Category Archives: Health and Wellness

Healthy, holistic success: Be curious, be mindful, be brave

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The wheel of life — an exercise designed to help people find true balance among all aspects of their lives — typically has eight areas of focus, from social life to personal growth to career.

Amy Machacek, 46, a high-energy yoga instructor turned entrepreneur, rocked the wheel a bit for her personal and corporate training programs. Her nine categories include “home/environment,” “fun and recreation,” “significant other/romance” and “friends.”Amy Etzell

As the owner of two Northfield, Minnesota–based businesses — HeartWork Yoga and LIFE.REVAMP — Machacek has relied equally on her instincts, her network (including her entrepreneurial father) and her passion for keeping up with industry trends. In addition to her E-RYT 200-hour yoga certification, she has trained in nutrition, meditation and life coaching. She’s also studied with Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and author of The Success Principles.

Machacek’s liberal arts education at the University of St. Thomas taught her to “be curious” — one of her favorite sayings — and to embrace lifelong learning. “It’s why I have one daughter there now and another starting in the fall,” she says.

On February 6, Machacek will headline UST’s prestigious First Friday Speaker Series in downtown Minneapolis, offering attendees a five-step plan for gaining more energy in all areas of their lives.

On stress reduction: “Yoga doesn’t decrease your stress. It doesn’t make your boss nicer or your kids listen to you. But it changes your perception of that stress. I’m helping people process or manage this stuff in a way that is less taxing.”

On the character of an entrepreneur: “I’m not sure whether it takes courage or stupidity! My partner, Dave Shonka, works for a traditional company. He likes the security, but he doesn’t have the freedom. I like the freedom, and I’m OK without having security. Neither is right or wrong, but your choice should match your personality.

“I’m creative, and I really need a creative outlet. Plus, I watched my family do this when I was growing up. It seemed normal to me to put in long hours when you’re building the business and have some flexibility once the business is doing well.”

On growing a business: “If I stay just one step ahead of my growth, I can expand thoughtfully and not have to take on debt. HeartWork initially was yoga classes only, in a small town with 11 other places that offer yoga. We weren’t going to be viable forever if we just did yoga classes.Life Revamp

“Then I created the yoga teacher training school and added personal training to the studio. LIFE.REVAMP was next. I was working on all of my certifications, and I recognized that if I combined nutrition, life coaching and yoga, I could help people gain forward momentum.

“I brought in barre tone classes when I saw them on the coasts. People have short attention spans. If you’re not adding or changing, you’re dying.”

On how fitness fuels success: “Everyone in LIFE.REVAMP is working on their own things, but it all starts with fitness and nutrition. The initial call may come because of career issues, but first people need more energy and clarity about where they are body-wise.

“One of my clients has 750 employees, and his company bought another company this fall. He told me how great he felt standing in front of his expanded team. ‘I knew what I was talking about,’ he told me. ‘I was standing up straight.’ Another middle-aged client who has shed some weight says she’s now ready to focus on being an athlete again.”

On the tyranny of technology: “We have to make some rules for ourselves. At the end of the workday, Ward Cleaver could close his ledger book, turn off the light and go home. And nothing followed him.

“Now, that doesn’t happen — but we don’t have to allow technology into every aspect of our lives. Otherwise, it’s like the spoiled child who demands our attention all the time. We’re losing out on our relationships because of it.”

On positive parenting: “I don’t want to hover over my kids and make every decision for them. I help them slowly make more decisions as they get older, so they’re ready when they go to college. Nowadays, parenting seems to be defined as keeping kids in a sweet, tight grip. My job as a mom is to love my kids and prepare to let them go.”

On beauty and aging: “Marcia Wellstone [Markuson] was a classmate of mine at Northfield High. When she died in October 2002, I was 33 years old. I remember it vividly. We’d had a class reunion that summer, and she was this shiny person. She had gotten remarried, she loved her stepkids. I was standing in my bedroom when I heard the news and thought: ‘Who am I to complain about getting older, about being alive?’ Marcia didn’t get this opportunity, and I did.

“I describe it now as my life before that moment and my life after. Honestly, not for one day since then have I complained about aging. I see aging as a gift, and I believe that to the bottom of who I am.”

On the rewards of growing older: “I love the wisdom and experiences that come with age. All the hard stuff and good stuff we’ve been through makes us who we are today.”

On staying curious: “I tell people in my classes every day: ‘Be curious. Don’t act like you know everything.’ Our lives get smaller as we grow older. We don’t get down on the floor. We don’t reach our arms as high. We don’t move as fast, we don’t try new things — but we need to keep reaching in life.”

Sit Still! Can a ‘Staycation’ Become a Daily Practice?

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I skipped my company Christmas party this year — not a smart move for a new employee who hopes to grow her job and widen her influence at work.

It wasn’t because I’d had a lousy week and my boss had barked at me (though both are true). I just needed a night at home, alone, after six straight days of having e-mails, texts and virtual meetings intrude on weekend plans and overtake every evening.

My iPhone is running my life. More accurately, my connectivity-fueled agenda is my life, and the signs of that imbalance — inability to concentrate, a craving for constant movement and excitement, and, recently, the not-so-subtle suggestions from coworkers and friends that I seem hyper and wired — have me worried.

Which leads to less sleep and more caffeine.

What’s an over-achiever to do? What else? Draw up a list on the iPhone. Make a plan.

Power down

Love it, hate it

Lately I have been drawn to media reports about the downside of an internet-amplified, over-scheduled life:

  • Ever check your iPhone before and after a Sunday matinee? Or read e-mail on the sidelines of a soccer game? Me, too. In fact, the tools designed to keep us current and organized have stolen our leisure, according to a special report in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the cost of living in a state of fast-moving distraction.

“Plugged in 24/7/365, we are constantly struggling to keep up but are always falling further behind,” the Chronicle declares. “The faster we go, the less time we seem to have. As our lives speed up, stress increases, and anxiety trickles down from managers to workers, and parents to children.”

Read a book or a newspaper in its original form, he says, without the temptation to click through to related sites or articles on your portable device. Daydream. Sit still. (And do what?)

  • “The time I’ve spent going nowhere is going to sustain me much more than the time I’ve spent running around,” says travel writer Pico Iyer. He schedules some amount of downtime every day to reflect on and process his various experiences.

In an August 2014 TED talk called “The Art of Stillness,” Iyer described how Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly found the space and creativity to write his latest book by eliminating smart phones and television from his home. Take an “Internet Sabbath” at least one day a week, Iyer says, “in order to develop the perspective and sense of direction when you go online again.”

What is scary about stillness?

I’ve been taking stay-at-home vacations since before the shorthand, staycation, was even coined. My husband and I couldn’t afford to travel when we were raising our two sons. Plus, I enjoyed hanging out at our small-town home after daily commutes to the city.

When colleagues asked, “Where are you going?” my standard reply would be: “Off the clock.” Lately, I’ve amended that to “off the iPhone.”

Since finally buying a smart phone in May 2012, I’ve learned that a staycation is no vacation if I stay plugged in to office e-mail and my social media accounts. Nor is time off a break if I’m scheduled dawn to dusk with workouts, lunches, errands and appointments.

A Type A person tends to see weekends or vacations not as opportunities to relax and recharge but as prime time to get things done. And that’s OK, she tells herself, because the busyness is tied to her family and friends. Problem is, the deeper I get into middle age, the more I find that “always on” is not sustainable.

I want to live more in silence, not with Minnesota Public Radio on as background news and noise, not with music blaring while I clean or cook, but silence. Without distraction, with myself. I want more mental freedom, more unstructured moments to get lost in a book or in my thoughts.

I want to live more often without a schedule and the tools that tie me to it.

“Be curious,” one of my yoga instructors used to say. So, what would happen if:

  • I swore off caffeine for 24 hours?
  • I invited a friend out spontaneously?
  • I did yoga at home, instead of in a structured class, and followed wherever my mind and body took me?
  • I turned off my iPhone for an entire weekend?
  • I committed to focused reading time for a natural wind-down in the evening?
  • I explored the observation my mother made of me long ago: “You’re always on the go. What are you running from, I wonder?”

I won’t find the answer till I learn how to be still.

Become a Midlife Revolutionary: Walk to Work

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Minneapolis is among the 10 safest cities for pedestrians in the country, the local newspaper announced this week. Seattle was the most safe, Detroit the least among the 25 large urban areas studied.

That’s comforting news, given that I do a lot of walking in Minneapolis and its twin city, St. Paul, where I live and work. But the data ignore the more interesting sociology.

Buried in a recent U.S. Census Bureau analysis of the percentages and characteristics of people who walk or bike to work is an age-related statistic that speaks to the subtle mind shifts that start to happen in middle age.

Although walking to work is most common — no surprise — among young adults with relatively low incomes, it creeps up again among people 55 and older. People like the violin maker who lives across the street from my house and walks more than a mile to work in all weather, or like his wife, a college bookstore manager who commutes a similar distance by foot or bicycle.

People like You Are Hereme, who a year ago traded a 40-mile commute for a walkable distance to work of 1.2 miles. Now, instead of nonstop meetings by iPhone in unpredictable weather and crawling traffic, my commute entails reading sidewalk poetry, admiring the art of urban landscaping and simply getting lost in my own thoughts.

Why walk? Why bother?

A higher percentage of people walk to work in Minneapolis (and, by extension, St. Paul) than in other cold Midwestern cities like Chicago and Milwaukee, according to the Census data. Across all 50 metro areas studied, an eco-friendly commuting method — walk, bike, bus, train — is most prevalent among people who live and work in the same city.

But the uptick in “older worker” walking interests me most — because my experience correlates exactly with the statistics. Walking has become, for me, a social statement, a political action. I walk to work because our neighborhood streets are choked with cars. I walk because I polluted the planet for years so I could enjoy both the city career and the small-town family.

I walk because the United States has become a fat and lazy nation, with obesity rates more than double what they were in 1970 and an average of 2.28 vehicles per household. “We don’t have a parking problem” in St. Paul, a City Council legislative aide told me recently. “We have a walking problem.”

And so, while it would be easy for me to talk about the more balanced perspective that middle age brings — along with the resulting confidence to slow life’s pace, to find my path — in truth I’m not sure that’s why I’m walking more. I walk because “excess” has become the U.S. brand, a hedonism we export to further justify our self-centered shopping and consumption.

I walk because I’m a child of Depression-era parents who raised my siblings and me without air-conditioning, with one TV and with the discipline to turn off lights even back when electricity was “penny cheap.”

I walk because I’m a sucker for the starfish story, and walking to work is one thing I can do, one small difference I can make, in a planet that grows more damaged by the day.

It’s not easy being green

Living an eco-life is more palatable and possible in a granola-eating, rainbow-flag–waving neighborhood with bus lines close by and a grocery store, Thai restaurant and charming retro movie theater within easy walking distance.

Still, walking to work has its challenges, especially for middle-aged women. Discomfort and inconvenience top the list:

  • Walking takes longer than driving, and that’s a pain on Monday morning when I have to be at the weekly staff meeting by 8:30 a.m.
  • It rains in Minnesota, and, of course, it snows.
  • My building has a Wudu station in the second-floor bathroom where Muslim women can wash their feet before prayer, but the closest showers for commuters who walk or cycle are at the athletics facility across campus.
  • My lunch gets squished in my backpack, which also gets heavy with a laptop and a pair of work-suitable shoes inside.
  • It’s harder to walk and wear a skirt or suit — the expected attire for a woman my age. I dress more casually than I’d like because it’s easier to stuff jeans or cotton pants in my backpack than to carry dry-clean-only clothes.
  • You have to plan. I need my car for work — at least that’s what I tell myself when I have an appointment more than a mile away. Instead, I have learned to plan outside meetings at the top of the workday, so I can drive there and back, park my car at home and then walk in. I also meet with people more often by phone.

Most important: I have a tolerant employer who has no problem with me working from home sometimes or varying my schedule. And that’s what a walk-to-work movement will require — flexibility from employers who recognize that a healthy, calm person is a more balanced, productive employee.

The sidewalk art three blocks from my house says it best: I don’t know enough about balance to tell you how to do it. / I think, though, it’s in the trying and the letting go / that the scales measuring right and wrong — quiver and stand still.

Lesson learned: “Walking the talk” is a literal action. By living my values, I may inspire someone else to do the same.