Nourishing, Natural Medicine
by Dakini Oceana
Relationships are Nourishing, Natural Medicine
Human happiness leads to health and fulfillment over a lifetime. From youth into older ages, your body wellness and mental calm are directly affected by the depth of your relationships with others.
Developing an understanding of how to maintain and nourish body wellness and self care is important for longevity and health. It is also equally important to develop and maintain close, supportive and nurturing relationships with others. These relationships with others feed your body and weave into your life a purely natural medicine that helps you remain strong, healthy and vital throughout any life stresses.
Feeling heard, cared for, understood and loved are all important aspects to your overall health. Being able to hear, care for, understand and love another is nourishing to your overall health. In a nutshell, good relationships “keep us healthier and happier!” I have read statistic-based medical studies that prove people with maturely developed social connections experience lower rates of diabetes, arthritis, cognitive decline, and other chronic conditions. This is because intimacy and loving care with others promote healthier levels of oxytocin in your heart and brain, and increase the levels of serotonin throughout your brain and body. These close, understanding, and thus intimate relationships can be your “stress regulators”— through feeling seen, understood and giving caring and understanding to another our bodies calm down. When your body calms, your nervous system calms, decreasing levels of adrenaline and cortisol that heighten depression and anxiety. So nurturing, healthy and loving relationships can help your body return to equilibrium, even, and especially, after being revved up by whatever challenging events life presents you with.
How Do You Nurture Relationships?
Many adults I work with say they feel lonely some or all of the time, even when in a committed marriage with children and parents close by. I have concluded through observation that people who have actively cultivated deeper, more intimate and understanding relationships in their lives have also found a deeper level of intimacy with themselves and human nature at large.
Learning to value and cultivate intimacy comes through learning how to express yourself and truly hear others. It is a fact that all relationships can bring their own challenges, this is part of the curve that allows for personal growth and greater levels of intimacy. When we commit to staying in the conversation, rather than abandoning it when one person’s needs or modes of expression are different from the other, it is greatly beneficial to body wellness, mental peace and open-hearted expression.
When you stay and communicate through challenging ups and downs, remain steadfast in wanting lasting ties over severed relations, you will find the personal rewards to be much more valuable than anything material in this world. Yes, the ability to have close long-term relationships is not a fluke. I have worked with and watched many people who understand the value of the relationships in their lives, and these people are proactive about nurturing and maintaining these relationships. They make plans with friends, reach out to people to see how they are doing, and become available for deeper conversations when needed. The romantic partnerships make time for loving touch together, nature walks and adult time alone to share interests.
The people I have worked with who are actively seeking to build romantic partnerships have done proactive things like joining like-interest community and social groups, making phone calls to and in person time with new friends that help develop a stronger bond, keeping in touch with long-time acquaintances and seeking new ways to meet people. I have coached and supported many people to intentionally nurture in-person social connections and their personal relationships as these are deeply beneficial aspects to your health, heart, goals, and soul journey.
Marriage and Family may see Ups and Downs yet always Gives Lifelong Support.
Marital satisfaction is never a constant, it is a goal throughout the ups and downs. A marriage relationship is important to long-term happiness, and part of the journey is the cultivated ability to listen and learn how and when to communicate with your partner.
Generally, people experience deep happiness when they first get together but the satisfaction declines when children come along, rebounds when kids leave home, and drops again if adult children return to live at home. Overall, though, having a supportive spouse through one’s life journey provides tangible mental and physical health benefits. Marriage offers the partners emotional support through stressful events and can help build resilience.
Like all relationships, marriage can be especially challenging because you are sharing the most intimate aspects of your survival together: children, home, money, long term goals. This calls for a deep amount of trust. Trust is never completely constant, it can come and go in small increments, but for the most part the underlying value of trust is gained through intimate communication, seeing your partner, feeling empathy and open hearted-ness toward your partner. Knowing that the appreciation of the partnership far succeeds any small gripes one may have on the day to day basis. Your partner is your greatest healer, love is your greatest teacher, and valuing the tender fragility of even the strongest partnership is what helps you maintain a long term care and passion for staying through the shared goals and building of home and family.
Take Care of Your Body
A commitment to regular exercise, maintaining physical health throughout your life helps you maintain vitality, peace of mind and energy for your goals and your relationships. You can thrive well into older years. Take care of your body with the awareness that it is a profound and magical gift, a vehicle for your soul to carry out passions, make changes in the worlds of others, create the life your heart feels led to live. Treat your body like you’re going to live in it for 10 decades. Adjust to your body’s changes every 10 years with updated plans for daily maintenance and sustenance and prepare for your future life with your body. Your home, car, clothes, status, family are lovely flowers that bloom.
Loneliness
Relationships play an essential role in wellbeing. Loneliness activates your body’s stress response and high levels of cortisol and adrenaline can cause your organs, tissue and joints much discomfort and devitalizing inflammation. This leads us back to the balancing role relationships play in regulating your nervous system. Finding the joy in day-to-day life, creating an appreciation for all you have and are, letting go of fear of the unknown or trying to control the outcome of each scenario you are faced with, helps you nurture your relationships, and larger consciousness- purpose. Your intimate connection with yourself, and thus with others is nourishment for body, mind and soul. The more deeply you accept and value your self, body, mind, soul, the more available you are to loving, understanding, hearing and accepting others. This is a firm foundation for the bedrock of building healthy long-lasting relationships.
Hence, seeking a deeper level of intimacy and self-acceptance within, loving yourself while simultaneously seeking spiritual development with the vibrations and phenomena of nature, will help you nurture and maintain mental peace and enlightenment.
This is a beautiful pathway into understanding and caring for all human experience, as you seek to understand rather than simply be understood by others. As you seek to love rather than to be loved. As you seek to listen with your soul rather than just be heard. When you gift these actions of love toward yourself within, you then become open to giving to others, instead of only relying on others to give you what you first need to offer yourself. This becomes the illuminating pathway to try bonding, and the departure from loneliness.
Intimacy is growth, Loneliness decimates life. You can be alone but not lonely. You can be with others and feel lonely. This bonding you seek begins with your intimacy with self. Subsequently, social connections are as important to our long-term health as diet and exercise.
So. . . relationships and intimacy are foundational to health and well-being. . . Have you felt your heart and emotions today with yourself ? Have you felt the glorious inflow of natural life force? Have you turned your open-heart outward and connected with another person today?
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