Author: Bright Star Woman (Page 33 of 39)

Bright Star Woman is an energy coach who helps people reconcile their four energy bodies to create meaningful lives through greater awareness, overall health, and intentional choices.

Mercedes is a spiritual writer and an Usui & Blue Star reiki master, who believes that seeing yourSelf for who you are; a bright being of light will inevitably change your life.

Defusing Overwhelm

November 25, 2015 / Bright Star Woman

We’ve all been there. There’s too much on our plates, we can’t keep up, we feel exhausted and weekends just don’t do the trick anymore – they’re packed with errands, anyway.

Life has no Pause button. But guess what? Life doesn’t need to run on Fast Forward either.

We’re allowed to slow the heck down. We can choose which days we let unfold and which ones we run with, and it becomes a dance. Sometimes, we just need to bust some stress.

Overwhelm is a lot like stress in that it lives in the space between our expectations and our reality. Overwhelm is the result of feeling incapable of dealing with a situation in its perceived form (key detail here!). We perceive a “need” to do/react/solve/accomplish in a time frame that seems improbable, without the tools we think we need. In most cases though, our reality is very different from what we perceive and assume about a situation.

The good news is you can shift your perspective in order to ease your mind and soothe your heart and body.

5 Steps to Defuse Overwhelm

1-Acknowledge the Feeling

Denying what’s going on in your body, your mind or heart will not do you any favours. It’s only going to keep you disconnected from your body and fester to blow up into something worse later. Acknowledge that you are feeling overwhelmed and notice what your triggers are.

2-Assess – Your Feelings vs Reality

Ask yourself if your feelings are proportional to the situation. Sometimes, putting things in perspective is enough to defuse the overwhelm. In doing so, we can start thinking clearly about the situation again – without the emotional charge. If not, then ask yourself what about your situation requires your attention and why. In other words, beyond your triggers, what’s really going on and what would happen if you didn’t react to this? ASK the people involved to clarify facts you may have assumed. If you need to respond, what is the absolute need and when can you allow yourself to withdraw?

3-Give Yourself Permission to Take a Break

Do you really need to fold another basket of laundry TONIGHT? Do you need to stay up late to finish a report, or could you just take a book to bed and catch an early night? The reality of it is, we set all these expectations for how we think we should live, perform, care, clean, organize… And we end up should-ing all over ourselves. I’ve struggled with this a LONG time! I still occasionally catch myself and think “It’s ok, enjoy that bath… Put down the laptop and read the last chapter of your book, you know you want to!”. It’s absolutely normal to not feel/act/think at our best all the time. We’re allowed to take breaks…and we need them!

4-Communicate + Ask for Help

As much as we think we know everything with the digital age, people aren’t yet mind readers. It’s ok to tell the people involved (or at least your loved ones) how you’re feeling about a situation. It’s not about blaming or passing the buck; it’s about being honest with yourself and those you love. No (wo)man is an island, so be brave and ask for help, even if it’s a small thing. Bosses can understand negotiating deadlines. Children can understand waiting an hour for help with their homework. Don’t assume people know what’s going on with you and don’t assume you know their ability to help (or take a load off your plate).

Here Are 3 Signs You Need To Ask For Help.

5-Give Yourself Care

If you accidentally cut yourself or get even just a paper cut, you tend to it, right? You rinse it in cold water and either rub balm if it’s small, or get stitches if it’s deep. Overwhelm is a form of emotional injury – it can be small or great, but you probably still want to tend to it! Mental and emotional health are as important as physical health…because they’re all connected! Ask yourself what you need to feel better and give yourself that care. Others will also show more respect for your needs when they see that you set care standards for yourself…but that’s just gravy!

How do you deal with overwhelm and regain peace?

Making Kombucha – 5 Benefits

November 18, 2015 / Bright Star Woman

Yes, I’ve joined the kombucha craze. Why? Well, because I like the taste and it’s a healthier alternative than pop (soda). Actually, kombucha being fermented tea, it is rich in probiotics and aids in digestion.

So not only does it taste yummy, it helps your tummy. (I know! I’m totally corny.) Since I made the jump to self-employment, I’ve made a conscious choice to reconnect with food. I’ve also made a choice to learn for pleasure.

What I was less excited about was paying $6-10 a bottle to get my kombucha fix. When I started looking at “starter kits” online, they were all pretty pricey (ranging $40-150)…for a tea base, a kombucha base and a scoby (or Mother) mushroom. My partner suggested I look on kijiji. Lucky for me, I found someone local who was selling the kombucha base, including the scoby, for a few bucks and she emailed the recipe too. All I had to do was make the tea, cool it and follow the recipe.

Learning the process of fermentation of tea is like doing a fun experiment at home! I also get to taste it at different stages and have great tasting kombucha (just the way I like it) for a few dollars and a little patience.

The 5 Benefits of Making Your Own Kombucha

1-It’s so much cheaper

I don’t know about you, but when I love to eat or drink something, I don’t like to break the bank to enjoy it. Often, that means learning to make it yourself or buying in bulk.

Two jugs of roughly 4 L cost me the initial $10 bases and 50 g of organic sencha green tea (roughly $12). That’s a lot of kombucha bottles! Let’s say it works out to about 10 bottles for my first batch and I recycled bottles I’d bought at $4-6 each, I managed to yield 10 bottles from my 2 jugs and that means they cost me approximately $2 each.

Jars of tea and kombucha, with scoby and starter.

The big kombucha adventure begins

2-You can make it how you like it (and reduce the sugar!)

I have a fondness for ginger-flavoured drinks. I especially like ginger kombucha. I also know that you can make pretty tasty fruit-flavoured kombucha. A lot of commercial kombucha is sickeningly sweet; you can choose to add less sugar. You can experiment at low cost (and great excitement!) with what flavours you like and maybe even create a kind not yet sold. That’s the beauty of being creative!

3-It teaches you patience

Kombucha takes several days, even weeks, to properly ferment and acquire the right zing and effervescence. Many blogs says it takes between 7-30 days, depending on your taste preference. In short, the least it ferments, the sweeter it is, the more it ferments, the more tart it becomes. The culture feeds on the sugar you mix in at the beginning. So the longer it feeds, the less sugar there is left for you to taste.

4-There is less waste and more connection to food

When you purchase packaged food, whatever it is, there is waste, even when we recycle. It’s often a good idea to make what you can at home as your bit for the environment (don’t obsess about it, but know that what you do do, is a great step!).

The process of making food increases our connection to it. I read that when we prepare our own food, we have an easier time digesting it. That makes a lot of sense to me! As a reiki master, I also know that we impart our intentions to the food we prepare.

5-It can be an active meditation

The act of preparing kombucha is not complex, but it involves certain steps in a certain order. Preparing kombucha mindfully, and “infusing” it with loving intentions can give a sense of presence, empowerment and it can yield wonderfully tasting tea. It’s an easy and practical meditation.

My jars of kombucha!

What’s your favourite flavour of kombucha? Tell me about something you learned to make that taught you more about yourself in the process?