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Wellbeing

Positive psychology says we need more good news in our world. We've all heard how important it is to be in a positive frame of mind. Of course, this same sentiment has been around for thousands of years in the ancient cultures.

Good in theory, not always so easy in practice. So what can we do to help our mental health and hopefully reduce things like anxiety and depression?

Ancient Wisdom

The ancient wisdom has always been that we put our attention where we can on what is positive, what's uplifting, what is sweet, what is beautiful in our world. Why? Because as the ancient Vedic aphorism suggests, "What we see, we become."

As the ancient Hawaiians also said, "Where attention goes, energy flows."

Simply put, what we put our attention on grows stronger in our lives. In the ancient Ayurvedic understanding and current day Maharishi Ayurveda for example, the understanding is that we metabolize not just the food we eat, but everything we experience.

Digestion … of experience

The term metabolize is often used in connection with food. We eat food. We need to process that food. We need to digest it, and then metabolize it so that we get the benefits of its nutrients, but as mentioned, it's not just food that we have to metabolize.

The ancients understood that all our sensory perceptions, what we see, what we taste, what we smell, what we touch also must be metabolized or processed on a deep level.

Most important today is what we hear. Do we hear good news or stories about war, crime and all the bad things that abound in our western media?

We have to process those things and it has a physiological effect. It can dampen our immune system, raise our stress hormones and negatively impact our mental health.

Do you sun gaze or at least connect to the early morning sun as a daily practice? Are you aware of the incredible mental, physical, emotional and spiritual benefits of such a daily ritual?

While many of us know about high-performers morning habits such as making their bed, planning their day and exercising, connecting with early morning sunlight is not so well know.

As understood by most ancient cultures, the master regulator of all our internal health and performance cycles is the cycle of the sun. Most advanced traditional cultures throughout time have started their day greeting the sun through an ancient ritual called ‘sun gazing’. (Others, as in India along the Ganges river, do things like Yoga 'sun salutes' while facing East as the sun rises).