6 Happy Rituals for the Short Days of Winter

Spring is almost here – you can feel it in the air already!  However, some of us are still affected by the somewhat shorter days for at least another month. 

 I have noticed that these shorter days have not affected me as much this winter because of the rituals I have created in my days. Seasons, after all, show us that our lives are meant to contain dark times, light times, expansion, contraction, and of course… change!

 If you have been experiencing anxiety or sadness this winter, I invite you to try one or two of these rituals. Maybe you’ll start to look forward to what remains of these earlier evenings as you see the mystery and magic of this beautiful season…

 1 – Create a Glow  – The great thing about darker evenings is that they allow for the perfect candle lighting ritual. Create a sacred space in your home and light candles at dusk or when you get home from work.

 2 – Start a Gratitude Journal  – The longer nights allow for a time of more reflection, enjoying family memories, creating great new recipes to share with friends.  This is a great time to begin the habit of gratitude. The best way to do that is to get a beautiful journal and commit to completing your day with gratitude. Start with a list of five things. Write in as much detail as you can.  We live in such lavish abundance, yet it’s so easy to speed through the days without noticing. Keeping a gratitude journal will change your life!

 3 – Catch Up on Movies  – If you are a movie buff, this is a great time to catch up on those movies you missed in the theatres.  You can keep a list in your purse or wallet and any time someone recommends a movie, take note. That way, when you go to the video store, you have a reference.

 4 – Morning Work-Outs  – Take advantage of the cooler weather and warm up with exercise.  Start a fitness ritual. Exercise has been proven – over and over again! – to remedy everything from disease to depression. Hire a trainer for a month and learn some new exercises! The fitness habit will lift your mood like nothing else!

 5 – Complete a Project  – Remember that idea you had for a scrapbook? Or that language learning series you’ve been meaning to plunge into? Well, now’s the time!  Winter is a perfect time to learn a new craft, create something meaningful, and get lost in the joy of a new project. Winter is also the time to go inward and lose yourself in creating.  What have you been meaning to create?

 6 – Get Out!  – Any dog will tell you: Winter is a fabulous time to hike!  It’s cold.  It’s crisp.  You bundle up in layers of polar fleece. And you get to experience the hidden treasures of a season that most people avoid.  Make it a point to find some trails or paths near your home. Then, commit to bundling up and spending time outdoors each weekend. There’s rarely anyone else out – so you get to have acres and acres to yourself.

Peterborough Wellness Expo

There are a few select booths left for the 3rd Annual  Peterborough Wellness Expo on May 8, 2010.   A very successful event for the past 2 years will feature best selling author and fitness icon, Tosca Reno as the keynote speaker.  The expo includes yoga and tai chi demonstrations, food presentations specializing in the 100 mile diet,  personal development, spirituality, beauty products, cosmetic enhancement, spas, relaxation products and services, financial wellbeing, pet wellness and environmentally friendly products and services. We hope to make this show a one stop opportunity for consumers to learn about the options available to them to improve or enhance their own personal well-being.  www.WellnessExpoPtbo.com

What’s Really in our Bottled Water?

Plastic packaging is not without its downsides, and if you thought mineral water was ‘clean’, it may be time to think again. According to Martin Wagner and Jörg Oehlmann from the Department of Aquatic Ecotoxicology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, plastic mineral water bottles contaminate drinking water with estrogenic chemicals.
Wagner and Oehlmann looked at whether the migration of substances from packaging material into foodstuffs contributes to human exposure to man-made hormones. They analyzed 20 brands of mineral water available in Germany – nine bottled in glass, nine bottled in plastic and two bottled in composite packaging (paperboard boxes coated with an inner plastic film). The researchers took water samples from the bottles and tested them for the presence of estrogenic chemicals in vitro. They then carried out a reproduction test with the New Zealand mud snail to determine the source and potency of the xenoestrogens.

In an analysis of commercially available mineral waters, the researchers found evidence of estrogenic compounds leaching out of the plastic packaging into the water. What’s more, these chemicals are potent in vivo and result in an increased development of embryos in the New Zealand mud snail. These findings, which show for the first time that substances leaching out of plastic food packaging materials act as functional estrogens, are published in Springer’s journal of Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

They detected estrogen contamination in 60% of the samples (12 of the 20 brands) analyzed. Mineral waters in glass bottles were less estrogenic than waters in plastic bottles. Specifically, 33% of all mineral waters bottled in glass compared with 78% of waters in plastic bottles and both waters bottled in composite packaging showed significant hormonal activity.

By breeding the New Zealand mud snail in both plastic and glass water bottles, the researchers found more than double the number of embryos in plastic bottles compared with glass bottles. Taken together, these results demonstrate widespread contamination of mineral water with potent man-made estrogens that partly originate from compounds leaching out of the plastic packaging material.

The authors conclude: “We must have identified just the tip of the iceberg in that plastic packaging may be a major source of xenohormone (man-made substance that has a hormone-like effect ) contamination of many other edibles. Our findings provide an insight into the potential exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals due to unexpected sources of contamination.”

 Source – www.ScienceDaily.com