Cate Stillman - Body Thrive: Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Ayurveda and Yoga

body

thrive

CATE STILLMAN

To the Planet

May we humans awaken to our potentials of dynamic collaboration with each other and with Earth.

To My Clients

To the certified coaches in the worldwide association of Yoga Health Coaching and to the Body Thrive Coaches for your studentship ( adhikara ) and your dharma. May this book help you help others as you set the global standard for Yoga Health Coaching.

To My Teachers Teachers

Im a synthesizer. My tremendous teachers imparted deep wisdom, and I attempt to make this wisdom even more user friendly. In this book, you may recognize the voices of my teachers. They are, in order of appearance in my life: Tim and Missy Goss, Don Cannon, professor Michael Molitor, John Friend, Dr. Vasant Lad, Sally Kempton, Craig Hamilton, Katrina Blair, and Dr. Claudia Welch. In gratitude to all those who dedicate their life to seeking, living, and sharing deep wisdom for the good of all.

Contents

You Only Get One Body

Y ou only get one body. Which habits are you going to mold it with?

There is a rhythm to your body thriving. When you know and live into this rhythm, you engage in your best life ever. The rhythm creates an order. When you engage the order, you thrive; when you disregard it, you suffer.

This suffering may be slow and superficial, or deep and painful. The aim of this book is to up your thrive through engaging the rhythm of life, the natural order.

A vibrant physique, an abundance of energy, and higher consciousness are worthy aims for the arrow of your attention.

Ayurveda, an age-old science of rejuvenation, gives you a manual for body wisdom and daily thrive as you chronologically age. If you up your game in wellness and body smarts by learning from your yesterdays, you experience body thrive. Learning from past behavior is the basis of health and healing. Informed, intentional habits rejuvenate you.

Part 1

Orientation

How Are You Designing Your Body?

Y our reality in body, mind, and spirit is a reflection of your habits. Your choices heal or undermine you, and your habits direct the lens through which you view your life. These small, seemingly inconsequential habits breed your life experience. Will you merely survive? Or earnestly thrive? Better habits open and strengthen your body even as you age; they open your mind to attract ideas that align with what you want to do and who you want to become next. Better habits also awaken your spirit and foster better relationships.

If your current habits are aggravating your body but you keep up your current state of affairs, youll exacerbate those aggravations, and things will get worse. When you dont act on what youve learned, you turn your direction toward suffering, which leads to aging. Youll be grumpy, anxious, tired, stiff, or fat instead of fluid, graceful, fun, and sparky.

You craft your inner universe: how its organized, how it runs, the vibe, and the way you age. What is the organization of your organism? How is your reverberation? Are you fluid, connected, contented? Or are you chaotic, stressed, overscheduled, bloated, or depleted? Are your habits intentional and effortful, or careless and regressive?

Your Habits Should Get Smarter as You Age

As a self-reflective human, youre designed to get smarter. By your very design, you can upgrade how you experience your life by refining, reforming, and then automating your habits. Right now, you are choosing the habits that will generate future ease or future stress.

When you slip into substandard habits, you start to live out of sync. Your emotions will generate a negative reverberation, which will, in turn, influence your thoughts and your biochemistry. You will experience more stress than ease in your emotions, in your thoughts, in your relationships, and in your body.

In this book, I crack the code of ten essential daily habits from the deep and ancient holistic science of Ayurveda, the perennial body-wisdom tradition that arose in tandem with yoga, the fully embodied path of living awake and at ease. Here lies a simple curriculum that every person should learn as a child, master as an adult, and refine as an elder for their body and life to thrive. Body Thrive is about upleveling your habits into the habits of ease, of wellness, of thrive.

The Wisdom of Yogis Is Based on Habits

The yogis of yore deeply explored human consciousness. Through their four-plus millennia of guru-to-disciple personal experimentation, the yogis (yoga masters) and vaidyas (Ayurvedic doctors and masters) discovered that consciousness in both mind and spirit is wired through physiology.

Matter equals energy. As you open and strengthen the bodys subtle energy technology, you open the mind to higher thought. You open your emotions to bliss and interconnectivity. Your physical body can support the capacity of your spirit to expand, and vice versa. As you pulsate, building integrity on both the subtle and gross levels, your capacity for thrive amplifies.

The body is wired for ecstasy, what the yogis call bliss . Your biochemistry is your pharmacology. The ten Body Thrive practices from yoga and Ayurveda teach you how to turn on and subtly optimize your biochemistry and activate your pharmacology. The practices become habits. When you age with the practices of yoga and Ayurveda, you elevate your capacity for and refinement of bliss on all levels of your being: physical, mental, emotional, relational, spiritual. The ecstasy is actually internalbetter named enstacy.

Inversely, most modern humans miss the boat and age themselves with physical, mental, emotional, or relational degeneration, much of which is preventable. We know from Sir Isaac Newton that an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by another force. Humans are the evolution of the laws of physics and nature. We can consciously choose to align with these laws, which lead to an experience of ease, flow, and the awakened regenerative nature of our bodily intelligence. When we consciously or unconsciously choose not to align with the laws of nature, we suffer the consequence of degeneration.

Ayurveda is based on living in sync. In Ayurveda, the synchronized daily bodily rhythms are called dinacharya , which means following the rhythm of the day. Isnt that lovely? You get to follow; no need to lead. No need for absolutes or rules or internal wars. Just pay attention and follow the lead. Nature isnt just on your side; shes got your back. Dinacharya becomes your daily schedule based on natures rhythms. When you synchronize your bodily rhythms to natures clock, your physiology harmonizes. You experience balance, ease, and flow. When you live against natures body clock, you experience stress, rapid aging, and dis-ease.

Body Thrive ushers its initiates toward subtle alignment with biorhythms at the speed of light, or one habit per week. As you drop into the ten core habits that align your day-to-day routine with natural rhythms, you thrive. You become a vibrant, dynamic human being on a growth path, which is a boon to yourself, your family, society, and the planet. You attune to the magnetic pull of the universal energies to align your personal body rhythmslike sleeping, pooping, eating, moving, playing, chillaxing. When you integrate the 10 Habits of Body Thrive, you align with the force of nature. You make the switch from degenerative to regenerative habits. Thats a big deal. You win big in the short run. You win bigger in the long run. You design your direction in life. You downshift aging. You evolve physically, relationally, and emotionally. This may sound like a tall order, but rest assured, the teachings in this book are simple, time-tested, empowered practical wisdom.