Have you ever wondered why you loved playing with your shadow when you were a kid? There is a concept in Japanese martial arts called Kage no Keiko. It translates to shadow practice. You stand with a light behind you and use your shadow on the wall to align your outer and inner world. It is a powerful tool to increase self belief, self confidence and self love. It comes down to embodiment and presence. The research shows that focusing on your shadow and how it moves with you positively impacts your brain and nervous system. It also sharpens your ability to feel what is happening inside your own body. Think of your shadow as a built in biofeedback system that is always with you. You use light and reflection as a feedback loop. You see the outline of your body on the wall. You notice if your head is tilted or your shoulders are collapsed. You see the curve of your spine. A simple movement like moving your head and standing up straighter activates your mirror neuron system. Mirror neuron systems (aka MNS) activate when we perform an action and when we observe someone else doing the same action. The MNS contribute to action understanding, imitation, and aspects of empathy and social cognition. When it's your shadow that triggers the MNS, you not only tune more deeply into self but you gain more empathy and understanding of YOU. Add to that, experiments on posture show that holding an upright position increases confidence in your own thoughts. When students sat upright while writing about themselves they trusted those thoughts more than when they were slouched. The posture itself made them believe in their own competence. Shadow practice improves nervous system regulation, perspective and safety signaling over time. People who practice in this way describe a shift where non trust turns into curiosity. Your inner world feels less like isolation and more like a rehearsal for connection. All it takes is 3 minutes of shadow play and your nervous system starts to associate YOU with calm and automatically builds self trust. You are teaching your body to support your belief in yourself.

After seeing a video on the subject, I decided it was time to launch a series on real food. Lab grown meat has been in our food supply for a while, but it is shifting from a rare circumstance to a standard. And there is not enough data to determine long term health effects. It is important to know what you are buying. When you pick up chicken from stores like Trader Joe's, Target, Aldi, Walmart, your local grocery or even a high end grocer like Whole Foods, look for the text on the label that reads, Hatched, raised, and harvested in the USA. Focus on the word hatched. This is currently the primary way to verify you are buying a real chicken. Let food be your medicine. You know the old adage, You are what you eat. (Which means Jax might be a cheesy potato!) Trust your intuition. Even if the label looks right, if the food doesn't feel right to you energetically, skip it. I have also compiled a list of nationwide directories to help you find local farmers. I have found that some local farmers are now selling meat cheaper than the grocery store. *Where to find real chicken near you:* Get Real Chicken getrealchicken.com This is the only directory specifically dedicated to pastured poultry. Eat Wild eatwild.com This site is strict about its criteria. It only lists farmers who practice pasture-based farming. If a farmer is on this list, they are usually raising animals the old fashioned way. Local Harvest localharvest.org This has the largest nationwide database of farms, farmers' markets, and Community Supported Agriculture. FarmMatch farmmatch.com This site functions more like a shopping cart. It connects you with local food clusters that often aggregate products from multiple nearby regenerative farms. Enter your zip code to see if there is a hub near you. This is often the easiest way to get local chicken delivered if you don't have time to drive out to a farm.

If you wake up randomly one day and your right nostril is plugged, your digestion is likely going to be weaker that day. Take it as a sign to eat light and drink plenty of water and warm teas. Soups are a great choice for this day. Focus on these easy digesting foods: - Vegetables: Leafy greens, broccoli, asparagus, peppers, garlic, onion and avocado. - Fruit: Berries, apples, bananas, pineapple, papaya and citrus. - Herbs: Peppermint, fennel, ginger and turmeric. - Protein: Salmon, mackerel and lean meats.

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What if the Dark Night of the Soul (DNOTS) isn't what we think it is? The spiritual community has blown this concept up. It’s very popular. They treat it like a required stage of purification or a necessary stop on the hero’s journey. They tell you it’s a time of surrendering to divine will, making it sound like a painful, inevitable rite of passage. But what if it can easily be avoided? Let’s look at the list of DNOTS symptoms: - A sense of emptiness and meaninglessness - Feeling lost - Intense sadness or despair - Physical fatigue, brain fog, and trouble concentrating - Social withdrawal and isolation - Loss of interest in former activities - Feeling of stagnation With a degree in psychology, I can tell you these are the exact clinical characteristics of depression. I could pull out the DSM 5 right now and diagnose that list as depression. What if the dark night of the soul is just a self-diagnosis of depression? The problem is people are self-diagnosing a mental health slump as a Dark Night of the Soul to make the suffering feel holy and purposeful. This makes people think they have to go through this misery like it is a badge of purification honor. I'm a two-time Master and Champion of the Dark Night of the Soul. OOoof. If only I knew then what I know now. The foundational Buddhist principle states that life involves suffering, not because life is inherently bad, but because of attachment and impermanence. Life is going to life. No matter how healed, awakened, or high vibe you are, you will encounter the inevitability of the human experience: loss, disappointment, sickness, aging, and change. The initial pain of these events is unavoidable. But the suffering is optional. According to Buddhism, suffering is prolonged by our reaction to that pain and what was, versus what is. This is where choice comes in. No matter how healed you are, life is still going to life. We are here to have a human experience. But how quickly we recognize the suffering and turn it around will decide the length of time we suffer.