We are what we Eat, Drink, Think and Do

The importance of eating and drinking healthy is fairly well understood by most of us. It’s the thinking and doing that often gets overlooked. Diet, supplementation, and regular detoxing are important aspects to keeping your body alkaline, healthy, and resilient. Additionally, both mental and emotional health, and general fitness or activity level, significantly impact long-term health, vitality, and resilience.

“Mindfulness meditation,” often recommended as an antidote to the stress and pain of chronic disease, is a practice designed to focus one’s attention intensely on the moment, noting thoughts and feelings as they occur but refraining from judging or acting on those thoughts and feelings. The intent is to deepen awareness of the present, develop skills of focused attention, and cultivate positive emotions such as compassion. According to author Britta Hazel, of Justus Liebig University and Harvard Medical School, the goal of their work was to “unveil the conceptual and mechanistic complexity of mindfulness, providing the big picture by arranging many findings like the pieces of a mosaic.”

With some initial training and guidance and as a part of a daily program, mindfulness can have multiple benefits for health and performance, including improved immune function, reduced blood pressure and enhanced cognitive function.

As one attains a state of concentration, it is due to the four key components of “mindfulness” – the state of meditation – that come together and relieve stress: attention regulationbody awareness, emotion regulation, and sense of self. Understanding the relationships between these components, and the brain mechanisms that underlie them, allows clinicians to better tailor mindfulness interventions for their patients.

We believe the mind and body need to function as a whole, and stress-busting lifestyle practices including meditation form an integral part of the Alkaline Way of living.

Britta K. Hölzel, Sara W. Lazar, Tim Gard, Zev Schuman-Olivier, David R. Vago,Ulrich Ott

How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective Perspectives on Psychological Science, November 2011; vol. 6, 6: pp. 537-559.

Britta K. HölzelJames Carmody,Mark VangelChristina Congletonetal.,Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Res. 2011 Jan 30; 191(1): 36–43.