A Daily Om

We all need a mental health break, don't we?  I just didn't expect to find one downtown in a city park.

While walking down the street yesterday during lunch hour in the downtown area of the nation's capitol, I spied a large white tent set up across the street in a park known as McPherson Square.  The tent reminded me of one of those large white tents that people use at outdoor wedding receptions.  I could only see the back of the tent so, ever the curious one, I walked over to check it out.

Somebody must be promoting something, I thought, but from the first glance of it, I couldn't tell exactly what.

Turns out it was Mental Health; as in come inside the tent and take a rest from your daily work routine or from whatever is happening to you.

When I got closer to the tent, I could see a rather small blue, yellow and white sign saying "Mental Health Break, Noon to 7 pm, May 6."  Yes, I thought, this looks interesting.  The front of the tent was wide open and inside were low white tables and cushions for seating.  Small groups of people were sitting and standing, talking and reading.  Other tables were set up with free goodies such as blue balls that people could hold and squeeze to relieve stress or anxiety, and there also were water bottles along with green tea for drinking.  There was even a photobooth for quick laughs if you wanted to take silly pictures.

 

Children Practicing Yoga
Photo Courtesy The Daily Om

Thanks to The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, which was sponsoring the mental health event, people could also take yoga classes outside of the tent for relaxation under a cluster of trees. A few people taking a class that had already started were either sitting on chairs or sitting on mats with their eyes closed and arms stretched out, palms towards the sun.

It looked so un-DC.

Yet it was a unique concept.  Everything went to improving the human experience and community.

 

Here, a couple of blocks from the White House and The Washington Post, two centers of business that I think most people would associate with stress and hypercompetition, was a place dedicated -- at least for one day -- to finding your inner self and "happy place."

 

I associate, and I'm sure you do too, a mental health break or a mental health day to calling in sick from work.  We've all done it at least once in our work lives or know someone who's done it. Either you've been working on a project or just putting in too many long days and you need a break.  You're not really sick but you know you're going to get sick if you don't take a much needed break.  Thus, the mental health day.

 

 

But this mental health tent was sending a different message from what I could see,  which is: we are all capable of self-care at any time of the day in any place and with some practice, we can learn to  turn down the extraneous volume surrounding us and instead find inner calm and peace.

 

As author and wellness coach Kris Carr has written, "When you understand your mind you can harness its power to achieve more than you imagined possible.  The space between the noise is where God/dess lives.  There are many answers there.  Don't shy away from visiting."

 

Go Green Tea

I write today in support of tea power; specifically the healing power of green tea.

I usually start the day with two cups of regular hot tea (Red Rose, Lipton, Tetley) and then sometimes will have another in the afternoon at work.  I'm not a coffee drinker and haven't been since I stopped smoking decades ago.  I like the way coffee smells but it has to have a lot of hot milk and turn into a cappuccino before I will drink it.  Coffee ice cream is also very delicious but that's another post.

Earlier in the week, I wrote about a book I have been reading, "Anti-Cancer: A New Way of Life," by David Servan-Schreiber, MD, Ph.D., which has made me look at my diet differently and make small changes based on the medical and scientific information in this book.  One piece of information revealed in this book is that green tea contains antioxidants, which is great news, and if I drink two to three cups of green tea a day I will be boosting my immune system in a major and beneficial way.

Doctors have been saying for a long time that the single best way to stay healthy is to strengthen your immune system.  As I get older, I am trying to do what I can to stay as healthy as possible and a strong immune system aggressively fights diseases ranging from common colds to arthritis and cancer.

Enter the drinking of more green tea on a daily basis.  It's a small change but I feel it all contributes to a positive health picture because good nutrition affects all areas of your life. Until I read this book, I had no idea that green tea contains a substance that the whole pharmaceutical industry today is researching in order to manufacture it: catechins.  (This part is going to get a little scientific but if I don't include this information you might not be persuaded about the healthy effects of drinking green tea.) 

Basically, catechins go through your body searching for free radicals that can damage DNA and contribute to cancer and atherosclerosis.  One of these catechins, epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, is "one of the most powerful nutritional molecules against the formation of new blood vessels by cancerous cells," writes Servan-Schreiber.

After two or three cups of green tea, ECGC is in your blood and spreading through your body by using your capillary vessels.  According to Servan-Schreiber, "ECEG settles on the surface of each cell and blocks the switches (the "receptors") whose function is to set off the signal that allows the penetration of neighboring tissue by foreign cells, such as cancer cells"

Is that cool or what?

I don't expect that green tea is going to make up for the years of bad processed food that I used to eat without thinking of the health consequences but we all have to start from where we are and today's goal is to get strong and stay healthy.