Highest Life equals Highest Self-Care

Living your highest life takes commitment, enthusiasm, energy and strength. Whilst the first two come from within, sometimes with outside help and mentoring, your well-being and vitality cannot be relied upon to appear all by themselves naturally.

Unfortunately, to have energy and be disease-free, you cannot just rely on good genes and a strong constitution …. If you want to live well in today’s world, it takes effort, planning, investment, time and energy. You have to invest energy to get the energy you need.

There is something about the pace of society today and the many expectations on us, as well as those we put on ourselves that can really challenge us to cope. So many women with passionate goals and visions for making a difference in the world can often achieve them but at a high price to themselves.

In the past, I have had burnout and have been forced to take time out to recover before returning to the wheel of life, hopefully, a little wiser each time.

In the decades since I first ground to a halt, I have made many life changes and have developed the skill and ability to catch the early warning signs and change course when needed.

Perhaps you are pausing and assessing how well you can handle the next phase of your life and all the demands it will bring. Personally, I am at one of those reassessing staging points that come up now and again.

I have had too many caring responsibilities for elderly family and sick friends and have not had all the skills to cope as well as I might have. It’s been new territory for me, and I am going through another learning phase. This time, youth is not on my side, and I am forced not only to manage stress but also to understand what effect that stress is having on my older body, mind and brain. And what I have created as my own healthy home environment is going through a change.

I will share some of my insights.

Firstly, you need to know when to hit the PAUSE button.

If you do yoga, you will likely be familiar with the shivasana position, where you let your body lie totally relaxed and motionless for five minutes. This is so that it can process the intense exercise and stretching that you have just done and get rid of the acid buildup. I advise bringing a ‘shivasana’ approach to your daily life outside of yoga.

Take those five to ten minutes and give yourself a break. The Brahma Kumaris spiritual organisation pioneered a concept called Just-a-Minute, where every hour on the hour, a gong would sound in each of their buildings, and everybody in them would stop for one minute of silence then after 60 seconds, work or meetings would simply continue.

I have a chair at home facing the window and garden view, and it remains a constant invitation to sit down and relax just for a few minutes.

As your life evolves as it inevitably does, and you wonder about the next phase, sometimes a change of scene is helpful.

Remember, your home is the container for your life, and it can be beneficial to go away to feast your eyes on new horizons and landscapes to help shift your perspective and discover new possibilities.

I took a weekend away in January, but it was insufficient to recover my balance. My brain had become frazzled looking after the details for three households, which was too much I needed more. So I got the idea to have a medicinal holiday where I would be cooked for and hand myself over to other caring people to look after me.

I am writing this for you from my lovely room at an Ayurvedic Retreat a beautiful hotel with a hospital on the top floor.

I am enjoying healthy food, lovely swimming, yoga and meditation, and daily consults with an Ayurvedic doctor before having two and a half hours of treatments, mainly involving massage, oils and herbs. It’s absolute heaven, and I don’t know why I did not think of having this medicinal intervention before I needed it.

Don't wait until your body tells you it's urgent!

I am not thinking about home, what’s for dinner and what jobs need doing I am on time-out. Perhaps you too must consider this to preserve your sanity and ensure you have the inner resources ready for your following challenges, for come they will!

The self-care which I am investing in now continues at home. The two places where your well-being is best attended to are your kitchen and bedroom - Food and sleep. After that, exercise is crucial, and some experts would put it as number one to keep your brain healthy. My advice is to create a nourishment plan for yourself That is the best way to delay ageing as you get older.

Back in the day, we just grew up, we worked, and we retired. We ate what most other folks ate, did our best and hoped for the best. Some people were unlucky and got ill. That is no longer the way the world works now. There is much you can do to keep well and stave off illness.

But - and this is key - it will depend on you seeking advice, expert help, and willingness to research and learn.

The healthy home of the future will be a bit different to what it is now. Reducing the use of chemicals in our food, decor and cleaning, reducing exposure to harmful electromagnetic fields in our equipment and wifi bringing more nature and natural materials inside that is all great, but another leap is needed.

The amount of information now available on different ways of eating healthily and research in the new field of brain science is vast. You need to check it out and find what resonates with you.

At some point, we all become primary carers in our lives, often for our elder relations or close ones. This is a time of life that demands we take care of ourselves more than ever before.

Self-care has become the primary focus for all of us - and high tech is right there to offer more sophisticated support than we could have imagined even 20 years ago.

Our family have taken the opportunity to have digital maps of our brains to check what is happening inside our heads (called qEEGs, Quantitative Electroencephalography). And the results show that stress is not having a positive effect on our neural pathways, so we have been investigating what is possible to correct this.

I have come across many new treatments that I now believe are essential to keep us healthy for as long as possible. With great results, we have had sessions in hyperbaric oxygen tanks, which deliver oxygen at high pressure deep inside the body. We have also invested in infrared light equipment to take the healing energy of red light deep inside the body. There are other machines that change frequencies in the body and others to help create coherence. The stuff of Star Trek is here now and affordable for most homes.

This is causing me to look to create a healing space in my home where we can have our daily treatments sitting exposed to panels of light or wearing an infrared helmet programmed to help balance our brains.

I have used a magnetic mattress to sleep on for 25 years to give me a deeper sleep with more protection from electromagnetic fields, and I use a bed quilt made from infrared reflecting fibres to provide a gentle detox overnight.

Now I am making time to add to my repertoire of healing technologies in my home. I have also drunk super-filtered and restructured Pimag water (technology from Japan) for well over 20 years. I am now adding a hydrogen machine to my process as hydrogen water helps increase energy and reduce inflammation, which is the main curse in ageing bodies.

These water enhancement gadgets fit comfortably into my kitchen, but other items need more space.

I use a shiatsu machine to massage my back and feet while watching TV.

I can even wear Pinhole Trainer glasses to strengthen my eyesight while watching a movie. Add to that the frequency-generating Healy and the iTera machine, which provides a kind of electronic acupuncture, and you can see that we need to create a healing corner, if not a whole healing room!

So many modalities are coming of age now, many of them using vibration and light, the most natural aids of all!

This is the medicine of the future, and it is within our power to keep well and not fall into the trap of becoming sick and letting someone else manage and cure the dis-ease.

These are exciting times, and I feel very empowered to take even more charge of my health as I move into my later years, but it is work … there is much to research and learn, and I am making the time to do this. I recommend you do this too. Don't think it's alL beyond your budget...rather re-examine what and how you are prioritising your expenses. In any case, many of these technologies are available to anyone and can easily be bought online!

My kitchen has undergone a transformation making space for the fermented foods that are continually being processed.

These include glass jars of apple pieces turning into apple cider vinegar which need regular stirring; ceramic pots of fermenting vegetables for my sauerkraut which need their regular ‘burping’ of air; jars of fermenting beetroot for my kvass drink; bowls of raw milk becoming cottage cheese; trays of lentils and seeds sprouting. All this requires space and time and energy but it is so worth it. You can easily find recipes with the search engine. These few actions need nothing more than inexpensive ingredients and very little time to prepare!

I really am making a difference in all our diets and nourishing our microbiomes with this extra kitchen work. With the food chain becoming more vulnerable, you need to enhance and widen your kitchen skills and become adept at making your own living food which you can preserve and store.

So it is time for a quantum leap in your health. Find out more about herbs you can include in your daily routine, do everything you can to have a deep, healing sleep and take on the research for what high-tech options are now readily available to optimise your health and energy.

And when it comes to a holiday and your desire for a change of scene, perhaps you might use one or two weeks of your downtime away from your business to have some super regeneration medicinal holidays should be taken well before you have a desperate need for them!

Take good care of yourself you and your light are so needed in this fast-changing world.

Gina Lazenby

Gina’s beautiful hilltop home in the Yorkshire Dales, featured on many TV programmes and the inspiration for her Healthy Home book, is now let as a retreat house to facilitators of yoga, transformation work and wellness. It’s also a special place to hire for family gatherings and celebrations.

Gina has circled back to her hospitality roots and now offers her home that inspired her books as the Healthy Home Retreat. The 750-year-old original property near Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales has been restored and extended according to the principles she expounds.