Spring is a time for renewal, making it the perfect opportunity to refresh your skincare routine and embrace practices that enhance your overall well-being. From adjusting your skincare to warmer temperatures to exploring emotional and spiritual healing, this guide offers insights and tips to help you thrive.
Skincare for Warmer Days
Warmer temperatures naturally increase moisture levels in our skin by boosting oil production. This is a great time to look at our skincare routine and possibly switch from layering rich creams to serums, facial oils, and water creams. Spring also means more time outside enjoying the elements, which means paying extra attention to any resurfacing or sun-sensitizing products you may be using.
Recommended Skincare Products
- Glyco Pads by Spa Technologies: A peel pad for weekly home use that consists of glycolic, lactic, and salicylic acids, plus mineral-rich water and seaweed extracts to minimize dryness and help balance the skin. This product is great for smoothing the texture, deep cleansing, pore minimizing, exfoliating, and clarifying.
- Vitamin C Advanced Wrinkle Repair Remedy Serum by Naturopathica: This serum has a powerful blend of 15% L-ascorbic acid, Vitamin E, and Oat beta-gluten. Hyaluronic acid helps increase hydration and calm the skin.
- Oxygenated Renewal Complex By Spa Technologies: 100% active ingredients! This anti-aging serum provides a powerful punch with the use of pharmaceutical liquid oxygen, hyaluronic acid, mineral rich seaweeds, Vitamin C esters, and Astaxanthin. Clinical studies show that with a continued 90-day use, you could see a 33% increase in collagen & elastin, as well as an immediate 15% increase in volume upon application.
- Plant Stem Cell Serum by Naturopathica: This powerful treatment serum helps to smooth the appearance of fine lines and rejuvenates the skin. Echinacea, butterfly bush, and helichrysum help to fortify the skin, provide soothing and anti-inflammatory properties, increase hydration, and protect skin from photo-aging.
- Oxygenated Marine Peptide Cream: This nourishing anti-aging cream helps repair and strengthen the skin. This oil is abundant in vitamins and mineral-rich plant oils. The essential oils of orange blossom, clary sage, lavender, and geranium along with 200 mgs of CBD oil, and Vitamin C & E provide a brilliant anti-inflammatory benefit. Pro tip: Facial oils are best applied to damp skin after facial mists and serums.
- Eco Defense Daily Moisturizer SPF 25 by Spa Technologies: This every day, lightweight moisturizer with a physical block SPF will be your new favorite!
Nourishing Your Body: Breakfast and Smoothie Recipes
Mornings can be a vulnerable time, nutrition-wise. Having an array of easy, nutrition-packed breakfast options ensures a fulfilling, nourishing foundation for your day.
Dream State Granola Bowl
Featuring our house-made hempseed + chia granola, anti-oxidant rich bee pollen, organic berries, & coconut yogurt. This breakfast bowl is packed with body-loving nutrition.
Blueberry Basil Smoothie
A simple and refreshing smoothie to give your skin a glowing boost. Enjoy this Blueberry Basil Smoothie filled with power-packed omega-3 fatty acids, collagen-boosting nutrients, vitamin c, and more.
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- Place all ingredients into a blender in the order listed.
The Wellness of WE: Global Wellness Day
Every day is Global Wellness Day and that tends to encompass a personal journey. Today feels like a good day to remember something that inspires our mission. We live in a fundamentally interconnected world. From the air that we breathe to the food that we eat, from our supply chains to the technology that keeps us connected during this time of physical distancing. The basic truth is: we belong to each other. Each day, we co-create this field environment that we live in. Our thoughts, what we say, and certainly what we do are all contributing. So, on this Global Day of Wellness, perhaps it is a good time to make sure what you are feeding the environment are the seeds that you wish to grow.
In celebration of Global Wellness Day, CIVANA is providing a four-part “mini-retreat” focused on our holistic 4-pillar approach to wellbeing: fitness & movement, personal growth & discovery, spa, and culinary.
Gratitude Unlocks the Fullness of Life
Nearly 20 years of formal research has validated what those who regularly practice this already know, an attitude of gratitude has the capacity to improve physical health, enhance psychological resilience, and increase our sense of social connection. At CIVANA we begin and end each day with our daily set/reset ritual, creating time and space to be present, together. Begin your morning by simply listing three things you intend or expect to be grateful for today.
Aqua Therapy Circuit
Enjoy this at-home method of our very own Aqua Therapy Circuit.
- Encase yourself in a warm shower – if you can close the door to enhance steam, that is helpful. Remain in your warm element until your body feels like it has reached its limit.
- Immediately exit the hot water and submerge your feet in a cold plunge of water that reaches from your feet to mid-calf. Do this until it feels like you can no longer stay.
- Remove your feet from the cold and notice your body from the inside out – what is the quality of your breath like? Your heart rate should be elevated; this is where the immunity benefits rush in. Rest and hydrate while you allow your body to naturally warm to room temperature.
Harnessing the Power of Rituals: Full Moon Ceremony
Actively inhabit this moment in time by setting the intention to transform through adversity. We can simultaneously appreciate the beauty of this bright full moon while consciously cultivating a strong balance between our intuition and inner resilience or fortitude. Powered by fixed Taurus, Scorpio will illuminate what Pluto in retrograde attempts to keep hidden from our awareness.
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Items needed for the ceremony:
- Crystals, malas, or a pendulum – the type of crystal or precious bead you use is entirely personal depending on what you are working on – let your intuition guide you.
Ritual Steps:
- Reflect & Release: on your first piece of paper, write down anything you are ready to let go of. When you feel like you have everything accounted for, put your pencil down. Standing over the fire source, hold the folded up paper across your heart, and genuinely thank everything you have written down for what it taught you.
- Call-In: on your second piece of paper, write down anything you are ready to bring into your life. Remember to be as specific as possible – the universe is always conspiring on your behalf, so be clear about what you really want. When you feel like you have everything accounted for, put your pencil down. Standing over the fire source, take another deep breath and drop your folded up paper into the fire stating out loud or to yourself one word that captures that which you hope to cultivate before the paper reaches the fire. State aloud something along the lines of, “I release all that is needed for my intention to manifest to my angels and to the universe.
- Connect: on your final piece of paper, bring to mind someone who could not be with you at your ceremony and write down a wish or offering you have for them. When you feel like you have everything accounted for, put your pencil down.
A perfect way to complete a ceremony like this is to properly hydrate and to draw yourself a bath with salts to allow anything remaining to wash away.
Tending to Your Emotional Wellness
How often do you tend to your emotional wellness? Perfect health is the result of all four bodies being in alignment: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
Four Practices to Boost Your Emotional Wellness
- Make friends with your feelings. ALL your feelings are part of you, they are all equally valid and deserving of your love and respect, and they all have something valuable to tell you.
- But don’t be ruled by them. It is also in our power to digest the information they have for us, thank them for their assistance, and choose the most empowered action for us in the moment.
- Practice cognitive resonance. Cognitive RESONANCE on the other hand, is when we align our thoughts, our words, and our actions, so that, ultimately we are living in truth and harmony with who we truly are.
- Listen to your dreams. Our dreams is literally where our subconscious mind speaks to us, meaning our emotional and spiritual self. Keeping a dream diary and noting the FEELINGS attached to different images etc., can give deep insight into situations you feel confused or overwhelmed by in your waking life.
Mental Health Wellness Tips
Connecting to Feminine Energy
The Earth needs empowered feminine energy like never before. To show up as a woman in the world, you have to understand that first and foremost you are WOMAN. Imagine what it would be like to feel worthy, beautiful, loved, and important without needing to change or maintain anything. What if no matter what you did, no matter how you looked, no matter what happened to you, you understood that these essential things were always yours?
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Activation: Grace of God Meditation
- Mantra: Bhand Jammee-ai
- Crystals: Chrysocolla, Ruby, Larimar, Rose Quartz
Finding Your Goddess
Finding the goddess is really just about connecting with the parts of you that feel beautiful and graceful. A perfect way to do this is through dancing. Put on music and just let it move you. Raise the vibration even higher by wearing something silky or adorning yourself with jewelry.
- Mantra: Adi Shakti
- Crystals: Moonstone, Mother of Pearl, Sapphire
Making Friends with Death
Making friends with death is about inviting back all the parts of ourselves we have exiled. It’s an invitation back into integrity and into wholeness. Explorations into this dark space can start by just allowing yourself to really be in the unknown.
Activation: Sit in silent meditation
Sit in silent meditation, unmoving, with your eyes closed for 20 minutes per day. See what comes up with curiosity, rather than fear.
- Mantra: Kal Akal
- Crystals: Black Tourmaline, Obsidian, Black Fluorite
Aligning with Feminine and Masculine Energies
We all have feminine and masculine energy. The key is to know when each is useful. Masculine energy is essential in order to manifest your creativity and turn your feminine force into action and form. But too much masculinity can show up as disconnection, rigidity, aggression, or irritation. Too much femininity arises through overly-emotional reactions, indecisiveness, confusion, or an inability to take action. If you’re experiencing either of these, it’s time to call your neglected side back to the table.
Feminine Activation
- Try reading or writing poetry, dancing, or singing. Focus on receiving. Do a few minutes of left nostril breathing.
- Mantra: Adi Shakti
- Crystals: Moonstone, Pearl, Rose Quartz
Masculine Activation
- Get physical - go for a run, take a kickboxing class or do a few minutes of Sat Kriya or right nostril breathing.
- Mantra: Har
- Crystals: Black Lava or Tiger’s Eye
The Power of Tapas
The word ‘tapas’ is traced to the third of Patanjali’s Niyamas. Traditionally, it is most often translated as meaning ‘austerity’ or ‘discipline’ or ‘heat of effort’. The word tapas itself is derived from the root Sanskrit verb ‘tap’ which means ‘to burn’.
When I think about tapas now, I can’t help but think that this aspect of yogic philosophy has propelled me (without knowing before I came to yoga) in most significant decisions I have made thus far off my mat in my adult life. It is this principle -above all others - that propelled me to leave my private law practice for the public service 18 months ago.
In closing, it struck me this past week just how important it is that one not just come to their mat to do yoga - but to do yoga in the fullest expression of one’s Sankalpa (intention) and in the fullest expression of their personal tapas. May all of us seek to incorporate the principle of tapas more fully in all aspects of our lives.