There’s something to be said about the hours between 3:30am and 6:30am. The Yogis call it the Amrit Vela, or, the “ambrosial period”. It’s a place that offers you a quiet stillness you may see for the next 15 hours, so it’s a perfect time to create the space for lies ahead.

Here are 10 things you can do just by waking up at least a half hour earlier:

• Meditate
• Engage in some form of physical activity
• Have a cup of tea
• Make a proper breakfast
• Read a book
• Work on a hobby
• Work on a business idea
• Have sex
• Take care of a chore
• Set your intention for the day

What else can an extra half hour give you in the morning?

Waking up a half hour earlier also means going to bed earlier, so you’ve got yourself a two for one here.

About ten years ago, I was overweight, miserable, and unsure of my place in the world. I shouldn’t have been, considering that I was doing what I wanted to do (photo major), I was well liked, and I had a series of really cool jobs (ad agency, jazz club, museum, Broadway theater, to name a few). But there I was, unhealthy, unhappy, and stuck.

One day I decided that I didn’t want to be that person anymore, so I changed my diet, quit my job, and struck out on my own. It’s been one helluva a ride since, and I owe a lot of where I am today to my decision to enroll in Institute for Integrative Nutrition. IIN laid the groundwork for how I shape my conversations about food, farming, health, and ecology, and even when I fall off, I go back to that foundation and my life shifts.

I’d like to pay that forward by offering a $1,000 scholarship to one person who enrolls by Friday, February 3^rd.

How would you use the savings?

Would you finally get the chance to buy an iPad?

Oh wait, Integrative Nutrition delivers their distance-learning program via the iPad. 

Would you use it to sign up for a seminar with your favorite wellness speaker?

Wait, Integrative Nutrition gives you access to teachers like Dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra, and Andrea Beaman. 

Integrative Nutrition offers a dynamic, start-where-you-are approach to transforming your relationship with food and health. There’s no dogma, deprivation, or willpower, just the education, tools, resources, support you need to live happy, healthy, and whole. And then, you can take those same tools and share it with your community by launching a career as a Certified Health Coach.

There’s a worldwide community of Integrative Nutrition students and alumni spanning five continents, each and everyone of them changing the world through their example of what it means to live on purpose.

Are you ready to join me and other Health Coaches like Melissa Martinez-Machado, Latham Thomas, Alex Jamieson, Jared Koch, Kyira Harris, Aqiylah Collins, and Hakikah Shamsiden who’ve reclaimed nutrition and are empowering others to do the same?

You have until Friday, February 3^rd to email me at melissa @honeybeeholistic.info for the details.

I can’t wait to hear from you.

The only one way to stop being stressed out and suffering from emotional pain all of the time is to STOP doing the things that cause stress and emotional pain.

Much of what we experience is caused by what we create. When our thoughts, words, and actions are out of alignment, we create suffering in our lives.

Here’s how to move past stress and pain from our day-to-day experiences.

Take Responsibility for Your Own Participation in Your Life

Sure, people do things that piss us off, but how much of what is wrong in your life is by your own doing? Your actions, and even inactions, are as much the cause of your suffering as the foolishness you allow others to get away with on your behalf.

Put yourself in check.

They Don’t Have to Be Wrong for You to Be Right

The constant need to be right all the time, even for the smallest of concerns, creates unnecessary stress in our lives. No one has to like you, your habits, or your way of doing something, and vice versa. Help others to be responsible for their own lives by giving up the need to be in control of everything, all the time.

Learn to accept that sometimes, you don’t have all the answers, you make mistakes, and every now and again, you are just wrong about what you think you are seeing.

Ask for Help

What are you trying to prove by taking on all that responsibility and doing everything by yourself? The only thing you’ll actually succeed at is ensuring that the people around you will defer all responsibility for their lives to you. Set boundaries, learn to say no to responsibilities that people are perfectly capable of handling themselves, and ask for support when you need it.

Let Go of the Past

You will never move into a space of healing and forgiveness if you refuse to let go of the need to change the outcome of something that happened to you in the past. The offending party may never, ever, ever admit to their wrongdoing, and they may even die before you get closure. So, forgive yourself for what you didn’t have the capacity to change way back when, acknowledge your new awareness of the behavior and the pattern so that you don’t make the mistake again, stop playing victim to the past, and move forward with your life.

Live Your Own Truth

Your parents have dreams for the kind of adult they’d like you to become. Your friends, intimate partners, and colleagues have expectations for your role in their lives. But if you don’t feel, deep down, aligned with their values and expectations, then no amount of posturing will help you become the person they want you to be. Living up to someone else’s idea of you will put you on the fast track to mental health disturbances, chronic pain, and disease. You can choose another path: Your own.

When’s the last time you got physically intimate that also didn’t involve or result in a sexual experience?

Nonsexual physical contact is the most underused and underutilized tool for expressing intimacy, mindfulness, love, self-care, and self-love.

Massage has multiple benefits, some of which include:

• eases muscle pain
• increases joint flexibility
• lessens anxiety and depression
• improves circulation
• enhances immunity by increasing lymph flow
• releases endorphins
• relieves migraines
• increases body awareness
• decreases medication dependence
• relaxes overused muscles
• relieves cramps and spasms

How many more benefits can you think of?

This week, get a massage, from a friend, a professional, a student at a licensed massage therapy school, or, learn to give yourself a massage (video).

Whether it’s a five-minute head massage or a sixty-minute full body massage, the goal is to experience a new way of thinking about and being in your body.  Notice the changes to your breathing, your mood, and your physical self.

How does massages make you feel?

Share your thoughts and experiences here.

The Food Culturist, who has a show on Heritage Radio Network was listening to this show the other day when she hit me up saying, she sounds just like you, the just-relax-and-eat-real-food you.

I took a listen, and decided that this would be my gift to you this Friday, three weeks into the new year, where a good half of the people who set resolutions will have dropped them.

In this episode of Taste Matters, host Mitchell Davis talks with Lisa Sasson, Registered Dietitian and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health about food, nutrition, and what is “healthy”.

This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve heard any RD talk food over nutrients with a non-dogmatic approach to food, nutrition, and healthy eating.

Professor Sasson, I may just have to audit one of your classes!

Listen online here. 

What did you think of Professor Sasson’s take on what it means to eat healthy and live well?