Blog Archives - Joanne Sumner

Effects of stimulants and depressants on your sleep

8th July 2019/in Emotional Energy /by Silvia Pink

Today I’d like to continue our tips on sleep here talking about the effects of stimulants, depressants and mindfulness on it.

The most popular stimulant we use is caffeine.

I know that when you’ve had a really poor night’s sleep it can be incredibly tempting to use caffeine to keep you gain during the day. I really want to recommend that you resist that temptation.

Caffeine actually has an impact on the body in more ways than you might realise, in particular on your blood sugar.

What happens with caffeine is that you end up causing a repetitive cycle of blood sugar crashing. Then, your blood sugar crashing makes you crave sugary foods, starchy foods and more coffee. You go back up the cycle, you feel good for an hour or so, then you’ll have another crash. In order to cope with that crash, you crave the sugary foods, the starchy foods and some more coffee and then you’re okay again. It keeps repeating all day long. That actually has a really tiring effect on the body over time and it can do is help people add on some weight that they don’t want.

So if that’s an issue for you, just have a look at your caffeine.

I’ve spoken to numerous nutritional therapists over the years and on the whole, people will say one or two cups of coffee in a day is not going to do you a terrible amount of damage. But actually, if you’re really struggling with sleep, you need to make sure that you have absolutely no caffeine after lunchtime. If you’d like to reduce your caffeine intake, make it gradually and do not stop suddenly, in order to prevent potential side effects.

In my previous post on How to sleep well – 3 Yoga tips for adult bedtime routine, I mentioned other stimulants when I suggested not using your screens in the last hour of the day.

The second thing I would like to focus on today is depressants.

You may not realize that alcohol is a depressant: it gives you a little bit of stimulation at the beginning, but then its impact on your sleep cycle is depressive and you can’t stay asleep.

You might have had that experience where alcohol can help you go to sleep, but, then, you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and it’s hard to get back to sleep: you have that sort of restless during the second half of the night. So, with alcohol, it’s really important that if you’re going to drink, you actually need to be drinking much earlier in the evening and believe it or no 6:00! Let’s say you’re going to bed at 10-11 pm, then you would need to be having your alcohol at about 6 pm.

It’s going to be easier on your body if you actually stop having alcohol some nights of the week if you are in the habit of having alcohol every night of the week.

I always recommend to just take things down one step at a time. So, if you’re in the habit of drinking every night of the week, maybe take that down to every other night.

So, we need to reduce alcohol and we need to have it earlier in the day.

The final thing I’d like to introduce today is mindfulness.

Having a poor night’s sleep can throw up so many emotional sorts of questions and worries. There may be things that stress you out partly just because of the tiredness, part because of feeling rattled and not feeling in a routine. Often, we try to medicate ourselves through the use of stimulants or depressive.

Mindfulness works on being able to tolerate whatever emotions are present right now on the understanding that emotions change.

You’re not going to continue to feel whatever it is that you feel right now. If you can just tolerate it, knowing it’s going to change, then that gives you a bit more freedom from needing to use stimulants or depressants.

I’ll focus a little bit more about in my next article. In particular, I will explain more about mindfulness and actually particular hand gestures that work with the meridians. These are the energy channels in your body that help you manage your emotions and allow yourself to sleep from that point of view.

Check my private Yoga sessions and my Yoga classes in Ealing, West London, and if you have any questions please contact me here.

How to sleep well – 3 Yoga tips for adult bedtime routine

21st June 2019/in Emotional Energy /by Silvia Pink

In this second article on Tips for Yoga for sleep, I would like to introduce you a few changes in your routine that can help you sleep well.

The main hormone that contributes to your good sleep is melatonin.

You may have heard of that, it’s actually available in these days to buy over-the-counter for example and to actually help good sleep is really really helpful for avoiding jet lag for example.

We reduce melatonin in the mornings and so actually it’s really important if you possibly can to stimulate it by daylight. To get outside in the morning is really helpful for building up the store of melatonin in your body so that when you come to want to go to sleep, there’s enough to help you go to sleep.

In order to achieve this, one thing I’d love to invite you to introduce into your routine is just going outside in the morning.

Especially in the beautiful sunshine that we’re experiencing at the moment, go out and get those melatonin stores.

Also, exercise is a fantastic contributor to sleep – so long as you’re leaving a three or four-hour gap between any really energetic exercise and your bedtime.

Make sure you got that through three or four-hour gap between going to the gym and when you want to go to bed.

This relates to a general point about timing that I wanted to share with you. If you think about a car, it takes a few seconds to get from nought to sixty. It’s not completely instant. It might take 10 seconds or 15 seconds, according to the different cars.

What I find when I’m working as a meditation teacher and a yoga teacher is that people do expect an instant switch! They stop work or looking after the kids, they stop making dinner and they sit down and expect an instant stop or an instant start in the morning. Either way, we don’t work like that.

What I see works best for people, for example, in meditation practice is actually really giving time for relaxation.

That has a very specific application in yoga for sleep which is actually building in a good hour of time to just do the wind-down and that needs to not be screen time.

I know that’s really frustrating and in fact, you shouldn’t be sleeping with your phone or any other Ipad or computer in your bedroom.

I’m going to be a bit strict here in thé. If your complaint about that is that you use your phone as your alarm clock, so do I but I just put it on a plug outside the bedroom. I could get a little desk just in the hall where my bedroom is, not in the bedroom with me I still use it as my alarm clock, although you can buy a specific alarm clock.

The problem is that screen light, blue light is stimulating for the brain.

Even just five minutes are enough to delay your sleep cycle by up to 90 minutes! So you might think that quick moment checking Facebook before going to bed isn’t having an impact, but it can have up to a 90-minute delay on your sleep time! So that is something I’m banning from the bedroom.

Recapping, we have 3 tips on how to sleep well today:

Please get outside in the morning and, if you can, combine that tip number 2:
Exercise is fantastic for regulating mood, to promote the right balance of hormones in the body that work amazingly well for sleep. Exercise in the morning would be awesome but have at minimum 3 to 4 hours without exercise before bed;
No more sleeping with your phone in your room, no more screentime in the last hour before bed!

How to build resilience in our lives – Sage Advice podcast

20th June 2019/in Blog, Emotional Energy, Recordings /by Silvia Pink

Here’s a transcription of my recent interview for the Sage Advice podcast.

Ed Kless:

[00:00:15] Well hi everyone and welcome to our Sage Advice podcast. I’m Ed Kless and with me today is Joanne Sumner. Joanne is an entrepreneur, trainer and wellbeing expert. She runs a successful coaching, yoga and holistic therapy practice in West London, specialising in teaching small business owners, teachers, health professionals and social workers how to relieve chronic stress and tension so that they can live happier, healthier lives. She also dedicates time each week to supporting business women in West London to build intelligent, creative and flexible businesses, drawing on her seven-year tenure as West London Regional Director of the Athena Network. Welcome to the Sage Advice Podcast, Joanne Sumner!

Joanne Sumner:

[00:00:55] Thank you, Ed. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ed Kless:

[00:00:59] Well, first off, Joanne, tell us a little bit more about yourself and your business.

Joanne Sumner:

[00:01:06] I’m based in West London, Ealing. My passion really is small business owners, in particular, female business owners and helping them build happy, healthy businesses and then helping people in our public sector work, which is so important, be happy and healthy themselves while they’re helping everybody else to do the same. So really I suppose I look at myself and my business as a resource for people who give all the time. And my job is to give to them and help them understand how to sustain themselves in these tough and sometimes thankless roles.

Ed Kless:

[00:01:52] And why do you do it? [00:01:52][0.8]

Joanne Sumner:

[00:01:55] I think the inspiration to me really is having been in that position myself. My original work was in medical research ethics, and it was absolutely the most fascinating role in some ways, but under incredible pressure and I would say seen often as somebody whose job it was to say “no“, and under that pressure, over time, I burned out and have been through the experience of having to recover from burnout, having quite a physical problem to overcome. So, that makes me fascinated in helping other people avoid to burn out in the first place. And to understand how to resource ourselves so that we actually enjoy our businesses and we enjoy these incredible and heart-driven professions.

Ed Kless:

[00:02:52] And before we started recording you mentioned a topic of resilience and that’s something that you’re working most recently on. How can people help build resilience in their lives?

Joanne Sumner:

[00:03:04] I think that I’ve been working with people on a three-part strategy for it.

So, the first part is understanding that we have this vehicle for this lifetime which is this body. And we have what I call our energetic container, our energy field around us. And so that is our personal space.

That’s the most common way people think about it is our personal space in which we hold all of our experiences, our dreams, our aspirations, our insights, but also difficult experiences, too.

So, the first thing that we need to do is be able to seal that container, so that we’re not porous to each other.

And you’ll see online there’s so much talk about what to do if you’re empathetic. How do you deal with being an empath and being able to feed everybody’s feeling and being drained by experiences and the people around you? That’s because the person needs to better feel this energy field around them. So the first thing is teaching people how to do that and to heal to the difficult experiences that they may have had, so that energy is not getting caught up in trauma, for example.

The second part of the strategy is a shift in how you think about managing yourself and managing your mental, physical and emotional energy.

It’s really taking on board. I cannot just make withdrawals on this on myself, I can’t just make withdrawals. It’s like a bank account: I have to put deposits in, too.

But what deposit am I going to actively put in daily and weekly, monthly, so that there is something to give?

And then the third thing is actually beginning to choose to give your energy mindfully so that you don’t just give to anybody who’s asking for it.

I think people are attracted to people who have high energy and want to be around them. The result of that is those high energy people can end up very drained. So, what we want to do is begin to make choices.

“This is worth my energy. This person is resonant with me. They’re worth my time. This project is a good call for me”,

but also

“these things aren’t”.

[00:05:29] So, it’s really those three things working in concert with each other that helps us bounce back.

Really, resilience is the ability to come back from whatever experiences have happened. It’s not about not getting knocked down in the first place: that’s going to happen.

Ed Kless:

[00:05:50] In the introduction you talked about the relieving of chronic stress and I just that just struck me as I was reading it that there is a difference between chronic stress and what I would call “transactional stress” maybe: the stress that happens when trying to get the kids out to school on time, something like that. Why is it that you focus on the chronic stress rather than that transactional stress?

Joanne Sumner:

[00:06:15] I guess that with the transactional stress and what I might call “situational stress”, so long as the person releases that, so they’ve managed to get the kids to school, they take a breath and they go on with their day, there shouldn’t be long-term impact on their body from that. It’s just something that happens and then it goes away if the situation resolves. Chronic stress is when often the person has lost the ability to do that because there’s just one stress that layers on top of another stress, to the extent that they cannot let go. They cannot actually recover normally after a particular event. The one event just layers on top of the other. Then, you really start to see physical dilapidation of the body. As that as the body starts to go under, so the mind follows.

Ed Kless:

[00:07:09] Joanne, we have an exit question that we ask all of our guests and that is “who is a hero of yours and why are they a hero?”

Joanne Sumner:

[00:07:17] I love this question. My hero is Oriah Mountain Dreamer. So, Oriah is a counsellor and author and she wrote this incredibly beautiful poem that I think many listeners will note called “The Invitation” and I admire her because she is somebody who deals with chronic fatigue syndrome. She does this powerful work about purpose and passion and doing the work that you’re called for. And she is totally open, upfront and honest about the difficulty doing her own work with chronic fatigue. She just inspires me so much. And her work is beautiful. It’s poetic and beautiful and I would recommend anybody visit her website to find out more.

Considerations and Learnings from my Meditation retreat

1st June 2019/in Blog, Emotional Energy, Retreats /by Silvia Pink

During our meditation retreat during the Mothering Sunday’s weekend in the Vale of Evesham , Jo said:

“The capacity to love myself is the direct cap on how much I can love someone else”.

The biggest discovery for me was the realisation and acceptance that learning to love myself is fundamental to being able to give the best of myself, my time and my energy mindfully to others, and to me.

I now understand the importance of nurturing and softening the physical, energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of my whole self.

I am responsible for myself but I walk hand in hand with the Universe. If I work on myself to clear the clutter, I shall have the space to create and grow.

At the deepest level, I have acknowledged my truth that I haven’t prioritised myself enough and that body image is an ingrained issue for me.

However, I left our meditation retreat in Stanton safe in the knowledge that I have all the tools I need to start to address this.

I particularly enjoyed doing the Chi Do moving meditation to birdsong outside overlooking the stunning scenery in the early morning sunlight. With the massage, easy chakra clearing meditation and yin yoga helping me to better nourish and connect to my physical body, I practically floated home.

The “nurturing” quality of our meditation retreat included the location and catering, as well as the people:

Stanton has unique magic and energy of its own which nourishes the soul. From the moment of my arrival, I felt at peace and enveloped in the most nurturing of bubbles. The scrumptious vegetarian fare that Susan cooked and served with love only enhanced this feeling.

Jo is a true expert in her field. She blended her gentle and light-hearted approach with some really powerful and insightful coaching. The camaraderie with the other attendees was amazing and I know I have made some firm friends.

The image that a participant created based on our meditation retreat

Here’s one more testimonial from another attendee of my meditation retreat:

Sometimes life just gets on top of you. You really need to stop and take a break. I am so glad I booked a place at Jo Summer’s meditation retreat. Indeed, I really needed to get away, take some time for myself, rest and re-group.

After two days of…

gentle yoga and deep relaxation by the fire,
group discussions and mood board creation,
blissful massage in the afternoon sun,
al fresco ‘chi do’ before breakfast,
delicious home-made food,
kind and supportive company in the most beautiful setting in the Cotswolds,

I ticked all those boxes and went home feeling rejuvenated and ready to get back to reality.

The thoughtful little touches like a handwritten welcome note with a trio of mini eggs, a crystal (in my case a yellow jasper) to keep, gluten-free options including biscuits (which never happens!!) made it all the more special.

Jo’s clear, calm, gentle (and often very funny) guidance and wisdom was wonderful and has inspired me to learn more about chakras and chi. Spring is a time of renewal and it was the perfect time for such a nurturing retreat. I need to make this a regular thing…

Leona

What happens at a yoga and meditation retreat

31st May 2019/in Blog, Emotional Energy, Retreats /by Silvia Pink

I recently came back from the Yoga and Meditation Retreat which I held on 29th – 31st March 2019 at The Guildhouse, in the Vale of Evesham.

The impressions and memories are so fresh that I would like to show you through some of the attendees’ words what is like to participate in one of these events.

Don’t just take my word for it.

Find out what happened at my yoga and meditation retreat in the testimonial below:

Why go …

I was at a crossroad in my life. Indeed, I wanted to invest in myself and really get to know myself again.

I had been attending Jo’s yoga sessions and had really hooked into her approachable and inclusive teaching style. So, I was very curious about the retreats she offered. The idea of nurturing myself, taking care of myself and learning strategies to do more of the same was just what I needed.

On the retreat…

It was just like visiting a friend. Someone who made me feel safe, valued and included. There was such an atmosphere of peace and good intentions. I instantly felt at ease … and completely safe to let go and focus on pleasing myself and giving myself what I needed for a couple of days.

The house, the surrounding area, the fresh air….they all enveloped me like a warm blanket. So, I sank into such a deep sense of relaxation and reflection.

Group sessions with Jo felt more like conversations with friends and I felt zero obligation to add more than I was comfortable with. There was plenty of time for myself but also times to come together… there is balance everywhere.

I loved the yoga and meditation – so accessible and always mindfully facilitated by Jo who is able to anticipate and scaffold my needs effortlessly.

What you get out of it…

So much. No matter what your reasons for being there…..it could just be about getting away to a beautiful place, eating amazing food and relaxing.

It could also be about you giving yourself the chance to think and really seek something new for yourself.

I went with an open mind and an open heart. The experience was, for me, a true act of self-love. I became filled with such positive energy and also the desire to put things into my life that would support me in continuing to feel that way. Relaxed, nurtured and content within myself.

Yoga For Sleep

12th March 2019/in Emotional Energy /by Silvia Pink

As you might know, I’ve been running Yoga classes in Ealing for 10 years now and today I’d like to share with you some very simple tips on “Yoga for Sleep”.

In my previous article, I shared some tips for a good night’s sleep and today I’m starting a series of posts aimed at really helping you get the absolute best out of yourself by nourishing yourself at night.

The core principle of Yoga For Sleep is the deep nourishment of both body and mind.

The reason why we want to do that is to allow the body enough time to rest, to digest and to repair from your day’s activities. Actually, we want the mind to have the same opportunity to rest, to digest what experiences you’ve had and any sort of repair and restoration that you need. That can happen at night time.

The first idea that I really want you to take on board today is that

It is so unhelpful when talking about sleep, to obsess too much about how much sleep you got and whether it is good quality sleep.

When you’re having a challenging amount of sleep, you can really start to think:

“Oh, I only got 3 hours (or 4, or 6 hours…), I should be getting 8 hours every night”.

I’m going to ask you, as my first tip, just to put that obsession to the side. You don’t need to create performance anxiety around sleep. It’s not going to help.

Also, if you are perhaps only getting 3 or 4 hours at night, setting this target for yourself straight away to 8 hours, it’s just too much! It’s too much of a leap to go straight from 3 or 4 hours, to suddenly:

“I’m supposed to get eight hours of sleep”.

So, my tip number 1 on Yoga For Sleep is let go of an idea of how much sleep you need to be getting.

You should progress gently and steadily from wherever you currently are. For example, from getting 3 or 4 hours, let’s get you to 5 hours. If you’re getting 5 hours, let’s get you to 6 or even from 5 to 5 1/2 can make a difference.

My tip number 2 is: if you’re experiencing the feeling of just lying there, trying to sleep and you can’t sleep, if you’re obsessing about the fact that you can’t sleep, I want you to switch your mindset into:

“I am still resting my body”.

Yes, I’m not resting my mind so much, perhaps, but I am still resting my body.

“I’m just going to release the need and anxiety that I should be sleeping and allow my body to rest as best as possible. My body will rest better if my mind is more relaxed”.

It’s a core yoga principle that mind and body are really intimately intertwined.

So, if your mind is anxious and running fast and turning things over, your body can’t fully let go. We’ll talk a little bit more in the next articles about what’s happening hormone-wise.

Today, I wanted to begin this “Yoga For Sleep” series with the basic idea of: let’s start with releasing performance anxiety around sleep.

We just take wherever it is that you’re at now, and we’re just going to add a tiny bit.

So, tonight I encourage you, if you find yourself awake in the night, to tell you just:

“OK, so, I’m awake. Yeah, that’s fine. I’m just going to focus on resting my body, then, and allow myself to get as much as possible from just gently lying”.

Check the video version of this article:

I’ll be back with you next week with the next couple of tips on Yoga For Sleep!

silencing inner critic become inner coach

How to become your own inner coach and banish the inner critic for good

8th February 2019/in Emotional Energy /by Silvia Pink

The overwhelming majority of athletes have coaches – in fact, we remark on the few who don’t. More and more executives have coaches and mentors to help improve performance. Businesses of all sizes are employing coaches to help create and execute plans that succeed. We have relationship coaches, life coaches, spiritual coaches, money coaches, visibility coaches.

But no coach is ever going to be as effective as you at coaching yourself.

The main thing all those coaches are working for is silencing the inner critic.

The inner critic is the term we use to define the negative voices in your head, that

undercut your belief
tell you that you’re not good enough,
make you second guess people’s intentions,
enlist in you in self-sabotage,
help you procrastinate,
avoid,
martyr yourself
or whatever you personally choose to do to trip yourself up.

Whose voices make up the inner critic’s cumulative one?

In order to understand this, let’s have a little check. I want you to think about a situation recently when you caught yourself giving yourself a hard time. Maybe you filed your tax return later than you really wanted to. Or was the bill higher than you expected and you hadn’t planned for it? Maybe you were late dropping your children to school. Maybe you’re avoiding making a sales call or dealing with a tricky customer.

What thoughts did you think?

Did you…

beat yourself up for not having planned better?
imagine the other mums or the school staff rolling their eyes and badmouthing you?
worry about the example you were teaching your kid?

What about the sales call? Do you talk yourself into all the reasons why they absolutely should not under any circumstances buy from you…? And therefore not have to make yourself uncomfortable by making the call?

Well. I want to share this little video with you….

Now. In some cases, STOP IT is actually going to be enough.

But in other cases, we need a more nuanced line of attack. Why?

The thoughts we think create our feelings, which create our behaviours, which have consequences.

Those consequences give rise to a new set of thoughts, which create new feelings, new behaviours and of course new consequences.

And if you’ve set off on a negative track, the result is a downward spiral into increasingly negative thoughts, feelings, behaviours and consequences. And that can have a direct negative effect on your physical and mental health.

Let’s play “silencing the inner critic” through…

Take a piece of paper and think of a situation – perhaps the one you thought of earlier, perhaps a new one. Describe the situation in as few words as possible.
Now, was your description true or do you need to retell it without some of the judgements or assumptions?
Ok. Now, start to make a list of the thoughts you had about that situation and about yourself in that situation.
Pick a couple of those thoughts and look at how they make you feel.
So how does the feeling affect your behaviour? How does shame affect your behaviour? How does guilt? Disappointment? Disappointment in yourself? What feelings are you having now? What sorts of consequences might come from entering a life situation or work situation with those behaviours?
Now. Let’s go back to the initial situation. Your job is to come up with alternative explanations for what happened or alternative ways of looking at the situation. It doesn’t matter if they are provable or not, so long as you could credibly believe that explanation instead.
Fantastic. Now, what feelings are you feeling about the situation and you in it? How might these new feelings change your behaviour? And what might the consequences be?

Even neutral thoughts give rise to more helpful feelings.

And we want to actively cultivate feelings that allow us to be resourceful and creative. In fact, the more resourceful and creative you can be, the more you will begin to generate an upswing in both the results you’re getting and, of course, in your feelings about those results and yourself, so that you create an upward spiral.

So. How would this help in silencing the inner critic for good?

Firstly…. When you begin to examine the thoughts and see how outrageously untrue and unfair some of those thoughts are about you… I’m hoping your inner rebel will come out and start fighting on your behalf!!

Who dared tell you that? Where did that idea first come from?

If your inner rebel is asleep, go talk to a dear friend, or a good therapist, to help you get some perspective.

So often these thoughts aren’t actually our own.

Maybe its something a teacher said in passing or an aunt or uncle or mum or dad. But for some reason, it went in and continues to play havoc with our lives. And the more we can name them – and I do literally mean name them – the sooner we will be able to let them go.

Baldy Bob telling me I’m not good enough

has a lot less effect.

Secondly, as you start to see for yourself how direct the link is between what you think and the results you get, you can start to build a positive feedback loop. Build evidence that when you think positive and supportive thoughts about yourself, you feel strong and resourceful. Also, you behave creatively and assertively and you get better results.

The trick is to think it matters enough to listen to what you’re thinking in the first place. If you do, I promise you will soon see better results and you will feel better in yourself – physically, emotionally and mentally.

If you’d like my help to train your inner coach the ways of silencing the inner critic for good, book a discovery session of life coaching in Ealing or by Skype with me!

Tips for a good night’s sleep

29th January 2019/in Emotional Energy /by Silvia Pink

Getting enough sleep is a perennial problem for some, and I sympathise. I’ve had two stress-related periods of exceptionally poor sleep in my life, and as a result, I began to dig deep into the science to help myself and others get a better night’s sleep. Here is what I found.

Tips for a good night’s sleep: environmental factors

Our circadian rhythm is influenced by external factors such as light and darkness in the environment.

So one thing we can do is to manage exposure to light to ensure that it works for our biological and mental processes and not against them.

For example, the hormone melatonin is responsible for good sleep and is produced in the mornings. Getting outside in the morning, therefore, can help your body to create more melatonin, which will help you get your snooze on at night.

Similarly, ensuring that you use blackout blinds and turn off blue light devices (phones, tablets, laptops) at night will mean that you are creating the right environment for your body to understand it’s time to rest. Especially given that reading on a tablet, say, can stimulate your brain so much it delays sleep onset for up to 90 minutes!

Finally, in terms of sleep hygiene, it’s important to keep your bedroom cool and to use the bedroom for sleep not work, housework or storage.

No more working from bed or watching the TV while you do the ironing in the bedroom. Make it a sacred space and have a ritual at bedtime instead. Perhaps, you fold your clothes away, get into bed and spend a few minutes thinking about what went well that day. Then, turn the bedside lamp off and go to sleep.

Tips good night's sleep bedroom sanctuary

Photo by Tan Danh from Pexels

What we eat or drink

You probably know what’s coming next… the bad boys of beverage stimulants – caffeine and alcohol.

As you may know, caffeine stresses the body through the impact it has on your blood sugar, causing spikes and collapses that make your energy levels rollercoaster through the day. The general advice in relation to improving your sleep is to avoid caffeine (e.g. in tea, coffee, chocolate) after midday and perhaps switch over to herbal tea. I found drinking Chamomile very helpful, and also the last thing at night a combination of Limeflower and Passionflower helped me to drop off.

The advice on alcohol may be trickier in some ways.

The “ideal” time to drink alcohol from the perspective of a good night’s rest is actually 5.30/6pm.

So that’s good news for the after-work drink and bad news for the drink with or after dinner. It is best avoided close to bedtime too as, whilst it can appear to help you to get to sleep – it can also cause you to wake in the night. The best advice is not to drink every night, and especially to avoid drinking on consecutive nights if possible.

Tips for a good night’s sleep in terms of what to include in your diet.

Magnesium can be very useful. You may even choose to get checked for magnesium deficiency as too little can reduce the production of neurotransmitters that help to balance mood. Supplementing with magnesium works for many people I talked to. Generally, professionals seem to recommend 500mg, especially when combined with a specific amount of calcium. You can find a professional near you by searching for the British Association of Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine website.

Mental factors

One of the most important things I learned during my flirtation with insomnia was that the more I worried about not being able to sleep the worse things got.

Cultivate a determined attitude that your body is still getting some rest if you lay down for several hours. Refuse to count how many hours sleep you feel you actually got. This will slowly but surely begin to work. With that in mind, I’m not a great fan of the smart devices that show you your sleep pattern. Use them sparingly in my view – perhaps as a source of information – but watch out for obsessing over how much and what type of sleep you did or didn’t get.

In general, I recommend focusing on relaxation and breathing exercises instead.

My own favourite breathing exercise: imagine that your breath is like a wave, entering through your feet and washing up the body to the crown of your head. Then, on the out breath, it washes back down the body and out the feet. You can imagine that the incoming wave brings anything you need more of in your life – my go-to is calm – and then the outgoing wave carries out of you anything you don’t need any more. It’s a beautiful relaxing visualisation. Breathing out my worries, disappointments, tensions, busy-ness, helps me enormously to wind down and let go. And then I find I can sleep.

And the remaining thing you can do is get help – talk to a professional if you are concerned. I have found Reiki has helped many clients get better rest, as does yoga nidra (yogic sleep) and yoga itself.

So please do contact me to discuss how you could benefit and get a better night’s rest, or go ahead and book an appointment.

The land of nod awaits!

Body Confidence: why it is so important in business

10th January 2019/in Blog, Entrepreneurial Mindset /by Jo Sumner

Your body confidence is your tool for making your mark in the world.

Minds and hearts alone won’t do it – we have to have a body to act through.

Think about it… we need

eyes to see,
ears to hear,
a voice to speak with,
hands to create, and help us to relate.
We need all the underlying structure to work for us to work – lungs to breathe, stomachs to fuel us, legs to take us from place to place.

It is through our body that we experience our world. We collect and filter sensory information through our many nerve endings and the brain, and through this information, we make sense of our experience. So in an immediate sense, I hope it is immediately obvious that having a good relationship with our body will lead us to better care for it, which in turn will set us up to be a better channel for our businesses.

But there’s a little more to it than the fact that our body is our physical avatar, our way of relating to and acting in the world. And that’s this:

The body is an energetic magnet to draw what we desire towards us and through us into reality.

That’s a bold statement, isn’t it? And what does it mean?

From an energy work perspective, there are four key energetic flows to know about and work within our lives.

Firstly, we have the manifesting flow. The manifesting flow is the ability we all have to bring our inspiration through into reality.
The liberating flow is the ability to rise above the humdrum detail of survival and reach towards self-actualisation (think Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).
The receiving flow is the means through which we allow ourselves to receive love, kindness, generosity, friendship and all the good things that we have coming our way.
The giving flow is the one through which we give those same things – our love, care, kindness, empathy and support.

The body is the magnet that draws the manifesting flow into being. Think about it. Think about a recent innovation you’ve had in your business. It started as an idea – which you began to contemplate and think through, bringing it into your being through your crown chakra. You looked at it from all different angles (third eye chakra). You began to check it out with key influencers (your throat chakra). All the time it’s taking more shape.

At some point, you became committed to the idea (heart chakra). You began to take the necessary steps to put it into place (solar plexus chakra). You went to work to create it until it ‘felt’ right (sacral chakra). And finally, when everything was ready you gave birth to it (base chakra). That’s the manifesting flow – which moves fast for the simplest of ideas, and for those who’ve mastered it, and which can take months and years, even a lifetime, for things of more import.

We give birth to each new change in our lives in this way, and energetically we can make this process easier by creating a safe ground for our desires to take root and grow, just as the physical womb provides the safe environment for a foetus to grow.

If we have safe ground or home, for our desires, it is far easier to draw them in and we become a more efficient channel from inspiration to reality.

And that will make us considerably more effective in business.

So that’s one energetic and yes, an esoteric, reason to develop a truly loving and cherishing feeling towards our body – it creates a safe and loving home through which our desires can be born. We experience more alignment (which is what makes channelling our desires into reality possible), and we experience less resistance. We become better at both receiving and giving, which too makes us more efficient and effective – knowing what our boundaries need to be, setting and holding them for example; delegating where we need to; creating teams that play to individual strengths and so perform better overall. We also through our much-loved businesses move towards our own self-actualisation.

But what else? What of the more prosaic but nevertheless absolutely critical elements of how body confidence affects your business?

Well, firstly total ease in yourself creates ease in the people you are with.

We mirror and amplify each other’s state, so when you are with someone, you will know whether they are comfortable in their own skin or not. That means other people will sense whether you are too! You want your clients to relax into your expert care – whatever service or product you provide. They can only do so if YOU are relaxed in yourself, which is more fundamental than just “not currently stressed”.

Being at ease will help you become a better speaker, communicator, marketer, and deliverer of your service. Why? Because you will see an improvement in intuition (less interference to fight through), better decisions (same reason), better self-esteem, better relationships.

Being at ease with yourself is a core secret to charisma, alongside being totally present. You will become magnetic. And it will become possible to own the rooms you walk into just by being YOU. And when you can do THAT, clients will flock to you.

So, how do we do it?

The first step is to recognise how profoundly programmed we are and to PROTECT YOUR THOUGHTS.

We are bombarded with incessant messaging through the media, through peer pressure, possibly through our family, even through our literature, art, and other cultural expressions. What are the messages? Well, it seems to me I’m permanently stuck between being not enough of something and too much of something else:

Not thin enough, too vocal.
Too demanding, not fit enough.
Not pretty enough, too emotional.

I don’t fit into the small box that’s been designed for me, so I am judged for the too-muchness that spills out of its confines. I’m sure you have your own rock and a hard place too.

If you’re not sure you agree about the messaging, think about this. The apparently objectively most beautiful people in the world are regularly dressed and made up to create an image and then photoshopped like crazy afterwards. So it’s not even a REAL standard of beauty. It is, in fact, a completely unattainable one because it’s NOT real.

So, it’s time to remind yourself with diligence that these are not attainable ideals, and also that they are not YOURS.

What would YOUR beauty ideal be?

Secondly, identifying your own particular brand of judgement will help you know how to fight back against the specific voices in your head.

Think about it now… in the not enough / too much stakes, what do you tell yourself? Got some ideas? Ok then – pick one that really annoys you. Where did that originally come from?

You see it’s probably not even YOUR idea. It is almost definitely something that somebody somewhere along the line said to you and you took it on board. Whether that was a member of your family, a friend, someone at school; or picked up by comparing yourself with someone else, or overhearing a conversation, or hearing something on the radio or picking up something from TV. Was it really yours?

Babies don’t get born into the world with body shame. We pick it up along the way. Well, it’s time to stop perpetuating these self-denigrating myths. Each time we keep them going we distance ourselves from our body further. Instead of being on the same side we make an uneasy ally at best, or an enemy of our own vehicle for getting things done in the world. How silly is that?

So, we’ve set up guard against the wider societal pressure; we’ve identified our own troop of tripper-uppers.

NOW, what do we do….

Let’s just get rid of them! Let’s clear them out. Give them the old heave-ho.

There are so many ways, but one way that I’ve absolutely loved is EFT – emotional freedom technique which you might know as tapping. If you know it, you can use the prompts below to help you clear these old judgements. If you have never done it before or need a reminder, here is a link to a fantastic practitioner and his getting started advice – Rick at Thriving Now.

Tap using the fingers of one hand on the places named below; fill in the detail where I’ve put [xxxx] with the judgement you would really like to let go of…

The side of the other hand: Even though I [xxxx], even though I really [xxxx], even though I hugely [xxxx],
Top of the head: I’m open to the possibility that [something less judgemental and more open]
Eyebrow: I’m willing to see if [something new or different in the situation or about you]
The side of the eye: if just maybe [are more redeemable than you originally thought!!]
Upper lip: [then begin to set up a positive alternative that you could credibly believe instead]
Chin: [reaffirm the positive statement, either with new words or repeating the same]
Collar bone: [continue to affirm the new for the rest of the places]
Under the arm: [continue to affirm the new for the rest of the places]
Top of the head: [affirm once more the new]
Breathe in and out…..

The more fun and completely ridiculous you’re willing to be in your judgements the better (because they are what you are secretly thinking anyway).

THEN, having cleared out all the old rubbish, we want to make a decision to think new thoughts about ourselves.

Make a decision RIGHT NOW that when you look in the mirror you will ONLY notice what works about your body and what you love about your body and affirm it to yourself out loud. Perhaps you like the wicked sparkle in your eye. Maybe you’re grateful to your feet for walking you from appointment to appointment today. Perhaps instead of seeing a soft tummy, you think how grateful you are for the babies that soft tummy represents. Perhaps you always had a soft tummy and you realise that its part of your essential gorgeous womanhood. I don’t know what the trigger points are for you, but you do. Take care of them (literally).

And finally, the icing on the cake is that the very best way to develop your body confidence is to do more of what your body loves.

Eat the food that makes your body feel best. Sleep the sleep your body loves. Exercise the way your body most enjoys. Have the sex your body most enjoys! And do what you love. Give your body pleasure and not only does life become a whole lot more fun, but your body and you will also be best friends and it will work SOOO much better for you.

And if you need help getting your body confidence back, book a coaching session with me now. It will be my privilege to help.

Cleansing relaxation script

7th January 2019/in Emotional Energy /by Jo Sumner

This relaxation script is based on a cleansing practice in yoga. It works with the different layers of the human energy field.

Within yoga, the physical body is seen just as the densest part of your being.

The other component parts are:

The energy body
emotional body
mental body
and the bliss body or spiritual body.

And you can see them as almost like a set of Russian dolls with the physical body as the smallest central one.

The spiritual body is the most expanded and least dense but they interpenetrate each other, so you can’t fully separate one from the other. And we don’t need to try!

Actually, we want to recognize that physical things that are happening in our body have an effect on:

our energy,
our emotions,
mental state
our feeling of being well in ourselves
and on our feeling of joy, which I think is the thing I associate most with the spiritual body.

The same is true the other way: if something happens that affects your spirit, you’re in low spirits, then it can weaken all the other layers too. So, we might be more likely to get colds for example.

In this meditation practice, we’re going to work with cleaning these layers.

We’re cleaning them of all the sticky residues from life events. These can be things like arguments, or something that happened on the tube, or things that you’ve been thinking through, and you’re worried about. It can all leave a sticky residue that you’re then carrying around.

The problem is that, because it’s sticky, it attracts other things that stick to it. For example, as a result of an argument, normally and very humanly, we carry that residue from the argument into the next conversation that we have or the next meeting that we have and we can end up being more prickly ourselves. Then, of course, if we’re more prickly in a new conversation, we make it more likely that the person we are speaking to, then, gets a bit prickly. So, you can see how it builds.

What I want for our meditation today is to just release some of that, letting go, releasing and smoothing out the energy field.

So, we can have a smoother experience in our life and a happier one.

We’re going to start by imagining that we’re lying down inside an egg-shaped energy field.

You’re in the centre of this egg shape: it extends maybe about a foot out from your body in every direction.

When we breathe in, we breathe gold light up, around the edge of the egg and also fill the right side of the egg with gold light.

When we breathe out, we are breathing silver light from the crown of our head all the way down the left side of the egg, filling the left side.

So, we have the gold light on the right-hand side and the silver light on the left.

Gold relates to solar energy, which is our drive to get things done. Silver energy relates to the lunar, receptive, replenishing energy.

Our yoga class sits more in the left side, it’s in the giving-back side. We’re balancing the two things out with this visualization, too.

You could add as the final element a very simple affirmation. You just say the affirmation inside yourself in your own mind, very simply:

I am calm and relaxed.

We typically use nine breaths and we all breathe at different paces. So I’m just gonna hand over to you to count.

Now, Imagine a smaller egg, about a hand’s breadth out from your body. It has 2 layers and it represents the energy and emotional bodies.

Keep breathing gold light in and out the right-hand side breathing silver light out and down the left-hand side. Keep repeating:

I am calm and relaxed.

Count nine breaths, starting when you’re ready…

Now, shrink your attention even further, coming to your spinal cord.

So, you’re breathing up and down the length of the spine, coming right up to your brain and then back down.

Breathe nine times gold light up the length, and silver light down and out. This time, an affirmation that works for me is

I am at peace.

Then, release the focus on the breath and just expand your attention to notice how you feel, just a light check on how your energy and mental state feel.

Joanne Sumner runs Yoga Classes in Ealing and Meditation Classes in West London.

Book online here!