by Jasmine | Mar 17, 2016 | Date Night, Family Counseling, Romantic Date Ideas
Book Review 1,000 Questions For Couples
One of the biggest reason marriages end in divorce is because couples fail to ask the big questions before they walk down the aisle.
One of my favorite questions is ” How do you think I act in a crisis situation?” A family member of mine, that had been divorced before, would not agree to marry his (now second wife) until he knew how she acted in a crisis situation. If he had asked that of his first wife, or just waited till they were in a crisis situation and seen what a vile lunatic she became, his life would have been mucho, mucho different since he would not have married her. He ended up with a lot of tumult and drama with her since she could not control her emotions when she got upset and got really out of control.
If couples simply spent some time asking each other the questions that really matter, they’d greatly increase their chances of staying together. The great thing about a “question book” is that it makes it easier to ask those uneasy questions and encourages an environment to address them.
But if this “1000 Questions For Couples” is a great list of 1000 questions to ask before marriage the right book for this? In short, yes. Most question books ‘beat around the bush,’ never really providing the important questions, and others simply don’t have enough questions. On the other hand, this book has a fairly comprehensive collection of questions, covering every single topic you’d ever want to know about before tying the knot. It includes tough subjects like money, children & child rearing, career, past and present relationships, religion, morals, convictions & beliefs, personality, and even sex.
RECOMMENDED BY MY PASTOR
“I read a statistic somewhere that if you go to pre-marital counseling before you get married it will cut down your probability of getting divorced by 75%.
I’m not sure if that is true but it certainly makes sense to have some sort of thorough discussion on all the vital topics before you say I do. I had asked my minister at church if he knew of any “tests” we should take before we get married to make sure we knew each other and he recommended this book with 1000 questions to ask my future hubby.
I must say that it was extremely thorough and asked quite a number of questions that I didn’t really feel comfortable answering but in the end drew me and my fiance really close together. Most questions were really fun to answer and I loved hearing my fiances answers – I learned a lot more about him than I thought I would. I definitely recommend this book.”
– T. Cat
But don’t get me wrong while there are many serious and tough topics to discuss, there are also many “lighter” yet just as important topics, including the car and driving, vacations, food & well being, pets, and your favorite things. That’s one thing I really loved about this book. It covered every conceivable topic from the super-heavy to the light-hearted and wacky, making it smoother for couples to start with easy questions and build their way up to important ones.
They make for great conversations starters…. ever feel like you have the same kind of conversation with your significant other every day? “How was your day at the office dear? …Oh…boring and mindless….how was yours.?” This book is a way to keep your conversations fresh and spicy and you will find out all kinds of things about your mate and get to know them on a very multi-faceted level.
It was cool to get 3 – 5 of the questions to my email each day, making everything automatic. I just go about my day and get new questions to ask my loved one, without having to really think about it. In all, there’s nothing really negative I can say about this book, except that I wish my family member would have read this before he got married….I’m sure he wishes that too….. divorce is so gut-wrenching…for the partners and the kids.
I highly recommend this book for everyone. NOT just couples who are thinking of getting married but also couples who just want to feel closer together, or people dating, who just want more things to talk about. For all the details check out the author’s site by clicking this link.
by Jasmine | Mar 3, 2016 | Law of Attraction, Meditation, Spirituality, The Secret, Yoga Health
Illness in any form is nothing more than our negative energies choking off so much of our Life-flow that cellular damage results. The body is not separate from the universe, so when we think a thought, the vibrations run through the body as well as everywhere else. If those vibrations are in harmony with our body’s intrinsic programming for well-being and vitality, the the cells thrive. But if it’s negative energy we are projecting, the cells can’t remain strong enough and don’t perform as well.
Without the high frequency energy of life force necessary for them to survive they eventually weaken and die before their time, no longer able to replicate normally. Illness exists in a state of dis-ease. Someone has flowed more negative energy than high frequency energy. If you find a generally happy person, you usually find a very healthy person. People who are sick have shut themselves off in some degree from their own life Life-force energy by letting negative thoughts from fear, guilt, blame, hate, worry (and the energetic resonance of those thoughts).
Anytime we think of anything, we’re flowing out some kind of positive or negative energy (feeling) Whatever we’re feeling, we’re attracting, on an energetic level. Then we live with the results. The vibration (or emotional resonance) that comes from our thoughts have the power to magnetize vitality or disease. The more thoughts we send out, the more powerful these vibrational clumps become and they start to draw into their whirling centers anything and everything of a similar vibration Like attracts like, whether it is something you desire, or something you don’t want.
When I lay my body down in bed each night I choose a few words and just repeat them in my head…. Peace…. Abundance…. Ease… sometimes I say them as an affirmation… I am Peace….. I am Abundance…. I feel Ease.
How to Heal your Body with the Law of Attraction
To turn illness around, you must start to use trickery with mind into creating higher vibrations (that come from focusing on feelings of gratitude, love, appreciation) to begin their process of regeneration. This is not a cure-all. It is simply a beginning. The key to reversing anything within the body is to get your focus of what you don’t like or want and get into the the “feeling place”, words a la positive affirmations and visualization will help but learning to shift your own energy is also paramount.
The trickery is much like writing a new script. You have to learn to consciously change the kind of energy or vibrations you are emanating since most social-conscious thinking (and feeling) is based on fear and lack. You can call this Flip-Switching your energy (vibrations). So here are two basic ways to flip-switch. You can do these at your desk (while facing a computer screen) or in the car, lying in bed or really anyplace…..so no excuses for not having a place or time to practice. (Are you committed to your excuse or are you committed to feeling better?)
Healing your Mind and Body Through Thoughts
1. Flow Appreciation– Focus on a part of your body that you are not happy with. If you have a bad back, then start to FLOOD your back with appreciation. Make yourself feel the frequency change in your body. Feel adoration, respect, gratitude and love pour and emanate out from you until you feel a buzz throughout your body.
2. Inner Smile Jump-Start. (Best to do this in private) Put a meaningful smile on your face, the kind of smile you’d have at seeing a newborn baby or watching puppies tumble and play. Feel it grow warmly inside of you until you’re encased in the glow of a gentle inner smile. While encased in this state, flow gratitude and love towards the part of your body that needs healing.
Just using these techniques once will not be a miracle-cure. It took a lifetime to get the thought and fear-based emotional habits and patterns you have and it will take discipline, commitment, faith and practice to heal as well. It helps to have a supportive buddy that you are practicing these with so you can check in with each other on your progress and keep each other inspired and accountable.
by Jasmine | Feb 10, 2016 | Couples Retreat, Couples Yoga, Date Night, Partner Yoga, Yoga Retreat
Evolve Music and Yoga Festival in New Jersey
How did it go at our Couples Retreat.. NJ at the Evolve Yoga and Music Festival in New Jersey?
I don’t know if most people would think of the Evolve Music and Yoga Festival as a retreat but a few years ago, my newlywed hottie hellenic hubby and me decided to take a hippie-flavored Couples Retreat ..NJ. It was quite a long drive from Philly, we actually took a wrong turn and it took us about 30 minutes longer to get there. It was fairly loosey-goosey, which suited us just fine. When we got there there was a main music stage that had some pretty decent bands on there. We arrived during the day and there were lots of vendors selling things like raw, vegan, organic food, crystals, incense, clothing, jewelry and it was tough to resist buying lots of tempting stuff. There was also someone there that had a monarch butterfly tent and we got to play with the monarch butterflies at this couples retreat…NJ.
We went up the the yoga pavilion and every 1-2 hours there was a different kind of yoga being taught. I was most excited about the acrobatic yoga that was being taught. I’ve always loved acro yoga and found a studio in NYC that taught this on a regular basis. I am somewhat of an amateur with acro yoga.
It’s always been hard to find a yoga partner since they seem to come on two ends of the spectrum. the brand new beginner that I have to teach the basic moves to like folded leaf or the almost pro acro yogi who can fly people and toss them around on just their feet in the air like they are salad. It’s a lot easier to teach someone to be the flier and a lot harder to teach them how to be the base so when I am teaching someone I always end up basing them for awhile and that ends up hurting my knees if I do this for too long.
The last time I practiced with someone that is actually a professional acro yoga teacher then ended up dropping me on the ground ( fortunately it was the grass) but it was still a solid drop. So I had a quite large and quite painful and quite dark black and blue mark
So we didn’t end up doing too much acro yoga since I can only base someone for so long. Here are some pics though of when we did the acro yoga which is also called partner yoga.
I think we stayed through dinner time at the festival. It was starting to get chilly and we did bring some gear to keep warm but I was getting quite cold. We found a meditation tent and got to go into a sound bath filled with crystal chimes and zen bells. It really transported us…WOW!
At night, it was non-stop music that usually have a techno flavor to it. There were all kinds of bright lights, neon lights and fire spinning at the festival. I think the festival really heated up probably pretty late but since we had gotten to the festival so early in the day I had kind of had enough and was ready to just go to sleep at our hotel. Almost everyone else had camped out but we didn’t have our camping gear and we figured that by the time we bought all of our camping gear we could just get a cheap hotel room nearby ( although nearby ended up being about 45 minutes away).
The next day after our couples retreat..NJ we ended up going to a winery nearby called Warwick. They had the most yum-yum Rieslings there and we ended up buying a case of Riesling… I’ve never bought a case of wine in my life…
What a romantic weekend! What is your idea of a romantic weekend? Write your answers on our Facebook page.
by Jasmine | Feb 1, 2016 | Yoga Health, Yoga Teacher training
When I am just a student in the class and someone accidentally lets a noisy one out I giggle and laugh and look in the direction of the lethal missile. Now that I do a lot of teaching and am not the student that often, when someone in my class accidentally lets one out, then I have to swallow my laughter and giggle and not even look in the direction of the explosion. I remember one time, that this guy kept cutting his chakra cheese fairly audibly and we couldn’t all ignore it if we tried and he had to say “ Sorry, Excuse me” a few times. 
In order to prevent this (nothing horrifies students more when this happens….particularly when the studio is really quiet) I have the music at a fairly audible decibel. If you are hard of hearing then you might have some trouble hearing me though. Also, when I can I urge students to avoid a heavy meal like lasagna with cheesecake immediately before class I do so. I think it’s the most embarrassing when it is a guy doing this in a roomful of attractive young women. Maybe this is why guys don’t come to yoga as often.
Also, there are certain poses that will make this happen more often than not. Boat pose is particularly lethal so I make sure the music is pretty loud in this pose. I think boat pose, particularly when it is a partner pose, is usually the evil culprit. Also, appropriately titled, “Wind – Relieving Pose” sometimes makes this happen. I guess you are pressing on the descending colon in this pose
As a teacher or student, what are your experiences of observing this in a class? How did you react?
by Jasmine | Jan 1, 2016 | Yoga For Weight Loss, Yoga Health
Guest Blog By Heather Rudalavage RD LDN
What Yoga Positions Help You Lose Weight?
One of the most challenging pieces of the the intuitive eating approach is that people can’t see how it can work. People, in general, don’t trust themselves. They believe they won’t be able to stop eating chocolate or cake or pizza. Maybe it’s because the diet message is so pervasive in our society, or maybe we are just narcissistic in nature, but it continues to astonish me how much my clients rely on external sources to know what, when and how much to eat. Odd, because hunger is a physiological response similar to breathing or having to pee. When we visit the restroom, we don’t say, “did I pee too much?” When we take a breath, we don’t say, “it’s not time to breathe yet”. But clients ask me all the time, “how much should I eat?” Or they say, “I am hungry all the time.”
Geneen Roth, in her book, Women, Food and God states that overeaters fall into one of two categories, restrictive and permissive. Restrictive eaters want, need, must follow strict guidelines. This is how they perceive having control of their life. They can tell you the glycemic index number for a banana, or the grams of carbs in a soda. Permissives on the other hand, figure that since life can’t be controlled, they might as well check out and numb themselves with food. They hide behind a care free exterior. Think of the jolly, round image of someone you know, and they are likely permissive eaters. Both types of overeaters are attempting to control their environment and use food to distract themselves from their real feelings, and even deeper levels of figuring out why they feel the way they do.
Despite what many believe – that eating intuitively means eating whatever you want when you want to – Intuitive Eating really means loving yourself enough to want to honor your body with nourishing, healthy food. It means eating when you are hungry and then stopping when you are satisfied. This is where some of my best clients get tripped up. They are okay with allowing themselves to eat when they are hungry and to chose a food that they really want to eat, but they end up binging because they can’t or don’t know how to really tune in, listen and care for their bodies. Going through a “honeymoon” phase is normal with IE, but if you find yourself struggling with getting past the honeymoon phase, then it is time to look within to see if you can find the reason for not being able to care for yourself and respect yourself enough to not want to binge anymore. Often, a long history of traditional dieting is partially to blame.
Sometimes, nourishing yourself means eating a hot fudge sundae, but if you find yourself wanting 2 or 3 hot fudge sundaes every day for weeks, then something else is going on. It’s time to do some inquiring and ask yourself what is the real reason you want a hot fudge sundae every day? If you take this important step you will be able to break out of the honeymoon phase and will begin to lose weight (if you have extra weight to lose).
I wish I had the answer to my clients struggles with food, I wish I had the magic pill or the right words, or even the perfect meal plan, but the bottom line is that the answer lies within them, lies within you. All I can do is help my clients to find their answer. If you drop the dieting mentality and question the voices in your head that tell you that a particular food is bad, (whose voices are they, by the way?) you will be able to tune in and when you tune in, your body will tell you what, when and where to eat. Sometimes your body may say chocolate and sometimes it may say a fresh berries, but whatever your body says, listen, because it is the right choice for you at that moment.
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Heather Rudalavage RD LDN
www.Intuitive-Nutrition.com
Twitter@IntuitiveRD
Facebook.com/Intuit.Nutrition
Connecting mind, body and spirit.
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