SWIHA Blog

“If you give thanks every day, every day is then Thanksgiving!”

Many scientific studies have been done documenting the benefits of gratitude and the practice of giving thanks including a study conducted by the Association of Psychological Science. Their findings showed those who had deeper, vulnerable conversations and made the effort to socialize more frequently with others were significantly and statistically happier and healthier.

Let’s look at six easy steps to ensure your health and happiness using the acronym THANKS.

Rima Desai is respected in the field of Psychology, holding a Master’s degree from her home country of India and fully dedicating her career to helping others. When she moved her family to the United States in 2011, however, her education was not able to be used in her new home and she couldn’t do the work she loved as a counselor.

“My life and my daughter’s life were endangered in massive mob riots in Africa. We had burnt up all our savings just to migrate to the USA. We were looking for a secure place to live,” Rima tells us, “I faced a lot of depression from culture shock. Being a person who is very passionate about psychology and my work, it was a huge blow to my well-being.

The brain is such a complicated machine that we’ve barely scratched the surface of its mysteries. In the last five years, however, many researchers have focused heavily on how our minds are affected by things such as nutrition, environmental pollution, screen time and multi-tasking. They’re exploring beyond mental health and now observing brain health—the ways in which the organ is physically responding to our fast-changing lifestyle.

With every new study, science uncovers a facet of the relationship between our body and our body. Optimal brain health will be at the forefront of wellness in the upcoming years, so today we'll look at some ways that holistic healing can help support mind, body and spirit.

For over two decades, Southwest Institute of Healing Arts has held the belief that healing takes place within mind, body and spirit. After all, it makes intuitive sense when you consider that we are multifaceted beings with many different energetic components.

We’re thrilled to finally see allopathic medicine and modern neuroscience embrace holistic modalities and confirm what we’ve felt all along: that we must treat the full being for true transformation to occur.  From major corporations employing nutrition advisors and life coaches, to chiropractors partnering with energy workers, we see traditional and modern healing coming together and igniting major change!

Our bodies are filled with electrical and chemical impulses that keep our brain and body in constant communication. Most of the time, we actively decipher the information and can quickly interpret it. A common example of this is when we accidentally touch a hot surface, our body moves itself away without a conscious thought to do so.

If you’re a mother, a woman going through a divorce, or struggling with relationship problems, Life Coach Rima Desai wants you to realize that you are not alone. Growing up in India, Rima felt deprived of love and burdened with responsibility from a young age. She has experienced first-hand what it’s like to feel constantly overwhelmed, underappreciated, hopeless, depressed, and abandoned, and she knows the impact of negative self-judgement and what it can do to a person. Yet instead of letting these experiences weigh her down, Rima has instead chosen to bravely dedicate herself to giving women what she always longed for herself: a sense of being supported. “I love supporting women,” Rima shares. “Women have been historically the most ignored population of all. Our needs as women have been suppressed culturally, as well by ourselves, and we have so much judgement towards ourselves…it is unbelievable!”

According to Life Coach and meditation teacher Bill Gisclair-Sullivan, authenticity requires practice: “It is a conscious choice that we must make about how we want to live our lives every day. It is a collection of our choices and decisions, and it requires us to show up, be present in the moment, and to be honest with ourselves.”

The truth is that authenticity usually has to be re-learned because so much of our lives have been spent mastering the many masks we think we must wear to be approved of or to fit into what we imagine is expected of us. A quote from Coach Bill’s website captures his life coaching mission, which emphasizes how we can step into our truest self: "Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we're supposed to be and embracing who we truly are."

Bill is so passionate about this work because it mirrors his own life journey. “It took me many, many years to discover my authenticity,” Bill explains. “I spent most of my adult life working in management in the hospitality field. After making some dramatic mistakes and trying to climb the corporate ladder, I lost some important parts of myself along the way.”

Entrepreneur and Life Coach Sheera Gersh has been in the beauty industry for 20 years. Her business, Addicted to Nails, has a huge clientele of ladies that trust her with their nails and their personal stories, dreams, fears, and problems. Sheera has the privilege of working on someone’s outside while getting a glimpse into what’s going on inside of them. Remembering one such conversation, Sheera recalls, “I had a client whose husband was terminally ill. We talked for a long time during that session about death and mourning and what life would be like for her after he passed away. When we were done, she told me that I have a gift and should go to school to become a life coach. This conversation stayed with me, and I thought about it a lot. After a while, I did some research about classes and that’s how I found SWIHA. Soon after that I made an appointment with an admissions coach, and signed up for classes!”

When Micah Lunassential speaks, she immediately commands your attention. Warm, kind, smart, and engaging, she brings experience, understanding, and enlightenment to people with her successful YouTube channel Ms.Micah. With a focus on love and relationships this channel embraces the discussion of uncomfortable topics that so often hold us back, like fear, forgiveness, addiction, and trauma.

Micah grew up knowing trauma, having PTSD as a child from a serious accident and later getting complex PTSD from abuse as an adult. These experiences dramatically affected her view on love and on herself. After years of feeling hopeless and being trapped in a victim mentality, Micah went to a Holistic Gathering at SWIHA in October of 2012 where she had a Toe Reading that would change her life.

“I was being mentored by the then Director of the Psychology department at Ottawa University for a class I was taking entitled Trauma Psychology,” Micah shared. “The Toe Reading reminded me of what I was avoiding because I was trapped in a victim mentality. True healing was learning to feel safe in the body after trauma or domestic violence.”

Maureen Ihle has always been dedicated to helping people, and yet it wasn’t until she enrolled at SWIHA that she realized that doing so was her life’s purpose (INSERT: www.blog.swiha.edu/life-coaching-corner-are-you-brave-enough-to-be-an-entrepreneur). Maureen shared that before she firmly found her path at SWIHA, she was struggling both personally and professionally. It took clearing away some of those personal cobwebs to ultimately see where her path was leading her.

“I was working at a job that was very unsatisfying. I had gained 30 pounds the year before I enrolled and was at my highest weight ever. I didn’t know where I was going in my life, and I certainly had no idea of how I was going to get there. I knew I needed to do something different with my life, and I knew I wanted to help people, so I started looking at psychology programs. I looked at a lot of programs at other schools, and nothing seemed to quite fit until I found the program at SWIHA. As soon as I saw the program, I knew that this is what I needed to be doing with my life. I am so passionate about life coaching and helping other people find their purpose.”