I traveled last week to Coral Gables, Florida to take part in my friend’s event “Stress Less Sunday.” It was a long drive, but I was excited to be a part of her vision of offering donation-based self-care techniques and education to the community.
I thought I came to share an offering of yoga, but I was wrong. I was approached by a fellow participant, a healer named Silvania from Peru. She immediately noticed I was carrying energy in my heart chakra that was not mine, and offered me a healing to help cleanse this. She was generous with her time, and I still feel the benefits of this healing more than a week later. Silvania recommended that I take a month to cleanse my kidneys, which were feeling over stressed in part due to my love affair with cheese. (Tell me I’m not the only one!!) She gave me a recipe for tea, which I’ll share below, and told me to avoid dairy for a full month.
Being a student of life, I began to research how else I can support my kidneys using the tools of yoga, reiki, meditation, and diet. Here’s what I learned:
Your kidneys cleanse and filter impurities from your blood. They get stressed from a rich diet high in saturated fat and from high stress. When your kidneys get overloaded, you might begin to experience intense feelings of fear and panic. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle as your body stays in a stressed-out state. Working with the tools of pranayama and meditation helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system and thus reduce stress.
Avoiding dairy and eating a predominantly vegetarian diet paired with more water and tea provides the alkaline environment your kidneys will thrive in. There are also specific asana, or yoga postures, which support healthy kidneys.
I’ll be working with variations of sequences for healthy kidneys all week in my public classes. Follow the short flow below if you want something to practice at home!
