valley in Milton.  It’s a bit of a hike for me, but well worth the trip to the country.  She’s named her studio well as there’s a sense of peace just by pulling into the driveway.  She’s a treasure of information about the body and its physiology, but her real brilliance lies in her suggestions to approach your yoga practice.  As I hold the poses and listen to her encouragements, I often think how useful they are to life outside the studio.  Two encouragements that have travelled with me beyond the studio are “relaxation through action” and “fill the pose, and hold it actively with strength”.

Relaxation through action

Is it possible that moving into action doesn’t require meticulous planning, effort and sweat?  I don’t have to marshal my forces, work on my list, and climb up that mountain of tasks?  Clearly, I don’t have a graceful, flowing ability to get things done.  So it’s a real shift in perspective for me to consider that taking action can be a way of getting relaxed. 

On the mat it’s so easy to see where the extra effort I use to push into a pose is wasted and painful. As is the pointlessness of the internal chatter about how hard it’s going to be and how others find it easier, blah, blah, blah.  In my daily life, it’s not always so clear.  Sure, the pain is acute when I’m procrastinating on something important that will take focus and vulnerability.   Finally getting into action is such a sweet relief.  But do I remember how relaxing it is to get into the flow?  Not often enough.

Fill the pose, and hold it actively with strength

This thought gets me through many a wavering moment.  With this encouragement, Gina asks us to engage fully in a difficult moment with all the energy and strength we can muster.  As opposed to the half-hearted, floppy, droopy attempt that sometimes passes as my warrior pose.  To me, filling out the pose translates daily into fully stepping into the difficult tasks or conversations and holding firm while staying open.  It’s dealing with the discomfort in kind of a badass way.  Instead of contracting from the discomfort, it’s a way of standing tall and saying bring it on.

This week my coach, Tara Mohr, was in town and I had the chance to see her at two different events.  Brilliant woman herself, she’s written the 10 Rules for Brilliant Women – a guide to standing with strength and authenticity as you add your voice to the world.  I love her take on filling the pose, with the rule “Be an arrogant idiot.”  She’s not really counselling that we become that annoyingly confident self-promoter who’s so enamoured with their own unformed ideas that they convince the world of their (faux) brilliance.  But she’s suggesting that we adopt their unwavering belief in their abilities and take a few steps in that direction. 

Stress is like the water we swim in.  Modern life is full of hassles, deadlines, frustrations, and demands. For many of us, stress is so commonplace that it has become a way of life. In small doses, it can help us perform under pressure and motivate us to do our best. But when we’re constantly running in emergency mode, our mind and body pay the price. Read the rest of this entry →

If I was standing in my childrens’ shoes and thinking about what excited me enough to devote years of study to, it would be neuroscience.  I am fascinated by the workings of the mind and the brain and how they affect so much of our experience of life. More often than not the books stacking up in my reading pile are about the wild reaches in the mind-body connection.

A decade ago the prevailing belief was that our brain was fixed as we left childhood, or perhaps adolescence.  Any of our experiences later in life left little trace in our brain, beyond minor alterations in neural connections or cell death.  But the new thinking is that the brain continually changes as a result of our experiences—whether through fresh connections between neurons or through the generation of utterly new neurons.  Read the rest of this entry →

When we visited Los Angeles over March break I had one of my most favorite meals (well top 25, anyways) at a cafeteria style restaurant called Forage.  The lunch was delicious, no doubt.  But the thing that really caught my attention was their commitment to locally grown produce.  Not just from farms nearby, but from local neighbours. Once a week they’ll buy produce grown by gardeners in the neighbourhood and create their week’s menu around it.  How cool is that? Read the rest of this entry →

Most of the time when we feel blocked it is because we are safer that way. We may not be happy, but at least we know what we are – unhappy. ~ Julia Cameron

Whenever I meet someone who is interested in growth and unlocking the potential for themselves and others they inevitably mention reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It seems like her book is on the required reading list for squeezing more juice out of life. Julia’s approach is to start by creating a zone of safety that allows the space to experiment with the new. That means getting to know those internal voices that can stop us dead or lead us to new worlds – our inner critic and our inner champion. Read the rest of this entry →

For some reason Mother Nature has been particularly indulgent of us this year.  The sun is our companion almost daily and at every window is a burst of green never seen before in March.  The arrival of spring brings out my giddy excitement about changing our weekly menu.  I pull out all the cookbooks and dream of all the delicious meals with all the new bounty. There’s something life-affirming about putting away the stews, squashes, brown rice and roasted vegetables.  Not to mention visually appealing. Good bye, brown.  Hello, emerald! Read the rest of this entry →

People come to coaching because they want to initiate action in their lives and see results.  Each person will define action in a different way – it could be integrating new health practices or changing the “feel” of their life. Read the rest of this entry →

Here’s an idea that usually makes people start eyeing the exit – how you tolerate discomfort is probably the biggest block between you and what you want out of life. I’m talking about that moment of discomfort when you can get on with the hard creative thing, or you can [insert personal choice of mindless soothing activity].  I know I go for checking my emails far more than I’m happy with. Read the rest of this entry →

Food allergies, food intolerances and food sensitivities – all terms that are getting more play in the holistic nutrition and naturopath communities. They are said to play a role in chronic conditions. But where we notice them most is the way they disrupt our digestion and dampen our energy.  They can cause a low level stress response in our body, wearing us down in subtle ways.  But how do they differ? Read the rest of this entry →

I’m always admiring and a little bit envious when I meet people who have accomplished transformations in their lives.  Admiring because I love to see the results when someone applies their spirit, determination and belief in themselves for a great purpose. Envious because they’re on the other side of all the hard work that goes into one of those transformations. They already pulled themselves from the inertia of the routine. They’ve ignored that internal voice telling them that they’ve had better ideas. And they did it day after day after day. Read the rest of this entry →