Soul Sessions by CreativeMind

The Extraordinary Power of Sleep

August 23, 2022 Debra Berndt Maldonado and Robert Maldonado PhD Life Coach Training and Personal Transformation Experts Season 6 Episode 125
Soul Sessions by CreativeMind
The Extraordinary Power of Sleep
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

50-70 million Americans have chronic sleep disorders. Lack of sleep creates many physical and mental issues in life, showing the extraordinary power of sleep.

  • Why do we need sleep?
  • What are sleep disorders?
  • Why do so many people have sleep issues?
  • The Mind-Body approach to sleep is safer and more effective


This information is for educational purposes and not intended to diagnose or treat any mental or physical conditions. Please consult your physician before beginning any mind-body intervention.

•••

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The Extraordinary Power of Sleep Transcript

INTRO  00:00
Welcome to Soul Sessions with CreativeMind with Debra Berndt Maldonado and Dr. Rob Maldonado of CreativeMind. Join us each week for inspiring conversation about personal development based on Jungian philosophy, Eastern spirituality, and social neuroscience. Spend each week with us to explore deep topics in a practical way. Let's begin. 

Debra Maldonado  00:29 
Hello again, welcome to another episode of Soul Sessions with CreativeMind. I'm Debra Maldonado. I'm here with Robert Maldonado. We are continuing our series on mind body health and wellness. Before we get started, I'd love for you to not miss an episode of this podcast by clicking on Subscribe on whatever apparatus you're listening to our podcast, on iTunes, Spotify. If you're watching us on YouTube, you could just push the little button in the corner here on the video, and make sure you get every episode. Today's title is the Extraordinary Power of Sleep.

Robert Maldonado  01:10
It's our continuing series on the mind body. Before we get into the contents of the program, I wanted to talk a little bit about how we see the mind body. If you think about Western culture and science, the way it sees the body is as a physical, biological entity. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a paradigm based on the philosophy of materialism and realism, meaning that the physical reality is considered the foundation of reality. Biology, physicality is considered to be the true nature of the universe. There's another paradigm though that comes from the East. That is a consciousness paradigm that says that's not really what's happening. What is happening is there's a foundational power called consciousness, pure awareness, in which this phenomenon we call the universe arises. We are using that consciousness paradigm, not the Western paradigm of physicality.

Debra Maldonado  02:35
So what you're saying is that there's more to us than what we can perceive with our senses.

Robert Maldonado  02:41
The implications are really profound. They really throw everything into question, the way we've been approaching our minds and our bodies. It allows us a new perspective. Of course, one of them is this idea of the mind body being one, and the mind being able to influence the body directly. Of course, it's a two-way communication. But both the mind and the body are arising from this deeper element called consciousness, or pure awareness. They're having a conversation, there's a conversation between what we call our individual mind and our individual body. They're conversing continuously. These mind body methods, or approaches to health and wellness allow us to intervene in the conversation.

Debra Maldonado  03:46
Instead of letting it happen unconsciously, letting the gossip, the body mind body set the tone for your health, for your wellness, for your state of mind. You can actually direct your life, which is always the best way to go.

Robert Maldonado  04:05
Keep that in mind as we go through the content, so it'll make sense to you. The extraordinary power of sleep is really extraordinary. It is an extraordinary thing, and we all do this. We all need to do this. It's not optional. You cannot live without sleeping. You have to include sleeping somewhere in your life, of course, within that 24 hour cycle preferably. The research shows that seven hours is optimal for adults, and if it starts to drop below six and a half hours of sleep, it starts to correlate with a lot of diseases: hypertension, diabetes, depression, anxiety, not only physical but psychological problems.

Debra Maldonado  05:06
I can tell you from firsthand experience. I've always had no problem sleeping, so it was hard for me to conceptualize someone who couldn't sleep. I remember when I first started doing hypnotherapy, I did a lot of work with insomnia. This woman walked in, she hadn't slept in decades for more than one or two hours a night. You could just see what effect it had on her body. We've all had those days where we wake up, and we're exhausted. Imagine that happening for decades. It was affecting everything about her. She was trying everything to get to sleep. I was able to help her but it was really profound, just the physical appearance of someone who hasn't had a good sleep.

Robert Maldonado  05:57
In yoga philosophy, they describe three states of mind that we all experience. Actually four, but I'll talk about why the fourth is a special circumstance. Obviously, the waking state of mind we’re experiencing right now, if you're listening to this, you're most likely awake. The second one is the dreaming state. It's important to remember our dreams because they carry a lot of messages, but it's an important function. We know from research that people who are not allowed to dream, they're allowed to sleep, but not to go to that dream state— what they do is they wake them up when they start to see the REM pattern show up, the rapid eye movement, which is dreaming. They would wake them up and then let them go back to deep sleep. It would impair their cognitive functioning. They couldn't problem solve.

Debra Maldonado  07:04
Even if you can't remember the dreams, just dreaming itself, even if you don't recall them, is still important stage.

Robert Maldonado  07:11
Dreaming is the second stage. The deep sleep state though is really extraordinary. When you don't allow a person to go into deep sleep in the lab, this is in research, they start to get ill, literally. Their body starts to break down. If it goes on long enough, they do that with animals, of course, not with humans. But when they continue that pattern of not being able to go into deep sleep, they die. Researchers want to find out what happens, they dissect the body and understand what's going on. Heart disease, arthritis, rapid aging happens, like the woman you were describing.

Debra Maldonado  08:27
She was only in her 30s but had the energy of an 80 year old, very heavy, a heavy mind, like when you get older and it's very lethargic, not very sharp, kind of dull cognition and just sad.

Robert Maldonado  08:52
It definitely impacts mood. That deep sleep you experience during the night, every 24 hours, hopefully, and hopefully you're getting at least seven hours of sleep, is necessary to restore the body physically, to reconstruct it from the inside out. All kinds of stuff is going on. Growth hormones kick in to repair the body tissue. A deep, restful sleep is so necessary for active, healthy life. In yoga philosophy that is described as sipping the nectar of immortality. Without sipping of the nectar, you start to get ill.

Debra Maldonado  09:50
That nectar of immortality is like vital force. The consciousness is a conscious world where it's more than just what we can see, we're actually tapping into that other place. It's having spiritual experiences every night. We just don't remember them.

Robert Maldonado  10:09
If you just consider phenomenologically what it is, we're in these different virtual realities experiencing color, sound, emotion, these 3D experience, and then waking back up.

Debra Maldonado  10:26
Life is a spiritual experience as well. But profound spiritual experience happens in deep sleep.

Robert Maldonado  10:35
Carl Jung says “We forget that throughout history, the way God spoke to his people was through dreams.” Most of the time, in all cultures, I would say. The fourth state described in yoga philosophy, in the Upanishads is called turiya, which means “the fourth”, but it is considered the consciousness, the pure awareness that allows these other three states to exist.

Debra Maldonado  11:12
Kind of like the ocean of consciousness. We emerge from that. Deep sleep touches the surface, in dreaming they get a little closer, and then the waking is above the surface.

Robert Maldonado  11:26
Waking is the furthest from that. That's why we require restorative energy to expand while we're awake and doing things. We start to get tired, we want to go back to sleep, to restore, to refuel.

Debra Maldonado  11:43
You hear people say “I only sleep four hours a night”, they're constantly chasing material things, super high achiever people. But is that really healthy? After a while they're going to suffer from that. Unless they do yoga during the day and some really deep restorative practices to balance out that lack of sleep. Would it be possible?

Robert Maldonado  12:09
The meditation practices are designed to consciously go into this deep state. It’s not deep sleep obviously, it's meditation. But you reach that deep level where you're able to take a drink from the nectar of immortality. A few hours of meditation has the same impact as eight hours of sleep. You can do it in a lot shorter time.

Debra Maldonado  12:40
But they're too busy making their deals to sit and meditate for hours maybe. But maybe that's how they balance it out. You hear a lot of people brag they only need a certain amount of sleep. I wonder what's really happening on the physiological level for them. 

INTERMISSION  12:57 
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Debra Maldonado  13:52 
Let's talk about people who can't get to this place. Everyone can relate to those times where you're worried about something or going through a change in your life, a transition, and you have a hard time sleeping. You're worried about something or yourself. It’s like you have pain or illness, you can't relax, your body is preventing you from sleeping. But then there's that other state where if it lasts longer than a couple months, a couple of weeks, it’s chronic, it's a sleep disorder.

Robert Maldonado  14:26
I have here a paper that mentions some of the sleep disorders. I'm going to mention three of them, they are general categories of sleep problems, you might recognize some of these problems in yourself. The first one is sleep related breathing disorders. We know obstructive sleep apnea. A lot of people report they're having sleep apnea, which means a cessation of breathing during your sleep.

Debra Maldonado  15:04
They've done sleep studies. Some people in my family had said they stopped breathing 12 times a night or something like that, that's not good. Some people have to, because of that, do the CPAP machine, which is helping them breathe and keeping them alive. It's good but it's still that intervention from the external.

Robert Maldonado  15:33
You're treating the problem, not the cause, not the source. You're not going to the source. We'll talk about how we approach these problems. The second was circadian rhythm, sleep-wake disorders. This would be shift workers who work at night. I used to work at night because I worked my way through college, working at hospitals. The night shift was easiest one for me. Nobody wanted to work it.

Debra Maldonado  16:09
Some people love the night shift because it's less dramatic. Although in the hospital, I'm sure it's probably more active time.

Robert Maldonado  16:17
It's intense, most of us have experienced some kind of jet lag. This is messing with our circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythm is an internal clock that keeps us on track. There's been research, a really interesting experiment one person did. What he did is he went into a tunnel where he couldn't see any light. He just recorded his sleep-wake cycle, when he would get tired and sleep, how long he would sleep and wake up. He wouldn't know what the time was. He couldn't see the light. He would record the the length of time, not the actual time. It verifies, and other experiments have verified there is an internal clock that plays out that rhythm. It does tend to synchronize with light patterns, the rising and setting of the sun. But when we're not able to see the rising and setting the sun, or we travel in different time zones, then our internal clock is confused, we experience that jet lag.

Debra Maldonado  17:55
We just went to Maine, it takes a couple of days to just get back to a sleep cycle that's balanced. Then when you come back, it’s the opposite. It is a very powerful clock we have in our system.

Robert Maldonado  18:16
You can imagine there are workers who work chaotic shifts, people that would rotate shifts. They’d work in the morning for a few weeks or months. Then they shift to 3 to 11, which is the evening shift, then to night shift. That's a terrible way to live because your internal clock would never be able to adjust and get used to a typical normal rhythm.

Debra Maldonado  18:43
Even people who travel for a living internationally, they're in different countries, waking up at different times. You can't just decide to sleep the whole day because your old timezone is nighttime. You have to adjust, and I'm sure that causes a lot.

Robert Maldonado  18:59
The third category is called parasomnias, abnormal sleep patterns. You're not sleeping well. Sleep terrors, common disorder, reported more and more, children, adults. This is where you wake up in the middle of the night and sweat. You were in some kind of danger, or it feels like you were in some kind of dangerous situation, but often you can't remember. You're in terror.

Debra Maldonado  19:37
Could it be a trauma that happened to you and you keep reliving it in your dream?

Robert Maldonado  19:43
We can't make that connection to say that caused it. But there's a strong correlation with trauma. People have experienced traumas. Not the same as nightmares, nightmares are a little bit different.

Debra Maldonado  20:04
I worked with children, a lot of times the kid would have a recurring nightmare, or they would dream of this monster. I’d have them do guided imagery around the monster and make it into something else. That would basically stop the pattern. It's helping the child be in control, they can change it into whatever they want. It's really interrupts kids’ sleep. Then they're afraid to go to sleep because they're afraid of having that dream again. It's a pattern.

Robert Maldonado  20:41
Sleepwalking. Most families have at least one person that at some point in their life was a sleepwalker. You told me a story of somebody who would get up and do a whole meal.

Debra Maldonado  20:58
A friend of mine, her client would wake up every morning, her kitchen was like she had a meal that night. It wasn't the dinner she had, it was something else. She realized every night she was getting up, sleepwalking, making a complete meal, eating it, and going to sleep, but not being conscious the whole time. She came to her to find out, how do I stop doing this because I'm starting to gain weight, I don't need this extra meal. Why am I doing this? Why am I waking up? You said everything's genetic. But a lot of times sleepwalking runs in families.

Robert Maldonado  21:37
There are a whole lot of disorders around rapid eye movement, disorders where maybe the individual acts out their dreams. In typical dreaming, the muscles are actually paralyzed, there's a mechanism that turns off the muscle, so you don't act out your dreams, you're essentially paralyzed. The only muscles that are not paralyzed are your eye muscles. Your eyes are darting around, looking at the objects in your dreams. But you're not able to move your body.

Debra Maldonado  22:11
Some people report sleep paralysis, where you wake up, but you're still half asleep and you can't move your body. It's a very scary place, to be what is that?

Robert Maldonado  22:22
It's precisely what you said. Your body is in REM mode, it is paralyzed. But your brain is awake. You're caught in between that stage. For all practical purposes, you're paralyzed, but you're awake.

Debra Maldonado  22:44
Almost like you woke up too fast or something? You didn't go through that REM state to get through this cycle. You switched on, but not all the mechanisms turned off yet.

Robert Maldonado  22:56
The ideal is to wake up from a deep sleep, or a stage one or two level, so that you weren't necessarily dreaming as you woke up but you were in sleep.

Debra Maldonado  23:13
I remember they had clocks, and my alarm does this too. I don't need an alarm anymore, I wake up the same time every day. If you have a pattern of time to go to sleep every day, it repeats it, you get into a rhythm. But they say that alarm clocks shouldn't have this blaring sound to wake you up, it should be gentle, let it get louder and louder, so you can enter the waking life in a more gentle way.

Robert Maldonado  23:42
Let's talk about what are some of the ways to approach the sleep problems in using the mind body philosophy. The idea that the mind and the body are one, and there's this deeper awareness in us that is above, or the foundation of both the mind and the body. Relaxation, that's a no brainer. Most people forget this principle, that if you know how to relax in a conscious way, meaning not by exhaustion, you have a way to relax yourself, the mind can guide the body into deep states of relaxation. Right now there's so many YouTube videos you can access that guide you through that deep relaxation. It's better to learn how to do it systematically. Some begin at the heads or at the feet. But it touches on every part of your body. You're consciously paying attention to it, you're either contracting and relaxing the muscles or simply paying attention to them and asking your body to relax.

Debra Maldonado  25:23
Progressive relaxation is from the top of the head down to the toes. You can do that with light, you can do it with imagining that part of your body being relaxed. At the end of this, I will give you my secret weapon to getting to sleep, when I'm worried about something it works like a charm. I worked with a lot of people with insomnia. Hypnosis is more than just giving them tools on how to relax, but finding out what is that reason why they're not falling asleep, getting to the root of anxiety, talking to the body, if it has one of the sleep disorders, it's not breathing properly, even psychologically, the terrors and anxiety that keeps waking them up, working with the core. The core is a psychological cause versus treating the symptom on a surface level. But relaxation works well, if you can start with that, it’s really powerful.

Robert Maldonado  26:28
Relaxation response is such a primal element of our mind body, we don't take advantage of it. Just like deep sleep, when we are in deep relaxation, there's a lot of repair going on, neurotransmitters and endorphins that make us feel really good are kicking in and doing great work in the body and the mind, they can work on mood disorders as well.

Debra Maldonado  27:05
Relaxation puts the body automatically back in homeostasis. It goes into a natural healing functionality where it's repairing and restoring the body. It also helps you emotionally stay calm and have a better peace of mind. And just overall joy, it feels like letting go.

Robert Maldonado  27:26
We know a lot of disorders now have to do with inflammation, and relaxation counters inflammation in the body, it allows it to relax, to turn off the fire a little bit, turn off the heat.

Debra Maldonado  27:45
You don't have to tell your body what to do as much. If you relax, the body's intelligence works in your favor. It has an intelligence that knows the perfect formula or prescription for you to return to health.

Robert Maldonado  28:01
Hypnosis is well documented, it begins with Freud and even before Freud, Freud learned it from Charcot, he was a French hypnotist who worked with a lot of severely disturbed individuals. Freud took it to another level where he started to use it as suggestion, guided imagery, as a way to help people deal with their mind in the context of psychoanalysis. But then it became its own thing because Freud dropped it. Other people picked it up or kept working with it. It's still with us today, well-documented, it is considered a mind body approach because you're tapping into the ability of the mind to speak to the body and suggest repair, betterment, less inflammation, pain, etc. Now guided imagery is considered distinct than hypnosis. Especially in the research is done separately. But it's a powerful tool we all have, and very few of us actually use it. In sports, it's a powerful technique they use to improve performance.

Debra Maldonado  29:48
They say Michael Jordan visualized every shot at every game. Wayne Gretzky used imagery. Tiger Woods had a hypnotherapist to work with him, to use guided imagery. It is so powerful, I have so many experiences personally, using it with clients and seeing a profound change in their health and sleep. Being able to see themselves in a beautiful place, letting go of the cares of the day and relaxing in that state where they can enter deeper sleep.

Robert Maldonado  30:30
Relaxation, hypnosis for insomnia or even for sleep apnea, although sleep apnea might require a little bit different approach. Guided imagery before you get to bed is very easy to do because you're already laying down and the lights are low or down or out. You're able to visualize. The more you can visualize relaxation, it's that counting sheep technique your grandmother taught you.

Debra Maldonado  31:05
I have a technique, it’s sort of like counting sheep. If you ever have trouble going to sleep, which we all have, imagine there are one hundred clouds in the sky. Each cloud has a number on it starting at 100, all the way down to one, you don't have to conceptualize all of them, just imagine all those clouds. What I want you to do is find cloud 100, start at the highest and work your way down. Imagine moving that cloud out of the sky, letting the cloud move away, say “Deeper relaxed”, then go to 99, say that number, move it out of the sky, “Deeper relaxed”. You're focusing your mind, it gets you out of whatever you're worried about or thinking. It's the ability to focus your mind, like a meditation. Usually by the time you get to 97, you're asleep. You don't have to worry about counting all of them. But there's so many you won't run out of numbers. It's really a nice way but you have to say “deeper relaxed”, you have to say the number, move it out. I use it every time I'm up worried about something or excited, sometimes you can't sleep because you have something exciting happening the next day, you're nervous about a presentation or a big event that's happening, and you're just too excited and amped up, use that really simple technique to go to sleep.

Robert Maldonado  32:39
The last one is yoga. By yoga we mean mental discipline, which is the original intention of yoga, to be able to work with the mind, so that it's not calling the shots but you're calling the shots from that deeper layer of being, pure awareness. In Ashtanga Yoga, the Eightfold Path, the asanas are definitely a part of it, the postures people take in yoga practices. Then it goes on to pranayama, breathing techniques that work on relaxation, they kick in the relaxation response, strengthen the body, activate neuronal systems from within to do their job properly. Some of the positions also actively bathe some of the glands in nourishing bloods, so that they're able to do their work properly. It goes on, of course, into the mind. Yoga is saying you have to prepare the body, you have to prepare the mind for reaching those deeper states of awareness that will allow you to see reality for what it is. After the pranayama the practice is to withdraw the senses. You're not caught up in the mind’s daily activities, you're able to bring it into a focal point and concentrate it, that's the next step. Once you withdraw the senses or you're able to withdraw the senses, you focus the mind on one particular object, thought, image, candle, whatever you want to do, but focus it and hold it still. It is an incredible ability, it doesn't take that much practice. A lot of people think it would take 20 years, but no, a few weeks of practice and you can start to see you are able to train your mind to sit still, to become focused. Then you're getting closer to meditation. That state of meditation is sometimes described as this continuous, unbroken flow of awareness, continuous stream of consciousness that's not disturbed by thoughts, emotions, it's a steady mind. Then, after that comes liberation, Samadhi.

Debra Maldonado  35:54
Are you saying they should do that before they go to sleep?

Robert Maldonado  35:57
I'm just talking about the practice. What it's doing to the mind body, it's revitalizing it, it's disciplining the mind from within, so that it’s functioning a lot better. It’s not only functioning at normal states of function, but it's taking it to its optimum skill level.

Debra Maldonado  36:26
Not just making you feel normal, but having extraordinary vitality, mental clarity, spiritual fulfillment, joy, bliss.

Robert Maldonado  36:39
Which is a holistic approach to the mind body. Yoga, I’d say, is the most powerful mind body system we know of because it addresses all those levels of existence. The physical, it's talking about not only proper behavior and moral behavior, but also observing your dietary habits, observing your sleep.

Debra Maldonado  37:06
How you're taking care of your body, drinking enough water, eating your vegetables, making sure you get by, making sure you're getting lots of vitamins that you need, your nutrients.

Robert Maldonado  37:20
Then through meditation, you are reaching those deeper levels of awareness where you're restored, where perhaps you don't need as much sleep.

Debra Maldonado  37:34
Or it could enhance your ability, because now your body has learned to crave it more and pull you there. It's like planting the treasure there, I want to go back every night to retrieve that immortality, sip from that nectar of immortality. Your body begins to want to go there because it feels the effect of it.

Robert Maldonado  38:01
It is a comprehensive approach, it gets to our Western diseases in a great way. If we look at modern medicine, it's very good at treating infectious diseases and emergency situations. But it's not very good at treating what is killing most people now.

Debra Maldonado  38:25
The long-term impact of stress, anxiety, depression, unhealthy eating, unhealthy lifestyle.

Robert Maldonado  38:35
Which are considered lifestyle diseases.

Debra Maldonado  38:38
Even during COVID, people were less active, not going to the gym as much because they wanted to stay isolated. They're working from home, so you're sitting on your bum all day. All those factors mixed with a stressful lifestyle that we have in the West. Perfect recipe for illness, and not only physically but feeling that lack of joy in life, lack of fulfillment, mental clarity and happiness.

Robert Maldonado  39:17
Back to sleep apnea because we mentioned it but didn't really talk about how to address it. Sleep apnea is correlated with belly fat, with other illnesses that might be going on in the body that are considered lifestyle diseases, something in the pattern of behavior, pattern of eating, pattern of not sleeping. It is playing into that disorder, sleep apnea, of cessation of breathing during sleep. The approach has to be a comprehensive one, it has to be a change in the patterns of your diet, your lifestyle, your exercise, your weight, something like that.

Debra Maldonado  40:29
Again, it's not just about taking care of the physical body, but taking care of your mind. What kind of stressors do you have in your life? What are you doing to deal with? Things that are upsetting to you? How do you work with your emotions? All of those play a part in your body's physiology.

Robert Maldonado  40:48
I went through a period of sleep apnea a few years ago, and I decided I'm going to try to take care of this by changing my lifestyle. Instead of depending on medication or the breathing apparatus, CPAP machines, I'm going to try to change it on my own. And it worked. If you pay attention to something, any symptom that appears in your body, whatever it is, if you pay attention to it, resolve to address it, to persist in it, because sometimes, it'll be difficult for you to find the solution.

Debra Maldonado  41:39
Sometimes it's trial and error, because some things that work for some people don't work for others. Everyone has a unique chemistry in their body, certain foods trigger them and other foods don't. It's a custom way, you have to know your body and pay attention to how you feel after you eat certain things, what happens when you sleep. When I have a coffee in the afternoon, I stay up later, stuff like that. 

Robert Maldonado  42:07
I’d say most people have difficulty with sleep apnea because they want a quick fix. They want the physician, the healer, the doctor to give them something and be done with it, solve the problem. But lifestyle changes are not that easy. You have to really look at what am I doing, what am I eating, what is my pattern of stress, managing stress management, managing anxiety, depression, whatever it is.

Debra Maldonado  42:44
We get stuck in our patterns. It's really hard to change. Even if we try or have a conscious desire to, it's really hard because conditioning is so powerful.

Robert Maldonado  42:54
But it's possible. If you're suffering from these disorders, do not give up. It does and will require some time because we're talking about lifestyle, not infection. It's not a bug. It's not a bacteria, it's not one thing. Lifestyle means lifestyle, the way you're living and expressing your life. Therefore, you're going to have to look at everything and be willing to make those changes. But if you're willing to make those changes, you'll get at it, you'll find a way to get healthy again.

Debra Maldonado  43:40
There's always that solution inside of you, your body has the key, the intelligence within you has the key to transcend anything. Just knowing that and not giving up when a certain mechanism or treatment didn't work or dietary change doesn't work, just keep going and be committed to that, it's there already. You just have to find it. The treasure is there, you just have to find where it is. That is the key.

Robert Maldonado  44:12
Managing stress, one of the big key issues or factors that will play into illness and wellness. Exercise, how much are you moving in your everyday life? Are you walking? Are you biking? Are you just sitting in your office working? You have to be realistic and observe yourself and say “I need to move, I need to find a way to move.” It doesn't have to be going to the gym. Find a creative way that works for you. Yoga of course is incredible because include that.

Debra Maldonado  45:01
Even as simple as just taking a walk. For me, it's not as much as exercise, but just mentally to take a walk and get away from your normal routine and clear your mind.

Robert Maldonado  45:16
Diet. What we put in our body becomes our body. The mechanism is that we put something in the body, the body breaks it down, tears it apart into molecules, and then uses those molecules to reconstruct the organs from within. You are made out of the food you eat, your body is made out of the food you eat.

Debra Maldonado  45:40
Next time you look at that greasy burger, say “Am I becoming a greasy burger? What is this doing to my body?” I think, a lot of times we think about what is happening in our mouth, the taste, the flavor. But what happens after you swallow, what happens inside the system that you're allowing into your temple?

Robert Maldonado  46:01
Think clean food, filtered water, organic, non-pesticide food if you can. And then sleep. We were talking about deep restorative sleep. Look at the patterns of your sleep. Are you getting seven hours of sleep? If not, think of a way to improve that.

Debra Maldonado  46:36
Next week, we are going to talk about how to deal with pain. We're not talking about emotional pain. We're talking about physical pain and how we can transcend pain and work with pain management, whether it's just simple headache, or chronic pain. Continue our mind body series. Thank you again for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. This is Debra and Rob, we'll see you next week. 

OUTRO  47:10 
Thank you for joining us and don't forget to subscribe to CreativeMind Soul Sessions. Join us next week as we explore another deep topic where you can consciously create your life with CreativeMind Soul Session. See you next time.