I have been very irregular with my blogs since March 2020. I hope this changes it all. Probably this is the best topic to get back with.

This particular piece was done for Deccan Herald, published on 12th June 2022.

Becoming your best friend

We are the most important, more important than our most loved ones. Sounds selfish? No, it’s not. Remember the airhostess telling you that in case of low oxygen pressure, first put the mask on yourself before you take care of your loved ones. Whether it be during a flight or in life, once we take care of ourselves, we are good at taking care of everyone we love, else we are not only not an asset, but a liability for them too. We’ll pull them down with ourselves.

If we are the most important, how come we outsource our physical and mental health to the people in white coats, who want to practise on us, while we patiently wait. Yes, they usually have the best of intentions, but they barely know us. Subconsciously they pass a judgement on our life after only knowing us for a few minutes. Some of them have the audacity to pick up the pen and start prescribing even before we are done with the first sentence. To be honest, we let that happen to ourselves, by empowering them a bit too much. It’s high time to empower ourselves with common sense knowledge. And suddenly all the doctors and therapists will be a lot more helpful.

More than complaining we need to understand that we let this happen to us. We need to first decide to take an active role in our lives, rather than a passive one. No matter how many degrees and experiences someone has, they simply haven’t lived our lives. Their expertise is important to help us make an informed decision, but it can’t be an informed decision if we ourselves don’t know about ourselves. That happens way too often in today’s world where there is so much noise and we are busy rushing around, failing to listen to ourselves.

We need to learn to be our own best friends, and then we’ll be even better friends to our loved ones, whether they be our parents, partners, children or friends. Once we realise that it’s not a race against anyone else, but the objective is to get better than our yester self, one baby step at a time, it’s game on.

It starts with sitting tall like a puppet being pulled up by a string and letting go, by exhaling, a long slow breath out. Hold it for a second or two. Close your eyes so you can focus better. Let your whole body relax, leaving it loose. Now take a long slow breath in, feeling the warm breath going in your nose and then the windpipe.

Just repeating long slow breaths in and out will help you calm down, making you realise how your physical body is connected to your mind. They are not disconnected as most so-called experts make it sound. Body without mind and vice-versa are as good as nothing.

Since you’ve made the body-mind connect, now it’s the turn of your sole to get moving too. You did read it right. I am not talking about soul as who actually knows about it, but the soles we all have. Their sole purpose is to get us moving. Even before we were born, we moved, we moved to be healthy with both our body and mind. We need to get moving again. It’s only when we move, especially doing simple repetitive things like walking and running that we connect with ourselves like never before and soon enough go into a trance.

The trick is learning how to move without getting breathless in the first few minutes. Without realising you have already started to address it when you sat tall and focused on inhaling-exhaling. Only once you can breathe well while sitting or lying down, do you have a chance of doing it well when you walk or run. For way too long in our lives we all have been tested, starting from our teachers to our doctors. Don’t worry about any kinds of numbers, move to just be.

You’ll notice that once you are at peace with yourself, your friends and family will be even more attracted to you, totally flabbergasted as to your secret recipe of life. Maybe you don’t need to have a smile at all times, but breathing and moving will make you a lot more content and at peace with yourself.

And that is MoveMint Medicine.