Learn how to make the most of Late Summer by using the Earth Element to help balance digestion, support mental clarity, and strengthen your immune system during this transitional season. Try practical tips for seasonal cooking, self-care, and preparing for the cooler months ahead.

Explore the dynamics of friendships in our latest article, "Friendships - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Delve into the importance of Social Rest, understanding red and green flags in relationships, and learn how to cultivate healthier connections. Perfect for anyone looking to enhance their social circle and personal well-being.

Immerse yourself in the vibrant energy of summer with our latest article, "Vibrant Growth: Ancient Wisdom for Summer." Discover how the Fire Element of Chinese medicine can enhance your season with joy, passion, and connection. Embrace the warmth and learn to live fully in tune with summer's abundant yang energy.

“Why Eat the Rainbow—What Does it Do for Me?" offers a vivid guide to enriching your diet with a spectrum of colourful foods. Each colour provides unique nutrients that boost health, from immune support to liver detoxification. Embrace a diverse palette for better health and vitality.

Discover the vibrant world of "Eat the Rainbow," a guide to enriching your diet with the colors of nature. It's an invitation to transform your meals into a palette of nutrients and flavors, promoting better digestion and health. Embrace variety, simplicity, and creativity in your culinary journey.

We can’t stop habits from forming and nor do we want to!  Habits help us!  Habits are great when they work for us and not against us.  Whenever we want to change our routines, we need to change our habits.  This is especially true every time there’s a change in season or a change in routine.  Think back to the end of August and the beginning of September.  There’s a lot of change in a couple short weeks.  Not having habits and routines that support you can make changing things harder than it needs to be.

Changing habits can be as easy as making the new habit easy or making something we want to stop doing more difficult.  As humans, we naturally gravitate towards easy over hard - let that work for you in this case!

My favourite season is finally here!! Okay, almost – it officially starts on Saturday. I LOVE autumn and everything to do with autumn. I love the warm days and cool nights, the amazing food (the farmers markets are full of amazing food), chai, soups, all the cozy sweaters and so much more.

Saturday marks the halfway point between the longest and most Yang day of the year (the Summer Solstice) and the longest and most Yin night of the year (Winter Solstice). Yin and Yang will be exactly equal on Saturday. After Saturday, Yin will begin to grow as Yang begins to wane. This is a season of change, a season of pivoting. It’s an important season because it represents the bringing in of all the work that has been done this year. This might be work on your health, work on your relationships, work on your home, work on your business, work on something else entirely.

We’ve been chatting about how habits are formed, how they affect your daily life and how to start making changes. If you didn’t catch the previous two articles, you can read them here: How Habits Affect Your Life + How to Make them Work for You and How to Change Your Habits and Make it Stick - Part 1.

Simply put, habits are an unconscious response to a specific stimulus. If you get cut off in traffic, what’s your automatic response? If you’re feeling stressed, what’s your go-to solution? If your pet or child comes to see you and wants a hug, what’s your response?

Our lives are run by habit. We wouldn’t be able to do the majority of the things we do in the day without habits. This doesn’t make habits wrong, right, good, bad, healthy, unhealthy… Habits simply are. Habits by nature are subconscious and exist solely to respond to different stimuli (pop over and read How Habits Affect Your Life if you want to understand why habits better).

"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." - Health as defined by the World Health Organization

I've come to believe that if I want to thrive, I must invest in my health. If I want to merely survive, I can treat health as an expense and treat symptoms as they arise.  For years I treated my health as an expense and opted for the cheapest solution.  I struggled with iron deficiency anemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, debilitating periods and more.  Unlike most practitioners, I understand chronic illness and the struggles it creates because I’ve lived with it.

Did you know that hitting the snooze button actually makes it harder to get out of bed in the morning?  

Studies have shown that we get most of our REM sleep (or dream sleep) in the latter part of our sleep cycles (these cycles happen multiple times throughout the night).  We also get more REM sleep overall in the early morning hours.  REM sleep is the most restorative part of the sleep cycle.  When your alarm goes off in the morning, you’re most likely disrupting REM sleep; especially if you wake up from a dream.  By choosing to hit your snooze button instead of getting up, you are starting another sleep cycle and may be reentering another REM cycle within that sleep cycle.  

When I was a child, I used to beg my parents for a pet; sadly, they never gave in.  However, I found a way around that!  I started babysitting our neighbours pets when they were away, this began a lifelong love of cats (and the occasional dog).

Little did I know then what a profound effect having pets would have on me.

My husband and I currently have four cats - Jane, Darcy, Toes and Lizzie.  They each have such unique personalities and quirks.  I truly can’t imagine life without them.

For anyone who’s ever taken a flight, you’ve all heard the safety demonstration telling you to put your own oxygen mask on first, before you help others to do the same. This doesn’t just apply to flights, emergencies and cabin pressure changes.

The reality is, that as women, we need to learn to put our own oxygen masks on everyday.

Recently, I’ve heard from several women that they’re putting themselves last.  Some want to make a change and put themselves first and others have said that they “don’t exist” until a certain point because they’re so overwhelmed by life, the demands on their time and energy, as well as everything else that’s happening on a daily basis. This also includes caring for their loved one.

Habits aren’t something that most people think about regularly until you’re trying to make a change. Habits, by nature, are subconscious and exist in response to specific stimuli. This is also called ‘Cue, Routine, Reward’ in Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit.

“Habits are the compound interest of self improvement.” ~ James Clear (Atomic Habits)

By definition, habits are repeated actions or behaviours that you do with such frequency that you may not be aware of them. You might find yourself in the middle of the action or have even completed it before you realize what you are doing.

Are you looking for a practitioner who is kind, compassionate, empathetic and understands the health struggles you’re experiencing?

Andrea’s near encyclopaedic wealth of knowledge combines perfectly with her calm and compassionate nature to deliver an outstanding level of care.

At Dancing Willow Wellness, we pride ourselves on patient-centred care, and Andrea exemplifies this principle. She is always ready to meet patients where they’re at, and use her skills, expertise, and warmth to bring them closer to where they want to be.

Patients feel supported and heard throughout their journey and appreciate her kindness as well as the great results they achieve.

Ever wonder why you have a great sleep one night and then a less than stellar sleep another night?

Do you struggle to get even a decent night’s sleep? Have you got your bedroom optimized and your bedtime routine down and you’re still struggling?

What you do during the day has a profound effect on how well you sleep each night!

Sleep is not self-indulgence or self-care. Sleep is a basic human need that’s critical to our health, well-being and self-preservation!

While I know I started the last sleep article with this same quote, it really is that important that we make sleep a priority.

It’s not accidental that we will spend approximately ⅓ of our lives sleeping.

Our bodies are really very busy when we sleep! Our bodies need this time to be able to heal, integrate everything that happened during the day, create new memories, reset our digestive system and so much more.

Sleep is not self-indulgence or self-care. Sleep is a basic human need that’s critical to our health, well-being and self-preservation!

I'm choosing to start with this bold statement for a reason: from a young age, we're taught that 'sleep is for the weak’, that we can 'sleep when we're dead' and other detrimental beliefs about sleep. This is reinforced in our 20's and the belief that we can "do it all". North American culture has become one where sleep is thought of as a luxury we can't afford if we want to get everything done.

Like so many other teenage girls, I had no idea what to expect with my first period or what it'd be like throughout my life. I also did what so many other teenage girls before me did - I asked the women in my life. In this case, my mother and older sister.

While this may seem an entirely normal and reasonable thing to do, in reality, it isn't! If they don't know what a "normal period" is, how can they actually answer this question?! They can tell me what a "normal for them period" is but not a "normal period".

Today I'm talking about one of my favourite ways to quiet overthinking, perhaps even begin to prevent it and allow your brain an opportunity to rest. While there are a ton of different articles, blogs and other posts about overthinking, this is a little different.