Waters of Oshun

By: Chanelle Noray

Summer is right around the corner and everyone is doing whatever it takes to shed those extra winter pounds and get those warm weather beach bodies in shape. While physical cleansing is always a must, we must not forget about the importance of mental healthiness too. The brain is the hardest working organ in the human body. It continually rewires and adapts itself and grows stronger through action and perception. Mental decline is mainly caused by diseases, age related issues, and lack of mental exercise.

Here are 7 easy tips and activities that can help keep the brain active:

1. Pick up a New Hobby

Consider your brain as a muscle. Similar to physical fitness, your body tends to feel the “burn” when you keep those lazy muscles active. This is just like the brain. Find new opportunities to flex your brain. Play Scrabble. Do a word search or crossword puzzle. If you are really feeling motivated, try learning a different language

2. Break Routines

Activate your underused nerve pathways and give those redundant nerve cells a break. Do this by taking a different route to work. Try eating with your opposite hand or shopping at different malls and grocery stores. It may seem pointless or time consuming but shaking up those monotonous routines helps to strengthen and grow brain cells.

3. Use Your Weaker Hand

Although it may feel uncomfortable or awkward, using your opposite hand helps your brain learn a small yet powerful skill. Switch the hand you normally use to operate your computer mouse. Switch your hand during dialing and texting or using the TV remote. Force yourself to use your opposite hand during everyday routines.

4. Combine Your Senses

Do you ever wonder why your vision is 20/20 but you can barely hear police sirens? Or your sense of smell is super sensitive but you can barely taste the ingredients that heightened your nostrils? Again, this is from overworking those same cells with the same boring routines. Listen to music while cooking. Tie your shoes or button your shirt with your eyes closed. Choose outside seating during the nicer days while dining out. Challenge those underused senses to catch up to the stronger ones.

5. Walk More

To keep that blood pumping, we are supposed to take 10,000 steps every week. To be honest, many of us only walk from the house to the car. Walking as low as a total of 30 minutes per day helps improve learning ability and concentration. So park and ride and commute to work. Park farther away from store entrances and take a walk to the entrance. Invite friends to walk with you. There’s a reason why people walk to “clear their head.” Walking is great for the brain and it increases blood circulation and oxygen.

6. Engage in Sexual Activity

If you are sexually active, engaging in sexual activityincreases the brain’s dopamine levels. Dopamine is connected withbehavior, mood, and perception. Even small shifts in dopamine have vasteffects on your body. Most people think orgasms happen between yourlegs when actually they occur between your ears. The brain’s nucleus andcortex impulses thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. At its mostbasic level, sex activates that dopamine which boosts decision-makingskills, survival skills, and happiness. With low dopamine levels expect tonotice restless sleep, low libido, lack of ambition, depression, oraddictions.

7. Exercise

We all know that daily exercise and physical cleansing is great for the heart and brain. Frequent exercise increases life expectancy by 10 to 13 years. Exercisers learn faster, retain information longer, think clearer, and bounce back faster from brain injuries or head concussions. Calories burned and miles ran or walked can directly correlate back to increased brain cell growth.

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1. Expect to spend 40 minutes on your detox bath, as the first 20 minutes are said to help your body remove the toxins, while the second 20 minutes are to allow the body to absorb the minerals in the water.
2. Fill your tub with comfortably hot water, using a chlorine filter if possible.
3. Add 2 cups of Epsom Salts. 
4. Add 1 to 2 cups or more of Baking Soda, aka sodium bicarbonate. This is said to help eliminate the chlorine in the water, as well as soften the water, and help the body to absorb the magnesium. 
5. Know that Epsom Salts and Baking Soda bath is a detox bath in, and of itself, other items can be added for further effects. Ground ginger, or fresh ginger tea both work quite well. The ginger is heating to the body and may cause your skin to turn slightly red for a few minutes, so be careful with the amount you add. Depending on the capacity of your tub, and your sensitivity, anywhere from 1 tablespoon to 1/3 cup can be added. Most people sweat profusely with the addition of the ginger, and if you wrap your body in a blanket immediately after getting out of the tub, you can continue to detoxify through perspiration for another couple of hours. This is especially beneficial if you are trying to rid the body of a bug of some sort, like the flu, or a cold.
6. Add aromatherapy oils; this is optional, but there are many oils that will help the bath to be a pleasant and relaxing experience, such as lavendar, or ylang ylang, or those that will assist in the detoxification process such as tea tree or eucalyptus. 20 drops is sufficient.
7. Swish all of the ingredients into the tub, and soak for as long as you can, preferably 20 minutes. You should start sweating within the first few minutes, and the longer the better, up to 20 minutes. If you feel too hot, start adding cold water into the tub until you cool off. Sit in the cool water another 20 minutes, if you can. When you get out of the tub, move slowly and carefully, as your body has been working hard and you may get lightheaded or feel weak and drained.

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Try creating a healing bath by adding these ingredients to your bath water. 

• rose water
• orange blossom water
• gardenias
• lavender oil/lavender extract

Generally, Rose Waterand rose oil, is used in many therapeutic preparations, specifically for face and skin treatment. Pure natural rose water is 100% free from artificial ingredients and perfumes and is used as a facial cleanser. Cleopatra, famous for her ancient beauty secrets, used rose water in various face masks. It also prevents aging by reducing wrinkles and tightening skin pores. Dry skin can be hydrated by using rose water as a moisturizer. Rose Water cleanses the skin, removing dirt, oil and other pollutants from deep inside the skin pores. It acts as a cleansing agent as well as a toner. 

Orange flower water, or orange blossom water, is a clear, perfumed distillation of fresh bitter-orange blossoms.

Lavender Extraction or Lavender Infusions serve as a healing agent for soaks. Lavender infusions reduce headaches and aid in lucid and enjoyable dream sleep, alleviates anxiety and improve sleep quality.

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Stay tuned as we post some of our most helpful Detox methods and recipes. We welcome you to share some of your favorite methods on our Facebook page. Click the comment link below to share your light with us.

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Try these simple “quick meals” to make small changes in your diet.

• Yogurt with fresh fruit and granola 
• Whole grain pancakes or waffle 
• Oatmeal, grits with dried fruit 
• Homemade soups with beans, veggies and grains
• Cornbread or Corn Cakes 
• Lean meat stews or soups
• Steamed vegetables and salads with protein
• Sweet potatoes/yams vs white potatoes

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It made me think of my own mother. What things she saw her mother doing as a child. Whatever passion’s my grandmother had chosen to follow or hadn’t; what she had been allowed to do. I thought about the ways she may have wanted to express her creativity. What things she wanted to do but didn’t get a chance to. I thought about her as a woman taking on the world. A woman first, not just a mother.

I thought about what particular hardships my mother had faced; not to mention the ones I’ve never known about. I remember speaking with my mother once about her early desire to pursue a career in cosmetology. She told me she has saved up tuition and made plans to register for classes. That was, ofcourse, until my father convinced her that spending such a huge amount of money on something like that would be a “waste” and persuaded her otherwise. She said that was one thing she regretted. Not following that passion, and feeling the sting of unfulfillment.  

I must admit, alot of what I have thought about my mother up until recently had all been filtered through the reality that she was MY mother. That she was somehow in debt to me. I thought little about her life apart from my own. I could attribute this to immaturity or perhaps the natural template of the childhood spirit; living revolving around “me”. As children we tend see our mothers in one light.

Everything exists under the scope of her life in correlation to YOURS.

It isn’t until we become women ourselves that we realize the separate togetherness of motherhood. 

I thought of Walker’s work in particular because as this work suggests, the creativity of black women has survived great adversity, oppression and hardship. Through it all, the will of the black woman’s creativity survived. Persevering; presenting itself in the form of delicious home cooked meals and quaint backyard gardens. 

It helped me to see my mother as someone who had sacrificed. Someone who had desire and passion. A woman who had made mistakes, poor decisions — a woman who cried and laughed and cried some more. A woman who had loved and lived and believed in something —anything —in herself, in her potential, in the tiny voice inside tell her to surge forward. She was a woman who had danced her life, not some perfect ideal I had made up in my head. She was reality. What had been her garden? What seeds had she planted? 

I realized that in the “search our of our mother’s gardens’ what we really find is our self. Or is it the other way around? Do we find our mother’s gardens in the route to creating our own?

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