What Surprised Me at My Son's Wedding This Summer

09/11/23 • 17 min

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For science- based information with easy to use tools, tips and practical advice on how to get the most of your time in green space see my website https://treesmendus.com and check out my books Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Stress Less, and Control Your Chronic Illness and Optimize Your Heart Rate: Balance Your Mind and Body With Green Space.

In this solo episode today, I want to share something that happened to me at my son Max’s wedding to Sarah - which took me by surprise and made me step back and revaluate who else needs to hear the message I am sharing in this podcast.
So let me take you to the big day. I was there mother of the groom and asked to do a big speech.I was nervous, practicing, second guessing whether this was the right thing to say-all the things that parents feel before making a momental speech.. I won’t read you the whole speech. So listeners here is part of my speech on that precious loved filled day:

When the kids were small we lived on Loughborough Lake near Kingston. One day I was rushing around tidying our house and saying, “I just want to get things back to normal.” Max who was in Grade 1 at the time said, “Mommy Where’s normal?” I replied “ I don’t know, where do you think it is? Max said “Out in the middle of the lake somewhere.”

And when Max was little he loved to lie on the ground and look up into the tree branches – for a very long time. So long that I finally decided to start lying down next to him. When I did, he said “look mommy angels” – he was referring to the light glancing through the tree branches.

I don’t know, but if I asked Max today “where is normal?” I am pretty sure he would say anywhere in the world – and mostly outside and always with Sarah.|”
At the end of the speech his friends shared with me the impact that my speech had on them - what it also showed that with their careers, technology and screens they have lost touch with the importance of making time for nature and green spaces in their busy lives.

So this is for you the 20-30 year olds at Max and Sarah’s wedding:

I get it. If I rewind my time back in my career and busy life in my 20s and 30s, I made time for the gym and workouts but that was it. Now you probably know that I have lupus today. I look back and think that if I had made time for more nature and green space daily in my busy career life – if I had

For peer reviewed research on how your time spent in green space can change your mindset, balance your nervous system and your heart rate please go to verlafortier.substack.com and check out my books Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Stress Less, and Control Your Chronic Illness and Optimize Your Heart Rate: Balance Your Mind and Body With Green Space

So this is for you the 20-30 year olds at Max and Sarah’s wedding:

Previous Episode

Outsmart Your Pain with Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD

Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD is a former physician and an internationally known mindfulness and Insight (Vipassana) meditation teacher. She is passionate about translating ancient wisdom teachings into accessible and applicable modern-day language. She aims to live from the heart informed by the brain and inspires her students to explore the same.

She is the author of “Outsmart Your Pain – Mindfulness and Self-Compassion to Help You Leave Chronic Pain Behind”and the co-author of the classic training manual for mindfulness teachers “A Clinician’s Guide To Teaching Mindfulness”. Christiane is the lead-consultant and teacher trainer for the VA’s (US Department of Veteran Affairs) National Mindfulness Facilitator Training and a senior teacher at InsightLA.
3:38 Originally I just wanted to provide a print out for patients and providers of what mindfulness and self compassion are and where to find resources. We ended up with a user friendly book.
4:45 When our body goes into pain, this is the body's priority: paying attention to pain. This gets complicated with chronic pain.
6:48 Our body learns pain. In chronic pain our body becomes over protective.
When we say the pain is killing me today, be careful because your body is listening.
8:00 When we are in pain, the mind goes into rumination, replays stories of what happened to us.
10:00 We have a story with a history. What did you do? what are you regretting? We have a story of the past and a story of the future. With each thought comes a particular emotion.
10:57 We might have a future story - we might know that the condition we have is progressive. We might worry that the pain will not go away....so you will not be able to go on hikes, lift your grandchildren.....

11:47 When the pain comes rushing in, this is a reminder of our past and future story: fear, frustration, and worry set in.

12:08 The past is over and the future isn't here. You might recognize your thoughts and say "the past story is really running right now."

12:16 You can learn practices to put that story down for a while. May say "I don't need to go down that path right now...at this moment."

For further episode transcript please visit my website Treesmendus.com
Follow Christiane Wolf on her website here
and on Instagram: christianewolfmindfulness

Next Episode

Why You Are Even More Beautiful/Handsome When You Are Outside in Green Space

What you might not know is that you will also be more beautiful or handsome to others when you are outside. When I saw an Instagram reel of my 20 something kids out in the countryside last weekend with their friends, I saw this. They were even more beautiful, happy and carefree out there together in the Cotswold area in England. I want to explain to you in graphic terms why you too look even more beautiful out there in the countryside. It’s about blood flow throughout your body when you are out there. To do this I have to draw on my nursing biology knowledge about your autonomic or automatic nervous system and blood flow.
In the last episode I talked about how getting outside loosens and relaxes your thinking – your thoughts relax, you get perspective. At the very same time there are changes in your physical body – your nervous system comes into balance. On pages 57-59 my book Optimize Your Heart Rate I discuss the see saw nervous system which goes up and down between the sympathetic (fight/flight – where the heart speeds up) and the rest and digest where the heart relaxes and slows down. We need both. To get things done we need out heart rate to speed up and that is ok. When you are in sympathetic f/f the blood goes to your arms and legs so you can run away. But you don’t want to stay in that hyped up productive state, you need to give your mind and body a break. This is what happens in green space.
The other extreme of your see saw nervous system, called you R&D takes over to bring your body and mind back into balance. Your In the r/d the blood stays in your head and core – so the blood vessels open up in your head, through your chest and heart (relaxed heart rate) and your abs – sphincters and organs are relaxing so that your food, waste, blood, and secretions can pass through your body with ease, and down below that the blood flows to your kidneys, bowels and genitals. This is where my kids say “mom......” This is all good I am a nurse this is how we talk... So 7 specific things happen when your blood flows

Transcript https://treesmendus.com