life coaching – Dr. Rachel

Wellbeing Tools to Thrive During Family Holiday Gatherings

Let’s be honest… the holidays can be a time of joy and connection but also bring challenges that test our emotional and mental well-being. Family dynamics can be triggering and difficult. By preparing with intentional tools and strategies, you can navigate family gatherings with greater ease, protecting your peace while making space for meaningful moments. Here’s how:

Draw Boundaries with Yourself

Setting boundaries is key to maintaining emotional balance. Decide ahead of time what behaviors, comments, or dynamics you are willing to tolerate, and commit to stepping away when those limits are crossed. If things become overwhelming, excuse yourself for a short break—a walk outside, or even five minutes of mindful breathing in the bathroom, can reset your mindset.
How-to: Practice a grounding exercise, like inhaling for four counts, holding for four, and exhaling for six. Keep a comforting mantra in mind, such as, “It’s okay to take care of myself.”

Don’t Engage in Triggering Conversations and Topics

Family gatherings often come with sensitive discussions, whether about politics, religion, or past grievances. Recognize when a topic is spiraling and consciously choose not to engage. You can redirect the conversation or politely excuse yourself.
How-to: Prepare a few neutral phrases, like “I’d rather not discuss that right now” or “Let’s focus on enjoying the day,” to pivot away from uncomfortable subjects.

Focus on the Positive and Find the Joy

Shift your attention to the aspects of the gathering that bring you happiness—whether it’s the food, traditions, or spending time with loved ones. Cultivating gratitude for these moments can help offset stress and negativity.
How-to: Take mental snapshots of moments that warm your heart. At the end of the day, jot down three things you’re grateful for to solidify the positive experience.

Limit Shared Time Based on Your Emotional Tolerance

You don’t need to stay longer than you’re emotionally comfortable with. Plan your visit in a way that works for your energy levels and be mindful of how long you can meaningfully engage before burnout sets in.
How-to: Use a timer or alarm as a gentle reminder to check in with yourself after a set amount of time. If you feel drained, it’s okay to leave earlier than planned.

Let Go of Trying to ‘Show Up Perfect’

The pressure to impress or live up to family expectations can be exhausting. Remember, you don’t need to prove your worth through perfection. Embrace authenticity and allow yourself to simply be present.
How-to: Before the gathering, write down one or two positive self-reminders to draw upon, such as “I am enough as I am,” to remind yourself in those moments when self-doubt creeps in.

Focus on Balance When It Comes to Food and Alcohol

Overindulging can amplify feelings of guilt or discomfort later. Instead, aim for balance—enjoy holiday treats without going overboard, and stay mindful of your alcohol intake to maintain emotional clarity.
How-to: Alternate alcoholic drinks with water or mocktails, and start your meal with a plate of veggies or protein to avoid overloading on sugar.

Eat and Move!

Both skipping meals and also staying sedentary after a big meal both can add fuel to the fire of emotional unbalance around family. With eating and then not moving your body, not only does this spike glucose levels but can take a toll on your energy and mood. When skipping meals before a big family gathering you risk showing up ‘hangry’ or having less emotional capacity for stressors that may arise. Nourish your body with balanced meals and incorporate movement to keep your spirits up.
How-to: Start the day with a short yoga flow or a brisk walk and ensure you don’t arrive hungry by having a light, nutritious snack beforehand. After your big holiday meal, take a 15–30-minute walk… this can provide valuable alone time to reset and rebalance or a fun and meaningful family activity.

Schedule Time After for Self-Care and Restorative ‘You Time’

Post-gathering recovery is just as important as preparation. Plan for self-care activities to decompress and recharge after the holidays.
How-to: Set aside an evening for activities you enjoy, like reading, journaling, or taking a long bath, and leave room for a good night’s sleep.

It’s Okay to Bow Out

If attending a gathering feels more harmful than helpful, give yourself permission to skip it. Your mental health and well-being come first.
How-to: Communicate your decision respectfully, offering an alternative to connect, such as a video call or a later one-on-one visit.

By embracing these tools, you can protect your mental health and emotional well-being while still engaging meaningfully with loved ones this holiday season. Remember, thriving during the holidays isn’t about perfection—it’s about prioritizing your peace and joy. Breathe & be intentional… you’ve got this!

Mental Detox, A Game Changer!

We can all relate to how toxic our thought life can be at times. We can easily get sucked into negative and spiraling thoughts. Anxiety filled thoughts. Fearful thoughts. Anger thoughts. Resentful thoughts and more. Once our thought life becomes toxic it sends signals not only to trigger emotions but also to trigger our fight or flight response. This slows digestion, reduces our ability to think with clarity and even disrupts our hormone balance and hormone production.

If you have ever heard the phrase ‘holding onto a resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die’? Yup, that is one hundred percent a reality within our physiological response to negative and toxic thoughts and thought patterns. Additionally, our self-talk or the thoughts we think about ourselves, when these become negative, they also have a toxic effect on our system. There are also real physical toxins that our mind and brain can be impacted by.

First, it is important to understand what is toxic to the mind (brain) and entire mental system (brain + though life + mindset)? Here are a few:

Environmental toxins (the air & pollutants)
Foods, beauty products and household products with harmful chemicals in them
Stress (mental, physical & emotional stress)
Negative thoughts (mind set, self-perception, self-talk & thinking patterns)

How toxins effect the mind (brain) and entire mental system (brain + though life + mindset) –

Negative and toxic thoughts and mindsets impact mental and physical health significantly! They even change your body Ph. level and the ability to digest and absorb nutrients properly
Impact brain health and can cause brain fog, cause headaches, lead to increased anxiety & depression as well as decrease overall brain function
Decrease the brains ability to make and balance hormones and neurotransmitters
Decrease the ability to mentally focus

Detoxing and cleansing the mind (brain) and entire mental system (brain + though life + mindset) requires both an outside-in approach AND an inside-out approach simultaneously!

Outside-in detoxing requires behavior changes, supplements and nutritional changes to eliminate toxins and also new, healthier choices.

Inside-out detoxing detoxing requires learning new tools (and applying them) to increase balance in your thought life, overcoming limiting beliefs about yourself and others as well as shifting your overall mindset towards positivity.

What are some of the benefits that you can experience after detoxing and cleansing the mind (brain) and entire mental system (brain + though life + mindset) –

A more peaceful thought life
Optimized brain function
Decrease in health issues
Decrease in anxiety and depression symptoms
More clarity
More joy!

I am so passionate about cleansing and rebalancing the WHOLE self; mind, body, heart & spirit that I created a FREE 30-Day program in partnership with Nupeutics Naturals. You can enroll HERE

Sometimes It’s Okay to Not Be Okay aka The Self-Care Slump

In the world of self-development, as we each adventure towards balance and our best selves it is easy to fall prey to perfectionism, especially when the going gets tough. In our culture what is the first thing we say when someone asks ‘how are you’? Fine, or even better… good. But we are not always good. I have to be authentic here, the more I was growing, somehow the less I felt it was acceptable for me to ever NOT be okay. That is a mindset that I recently discovered was lurking just below the surface for me. It was a completely unconscious belief that had somehow crept in and made a little nest in my unconscious mind.

The non-sense that belief created was that when I experienced something difficult and was having a hard time ‘rising to the challenge’, I found myself judging and even condemning myself. What the *%&#!!!!?!? I do not believe that it isn’t okay to give myself grace, I am not aligned with that type of self-judgement and harsh inner ciriticism… so why was I treating myself this way in the moments I was not feeling OKAY?

That’s when it hit me, yup… time to let go of some more limiting beliefs that are causing me pain and un-necessary suffering. So I got out the mental machete (the loving one made of unicorns and rainbows) and invited myself to gently cut those beliefs away through some powerful questioning… is it really true? Is it okay to not be okay sometimes? If so, how does that look, what can I give myself permission to do, be and experience exactly what and where I am?

Self-care and self-development is not a punishment or a realm where unrealistic expectations should be entertained, or acted upon. We have all heard ‘it’s a process’ or that balance may look different in different seasons of our life. I know I certainly subscribe to that and teach it as well! But what happens when we ‘seem to’ fall off the self-care and self-development wagon, or when life gets ugly, messy and painful for a season and it feels too hard to even show up, crack open our self-development tool kit, use our tools and take care of ourselves as our best selves would? Can it be okay to go through a tough season and simply allow ourselves to do our best… even if our best doesn’t look or feel like any ‘best’ we ever sought to achieve.

During some really dark times in my life, even recent ones, I have struggled with allowing myself to truly be human. Sometimes the grieving process is uncontrollably messy crying. Sometimes finding your way to the next version of yourself after a huge transition is bumpy, it is supposed to be, life is a grand experiment.

Hang a metaphorical ‘under construction’ sign on yourself and give yourself permission to BE IN PROCESS. This stuff takes time. That isn’t an excuse to give up on growth or showing up for yourself to do the deep work. It is acceptance that today’s steps for growth may be very, very limited and that’s okay for today.

Let’s all try to remember (myself included) that you are not broken. You do not need to fix yourself or change yourself in order to be worthy of love & acceptance. Your true self is perfect. It’s a matter of returning to wholeness, balance & alignment through self-development vs. Self-punishment. Be kind to yourself.

How Did You Get To Live Your Dream?

In a recent interview I was asked, “How did you get here, how did you get to live your dream?”

That was such a powerful question and one that people often don’t share the answer to once they have ‘made it’ to a certain level of success. Not that I have achieved all of my dreams yet, but I am solidly on my path, earning a living at doing what I love AND making a positive impact in the world.

With the end of 2017 nearing and many of us casting our big dreams and vision for 2018 I have been thinking quite a bit about the steps I have taken in my career. I have been thinking about what has worked, what hasn’t and what I want to create or expand into in this new year.

That being said, I wanted to share with each of you how I answered the powerful question I mentioned above…

Don’t forget to stay connected with my through social media:

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

Click HERE to view the full 3 minute video!

Building a Healthy Relationship with Fear

The emotion of fear gets a bad rap. As a teacher, writer and coach I have seen, read and heard countless blogs, posts, articles, books and conversations about how fear must be eradicated and removed from life. Let’s take a quick step back and access this from a psychological and biological position.

All emotions are responses that are wired into our makeup and are part of the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences.

Fear is one of the largest tools for feedback to ensure safety and survival.

It is impossible to remove our ‘fight or flight’ responses.

When we have a healthy relationship with fear it can be a guide versus a roadblock!

So why can fear be so awful and crippling at times? How can we learn to harness this normal emotion to better serve us? How can we work with fear versus against it? How can we better understand ourselves and our life through fear? How can we move beyond the negative impacts of fear? How can we experience and create a healthier and more balanced relationship with fear?

When we have an unbalanced or unhealthy relationship with fear it can block us from moving forward, having clarity, making good choices, effectively solving problems and overcoming life’s challenges, stressors and obstacles.

First, let’s understand health fear…

Fear is a response that is meant to warn us and keep us safe. Unfortunately, many people have become ‘triggered’ into a fight or flight or fear based state 24/7 and thus respond to non-threatening issues as if they were life threatening on a physiological level. This means that the things that may not normally cause fear or stress do.

Let’s try a shift in our perspective about fear…

What if, just what if FEAR was actually there to help you?

What if FEAR was trying to work for your highest good?

Here are some simple steps to begin shifting your relationship with FEAR:

Reset

Pause and reset versus reacting to fear.

Things like meditation, yoga and even simple breathing exercises can help us get back to a neutral place which will better enable us to evaluate our fear more effectively.

Ask Yourself Powerful Questions

Engage your brain in order to get clarity.

Instead of allowing your mind to run away with the fear, as yourself powerful questions that will lead to self-discovery, effective problem solving and solutions. Questions like, ‘why am I feeling fear’, ‘what feedback or alert message is fear trying to share with me’?

Assess

Analyze the situation.

Look at the situation that is causing the fear objectively and try to see the bigger picture, the broader meaning or the direction it is leading you towards and ask yourself WHY & HOW.

Breath Through It

Process and release the negative aspects of the emotion while keeping the lesson or alert.

Feeling our feelings, then processing them and letting it go or releasing it is an important way to not only move forward more effectively but also to bring more balance to you mentally, emotionally, physically and even spiritually.

Make a Plan

Based on your self-discovery and analysis make a plan of actionable steps.

Write out very specific action steps to take to begin moving towards solutions or achieving goals.

Get Support

Gain the tools, techniques, mentors, friends or coaches to help you!

Don’t go it alone! Everyone can relate to feelings of fear and also sometimes getting stuck because of them. Talk about it with friends and loved ones, research tools and techniques or even see a life coach (preferably an Integrative Life Coach iwacoaching.com) who can help you become more equipped to handle fear and stressors as well as to overcome their negative effects and successfully move forward.

Living A Holistic Life

Living A Holistic Life

By Rachel Eva, C.HT, M.NLP, MTILC

Founder of IWA (Integrative Wellness Academy), Integrative Life Coach & Health Practitioner

We hear the word holistic and holism tossed around a lot in integrative wellness and natural medicine. These terms have already flooded the health and wellness markets and made their way into popular culture.

But what exactly does this mean?

What is ‘holism’ and how can it be ‘lived’ in everyday life?

As the founder of IWA (Integrative Wellness Academy), myself and the IWA team trains and certifies thousands of integrative life coaches each year. As part of how we teach our students to coach their clients we educate them on holism as a core element to help their clients achieve health, success and balance through applying ‘holism’ through the Holistic Life Model, which I will share with you!

First, let’s define holistic and holism so you can get some simple clarity. According to dictionary.com, here are the definitions:

Holistic –

Philosophy – characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

Medicine – characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors, rather than just the physical symptoms of a disease.

Holism –

The theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts. Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology.

What does this mean in more simplistic and applicable terms?

Every part of us, our minds (mental), bodies (physical), emotions (emotional) and spirits (spiritual) are interconnected and have an effect on each other, as well as an effect on each of the major areas of life; health, career & finances, family & relationships, spirituality & self-development. Furthermore, each of the major areas of our life have an effect on all aspects or parts of self (the 4 systems); mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. We need to VIEW and CARE care for the whole picture collectively, versus just a few parts in order to live the best life possible.

Before I dive in and introduce you to the Holistic Life Model, I need to further share my definitions with you for the four systems or parts of self:

Mental –

The Mental System is your thought life, including your self-perception and thought patterns as well as our beliefs and conscious perceptions. This is also the way we view other things out in the world.

Emotional –

The Emotional System are your feelings and your emotions. It’s also your relationships with other people and also the relationship you have with yourself.

Physical =

The Physical System is your physical health, as well as the tangible physical things you have in our life.

Spiritual –

The Spiritual System is our true-self, our personal development, connection to community, world and our connection to a higher power, whatever that definition is or is not for you.

The Holistic Life Model

The holistic Life Model is living your life, caring for, balancing and bringing health to all aspects of self and all major areas of life, in other words, caring for the whole self with a ‘big picture’ approach.

So how exactly can you begin to care for and bring balance to all of these aspects of self? Here are a few steps to begin moving your life towards aligning with and practicing the Holistic Life Model:

Set an intention to pay attention to and care for ALL of the systems/aspects of self and all of the major areas of life
Put this intention into daily practice through actions!
Make a ‘to do’ list of actions you can take to bring more wellness, health and balance to each system and to each major area of your life
Schedule it! Put these actions steps into your schedule and stick to them

Remember it’s a process, not an event and the goal is to MOVE towards what you want to have, do, be, experience and achieve!

How Your Yes’s & No’s Shape Your Future

The third or fourth word that many people learn to speak is either yes or no. The first words are often mamma, dada and if a person has a dog, then dog is number three, followed by yes and no.

Yes and no are two words in the English language we learn early on and use to exercise our power, express our needs and our preferences.

A yes or a no can have a significant effect on how we create what we experience in life. Often this is approached unintentionally from a place that is not rooted in self-love or honesty with oneself.

When we say yes to something we are aligning ourselves with that. A yes is also an invitation for it to be in your life and in a sense, it is agreeing with it. A person, place, thing or situation such as a request or voiced expectation from a loved one, diagnosis from a doctor or even an invitation to go on a date, gives us the opportunity to be intentional about what we allow and create in our lives.

One of my favorite and self-loving things to say is ‘I’m going to say no to this so that I can say yes to something else’. Another favorite is when I am told what I should do, before I say yes to that or agree with it, I allow myself the time and space to consider what has been shared with me as feedback. Then I determine what, if any, of that feedback will be helpful for me to take and incorporate into my life.

Give yourself permission to change your mind. You can try on a yes for size and discover it needs to become a no and vice versa.

When we say yes because we feel like we should, like it is expected of us, but it is not our truthful response, we are essentially stepping out of alignment with our true selves and saying yes to things that conflict with our truth. When we are in conflict, even on an unconscious or subconscious level, it creates chaos, unhappiness and many other problems in our lives.

We have all heard the famous saying ‘be true to thine self’ – however many of us don’t realize the consequences and disconnection from self we experience when we choose to say yes when our truth is a no.

We can still show up for our responsibilities and obligations, however we can do so in ways that do not conflict with our personal values and our authentic truth. Boundaries are helpful in managing this effectively.

In addition to setting healthy boundaries for yourself (not creating rules and controlling others – see my blog on clearing toxic relationships and boundaries) it is also important to ask ourselves the following questions when presented with invitations to make choices and express a yes or a no:

Will saying yes or saying no serve me more?
Will saying yes or saying no lead towards balance and harmony in myself and in my life?
Do I want to say yes or say no? (Be honest with yourself) and then ask yourself ‘Why?’.
Which answer helps me best take care of myself while also showing up for life?
What does my gut say?
What’s the bigger picture? What will saying yes or saying no invite into my life and create, what will it lead away from?

Asking ourselves these questions helps us move beyond any beliefs or perspectives that are limiting us. It helps to step away from expectations that do not serve us (typically self-inflicted expectations) and gain clarity about the bigger picture of what we are creating and moving towards in our lives.

I invite you to let go of that which no longer serves you and to give yourself permission to say yes or to say no. Practicing intentionality towards your yes’s and no’s will empower you to create the life you want and to decrease the stress and negative things impacting your life.

Let all of your answers come from honoring your higher self, your truth. Boldly curate your life with intentional yes’s and intentional no’s.

Cart

Wellbeing Tools to Thrive During Family Holiday Gatherings

Mental Detox, A Game Changer!

Sometimes It’s Okay to Not Be Okay aka The Self-Care Slump

How Did You Get To Live Your Dream?

Building a Healthy Relationship with Fear

Living A Holistic Life

How Your Yes’s & No’s Shape Your Future

Newsletter

Categories

About Rachel Eva

Meta