Tag: bodymind

Peace One Plant at a Time

May is a wonderful month! If you are living in the Northern Hemisphere, you might welcome a reset from cold temperatures, a warming up in body comfort. Let’s also warm up peace in our hearts. I am a gardener at heart. I find much peace in gardening. Literally, gardening is grounding. I love the whiff of earthy soil turning over when I dig a hole to plant a new perennial in my garden.

A sweet inhale comes from the many scented blossoms that begin their seasonal run every spring. Angela Haupt (health and wellness editor at TIME) writes about holding a flower’s inhale for just 30 seconds to realize measurable body changes! Not only does your mood smile, but your heart rate slows and your nervous system switches on a calming state.

Cognitive psychologist Pamela Dalton is a researcher of taste and smell at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. She explains the science of smell. Our olfaction is so dominant that it evolves before the brain’s cortex, our thinking tool. A sense of smell helps define what we feel and may even be responsible for our survival — as in the case of smelling smoke before a life-threatening fire erupts. Although difficult to believe, the human nose can detect about 1 trillion different scents!

When you inhale a pleasant scent, you do breathe more deeply in the present moment. That deeper breath affects your entire body, including the releasing of muscle tension. Different from touch, hearing, or vision which have to pass through the brain’s thalamus before there is conscious awareness, smell travels directly to your amygdala and the hippocampus. The hippocampus holds your memories, so scent can trigger past emotions you experienced in some memory. Imagine a smell of a special food from childhood. Just a whiff of chocolate contains hundreds of different odor molecules.

Dalton suggests that such scented experiences form very early. Some compounds found in breast milk are linked with chemical properties in vanilla and may be responsible for why vanilla seems universally pleasant to nearly everyone across cultures.

I visited a lilac farm recently and experienced many inhalations of lilacs. While every person responds to scent in unique ways, this is a pleasing scent for me. Some think of lilacs with nostalgia. Seeing graceful lilac blooms swaying in the breeze brought back memories of my childhood home with a white lilac tree.

Lilacs represent peaceful vibes of tranquility with a sense (and scent) of renewal. The delicate blossoms are an early food source of nectar for bees and butterflies. Lilacs of various colors are associated with various representations.

Purple lilacs: Emotions of love and passion; White lilacs: Purity, humility, and innocence; Magenta/pink lilacs: Strong friendships and affection; Blue lilacs: Serenity and happiness; Violent lilacs: Reflection and wisdom.

Let’s embrace the symbolism of peace-enhancing lilacs.

Pearls of Peace (PoP) Quiz

494. What pleasant scents linger for you from your childhood?

495. What plant or flower gives you bodymind serenity

Olympics & Mental Health

Eiffel Tower in Moonlight (Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images)

Vincent Van Gogh captured the essence of one’s ability potential in a letter that he wrote to his brother: “…principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds…it’s good to reflect and to try to be conscientious, because that makes a person’s will to work more resolute and turns the various actions into a whole…for the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone and is a succession of little things that are brought together…it’s the same with other things as it is with artistic matters…the great isn’t something accidental; it must be willed.” 

What does it take to make a winning Olympian? Details may vary among different individuals, but I agree that greatness takes willpower which I define as grit. Research psychologist Angela Duckworth defines grit as “the power of passion plus persistence.” Grit is exercising discipline, a basic human need.

However, grit is not the only consideration in a person’s successful outcomes. One’s mental health is the secret sauce of success.

We can thank Simone Biles for educating folks about the importance of one’s mentally healthy approach to her dangerous-but-oh-so-beautiful sport. When she needed to drop out of most of the Olympic competition in Tokyo, many treated her decision harshly; she was expected to “push through,” and deny her doubts. Unfortunately, those who critiqued Biles misunderstood the situation.

Betty Okino, a 1992 Olympic medalist, explained that a gymnast can die if one cannot land on their feet (and end up landing on their head). Gymnasts call their doubts “the twisties,” a mental block where one has difficulty grasping their acute spatial ability to sense and control airborne moves. It feels as if their body and brain have a disconnect.

Biles did push through calf pain in the Paris Olympic qualification round this weekend, aiding her team in climbing to the top of the leaderboard. Biles told Hoda Kotb that she used to think of psychotherapy as a weakness. Now she has learned to speak about trauma.

Biles is not alone in addressing her mental health needs as an elite athlete. The comeback swimmer Caeleb Dressel made a decision to take 8 months off after the Tokyo Olympics to regroup in meeting his mental health needs; he has worked with a therapist weekly for 2 years.

According to Jess Bartley, senior director of psychological services for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, 15 psychological service providers worked with 1,200 athletes last year. Athletes grapple with such questions:

  • What is the place that sport has in your life?
  • How is your identity tied up in this?
  • What does it mean to make, or not make, the Olympic Games?

The Paris Olympics has a 24/7 hotline with mental health counselors who speak 70+ languages. This year athletes may seek services until 4 years post-Olympic week. Elite athletes are role models in caretaking one’s bodymind without shame.

Pearls of Peace (PoP) Quiz 

311. How do you define your own identity?

312. When do you need extra willpower or grit in your life?