Align Brooklyn

07/27/2023

☀️ Are you an early bird or a night owl? 🌙

It really doesn’t matter, just as long as you get good slumber during your sleep window—the period in which your body naturally feels the urge to snooze.

You can find out when yours is by experimenting with different bedtimes until you find the sweet spot when you fall asleep easily and wake up feeling refreshed.

07/26/2023

07/24/2023

It's been said that you can't heal a sick society with a bandaid on an individual wound. h/t CTZNWELL

The sad truth is that the wellness industry has become so focused on "healing" the individual with laser treatments, cool sculpt and kombucha exfoliants that it has forgotten its roots. Wellness culture has become individualized and superficial. When "wellness" started it was about going back to the land, living in harmony with the earth and connecting to each other through peaceful practices. It was a counterculture movement led by a bunch of hippies.

But like the rest of our society it got sick. It was sickened by hierarchy and hustle. More more more. Health became a look. Health became a hair color. Health became a body type. Health became a hierarchy. Health became about purity. Health came to mirror some of the worst ideas that humans have ever had and ever perpetrated against one another.

There is a balance between individual health and our collective health. If we learned anything we should have learned that. I'm not talking about shots and masks. I'm talking about something even deeper.

When we are all resilient, we all thrive.

Wellness has become a cult of individuality. It's a stupid filtered Instagram photo with a bogus tag.

We need to heal our very sick, very toxic society.

To do this we need to commit to wellbeing. ✌️

07/20/2023

Here's a sad truth: due to soil depletion crops grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the ones we have access to today.

The problem is that much of farming today is "mono crop" which is bad for us and bad for the environment. Chemicals including pesticides are regularly used and may produce perfect looking product, but sap the nutritional value.

Yes, if you can afford it, eating organic and supporting organic farmers is best. In many areas you can find farmers markets where you'll find the most nutritious produce at the best prices.

Still this is not enough with a 27% decrease in calcium, 37% decrease in iron, a more than 20% decrease in Vitamin A and a 30% decrease in Vitamin C.

The reality is that taking a high quality multivitamin, albeit imperfect, is essential to good health today.

* FYI This is why making high quality supplements affordable is one of our member benefits.

07/19/2023

Wellbeing for all. 🌈

07/17/2023

Get ready to dig in! 🌻🌱

Did you know that recent studies show that gardening has just as many health benefits as a workout at the gym.

Not only can gardening help reduce depression and anxiety, but it can also increase your overall quality of life, and boost your sense of community.

Plus, it's a great way to get some fresh air and enjoy the beauty of nature. 🌷🌿

07/14/2023

Wellbeing can't be boiled down to health. More and more we know that health is not as simple as "you are what you eat" or 150 minutes a week of exercise. And it can't be boiled down to genetics or fatalism around genetics. Health is multifaceted and one of the biggest facets is accumulated stress. We are meaning making machines. We remember in stories. Our stories about who we are connect us through culture. When the culture is unfair...when there's a mismatch, we become stressed. When the society is sick, we are sick. Wellbeing has the potential to heal. This is a movement. This is about

07/12/2023

🧡🌈🙏✊🏾

07/10/2023

Mastering gratitude and appreciation is a key to happiness and inner peace. It's easy to have small-ish micro-aggressions eat away at you. In order to stop the hurt and anger of injustice from breaking you down, reality is that you need a practice. Here's a simple practice, but the truth is it is not an easy one. Start with appreciating something that is easy: that you have shelter, food, a friend... Then start to work your way up to appreciating harder and harder things. The hard things to appreciate are always where the gems are. This is not a one-and-done kinda thing. It's a practice. Try it everyday for 30 days. Add journalling in. Don't be hard on yourself when your mind is literally blank. Patience, kindness and compassion are your friends.

07/09/2023

A lot of folks are using the words wellness and wellbeing synonymously.

But we want to speak to some important differences:

⭕️ Wellness is contained within wellbeing.
🌍 Wellbeing is holistic and 100% inclusive. No one is left out.
✊🏾 Wellbeing acknowledges social determinants of health.
🧡 Wellbeing is found in community.

Bottomline...wellness has become so focused on the individual cultivating an image of health that it's as toxic as any of the chemical laden products it shuns. It's time to claim our full humanity and wellbeing.

Want to know more about our vision of wellbeing? https://digital.alignbrooklyn.com/

07/06/2023

❌ Say no to white saviorism.
✅ Say yes to authentic solidarity.

07/05/2023

Happy July. Well, the end of June was pretty much a disaster.

It's impossible for our country to be well under the current regime. When a moral injury is repeated and repeated and repeated... When we have never done the work of healing together... We all pay the price... We lose our humanity... And we need to reclaim our humanity.

Align/WELL is committed to being a space of healing. We must close the wellbeing gap. We can only do that together.

🌦 This month our theme is "weathering." (We had planned on this before we knew the court decisions.)

Why are Black people dying 5 years earlier than whites and why do we have higher rates of chronic disease?

White supremacy teaches us that it is something about ourselves or something about the behaviors of Black people. But the facts teach us that the cause is stress - it's the stress of being Black. It is the strain of living in a country that refuses to address the moral injury we have sustained and the ways that we are gaslit and that reality is denied.

🚨 Next week in light of the devastating impact that these SC decisions will have, we are adding something special: a 5 Day Anti-Racism Challenge. This is totally free. No membership required. You're invited. You're invited to begin. 5 days is a start. 30 minutes a day cannot unroot what has taken years to create inside us...

What else?

🧘🏾‍♂️ New July Class collection - get your yoga, meditation and fitness on... Align style and with some of your favorite instructors: Chrysetta, Nicole, Allison J, Narissa, Taryn and more!

🍣 Recipes anyone? Who doesn't love a great healthy cooking idea? Follow the tutorial and riff or follow the recipe. This month we have 4 new ones including: Pan Seared Lemon Salmon With Artichokes. Yum!

🌈 Join my Live Workshop on Life Crafting on Saturday at 10am. Life crafting is a process that can help you move from one place to the next in your life. It's not something we made up. It's a researched process for transformation, managing change and healing.

📚 And this month we're reading Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. Why? Because we absolutely must begin our journey for deep wellbeing and healing by stopping to rest. Without rest we will not have the power to fight the internal battle or the external one. If you haven't had the opportunity to read this beautiful book, why wait?

Not a member? Get started with a free trial at: https://bit.ly/3WfGGyN