Create a sacred space that is welcoming, it will influence your emotional, mental and physical health. In this video I give you some tips to help you create that sacred healing space for yourself!
Learn to connect within to a deeper place of all knowing, and harness that knowledge in everyday life more intentionally. Connect to your spirituality. What gives you meaning and purpose?
Finding meaning and purpose today.
Schedule your day: This helps with decreasing your anxiety, feeling of being overwhelmed.
Scheduling your day will give better productivity, provide clarity and create space in your mind that will energize you.
Gratitude is essential to bring a deeper meaningful connection within life. Gratitude leads to your own inner profound transformation. Ancient philosophers and sages from different spiritual traditions have emphasized cultivating gratitude. It is a fundamental pillar for experiencing, developing and sustaining that inner peace, fulfillment and happiness.
In relation to mental health, gratitude and spirituality may be helpful to individuals experiencing anxiety and depression in response to a loss. The emotion of gratitude involves the feeling of appreciation, and creates a pleasant overall feeling. The perception of what is sacred, (people, experience, situation or the divine), elicits the emotions of gratitude and increase the amplitude of how they feel. This combination of spirituality and gratitude increases their ability to cope, creating a positive mindset and becoming more resilient to suffering.
Gratitude is an emotion that fills your heart. When practiced on a daily basis it can move you from selfish or self-centred beliefs to a place that is all encompassing and charitable. When you appreciate something, your ego moves out of the way and makes room for humility and compassion.
Let’s take the time to practice gratitude!
I will go first: I am grateful for my life, my spirit, my husband, kids, family, my friends and all of you who inspire me to keep sharing my passion in spiritual health.
Honouring and Serving,
Simran Rattan
We are dealing with unpredictability, chaos and unknowns. People are
feeling unsettled and less in control. It is more important now than ever to be
socially connected, this is a need of our spirit. By depriving ourselves of this we will
be creating more emotional, mental and spiritual distress. Creating more distress is
a downhill spiral for our wellbeing and health.
So How can we ride this wave of turbulence like a skilled surfer and perfectly be in
harmony with the wave?
Here are a few practical tips that may help you prevent yourself from falling into the
depths of the dark fearful ocean.
Remember as health professionals, finding strength in the chaos is not new to us!
Every day we are in amidst of others suffering and pain. Our strengths do not
change in this pandemic. Practicing the above tips and reminding ourselves of our
ability to lead, remain committed, calm, thoughtful, productive and faithful as we
have done in the past will help us get through this together.
Have you experienced loss that sometimes you don’t have the words to express?
Has disconnection caused heartache and pain that is unbearable?
Do you try and find meaning and sense in grief?
Grief can arise in many different situations in our lives. We can lose loved ones, relationships, our sense of meaning, purpose and identity, or the job we loved. We can experience grief as feeling like we don’t belong in the world. Communities can grieve the loss of land and ocean spaces
We can experience grief seeing others in pain and suffering. Grief is a human emotion and experience, that is unsettling to the heart, mind and soul. Finding meaning in grief is crucial to healing.
There is no set time frame or limit to how long grief persists. It varies culturally and also historically. In some cultures the ceremonies carried out for passing of a loved one is a process which takes sometimes days or weeks and in others, it may be a few days. All for very valid and cultural reasons. Grief also has different meanings and understandings for different cultures. Losing connection to a spiritual place, may take the return of this space to the people, to restore wellbeing.
While there is no set rule of how to describe and experience grief, we can all agree that as human beings, grief is something we have experienced at some point in our lives.
The Kübler-Ross Model, is an understanding that grief is a normal response to tragic events and is described in 5 various stages.
Denial: finding it hard to believe the experience is real
Anger: being angry at anything and everything around us
Bargaining: We ask ourselves, if I did this, then maybe that wouldn’t have happened. What if this happened instead, then maybe I wouldn’t be feeling this way. We dwell on what could have been or what could be.
Depression: can be experienced for a long time feelings of hopelessness and despair, low mood loss of appetite and other clinical symptoms.
Acceptance: we have accepted this as part of our life’s experience and are no longer letting the situation or experience deprive us of moments of joy and living
In order to grow spiritually, and heal, trying to find ways to process grief is important.
While it may seem like a long and arduous process, grief can offer us an experience of healing.
Grief teaches us to be patient with ourselves.
It allows us to make space for healing. It opens the doors to connecting with our innate spirit as it is our spirit that is experiencing loss.
After experiencing an array of emotions, our deep sense of grief, identifies our connection to others or something. This ability we have to feel and love rather than be indifferent. Thus grief highlights our compassionate side for one another and life.
Grief offers the chance for us to be compassionate towards ourselves and others.
Grief leads us to crossroads in our lives. We reach new paths, moving into a new stage, with new experiences. If we have lost land or community, we seek to rebuild, regain and restore.
Grief is a normal response to heart wrenching moments in our lives. Allowing ourselves and those around us to experience grief is crucial to spiritual well-being. It is our spirit that sustains us and an acknowledgement of this spiritual pain, is recognizing health and well-being is centred in spirituality, whether it be as an individual or community. Grief is a part of spiritual healing and growth.
Honouring and Serving,
Simran K. Rattan MD
Content support Maria Peach
Have there been times in your life when you have felt like you have failed as a parent, friend, child, student, worker? Do the feelings of failure overwhelm you and knock your confidence to the point where you lose motivation? Has failure ever driven you to do better? Are their moments when you have self reflected on seeming failures and realized these moments were moments of growth?
We have all experienced the feelings of failure. Failure to complete a project, failure to make a sports team, failure to ‘raise our children right,’ failure to pass exams, Failure to be that good friend or wife etc..
However, these moments in our lives require perspective within the context of a life’s journey and also reflection on who has set and determined the criteria for what constitutes ‘success.’ For every seemingly failure we are reminded of, there are stories in our lives that have brought us and others joy. The infamous story of Michael Jordan, basketball player, who never made the cut for his high school team and spent the season as the waterboy, can be used as an example of societal perceived failure to not ‘make it.’ Yet at a larger scale and plan as we now know of him, it was part of his story at being one of the greatest basketball players in the world.
There are endless ‘failure’ stories that show, moments in our lives when we are knocked down, are transient and temporary. They also provide times in our lives to challenge the environments around us, to deconstruct what success is. Success comes in an array of experiences, from being a good friend, to being a loving partner, to trying our best to correct our harms on others, to being there for a loved one.
Failure is part of success, Challenge is part of success, therefore failure can’t be avoided and is a critical part of moving forward.
Accompanying this idea that we have failed miserably at something, are feelings that can make us feel distraught. If we are constantly reminded by others, we take on this perception that we are no good, we cannot do anything, and we have no skills, or heart to accomplish anything. These perceptions affect our self-esteem and self-worth and we can spiral into a pit of despair. It takes a moment to step aside and reflect, to take hold of a situation and understand it is only a part of our lives. We need to be able to approach seemingly failures with balance, not letting the experience consume us. We need to remind ourselves of our light.
Honouring and Serving,
Simran K. Rattan MD
Content support Maria Peach
“Life is meaningless”
Maybe this is something you have said to yourself or there is someone close to you or who you have taken care of who have utter these words.
There are many ways to approach this.
The thing that pops up in my head is, 
what meaning is being referred to? 
How can I clarify what exactly “meaning” may mean.
When I do this I find it sets up the foundation for clearer communication and less judgement. Meaningless is like we lost our “so what?” and don’t know where to look to gain that value back.
As humans we are unlikely to be truly content with any purpose of our existence. It has to be something that is aligned with your meaning, your deeper held values. Something that you believe in.
So believing in something is an innate core part of us that has powerful motivation to bring about a more fulfilling life. Life becomes more fun, relationships are improved, and now when you meet friends for on zoom or in person you are able to enjoy the food and company more.
Honouring and Serving,
Simran K. Rattan MD
When we accept ourselves unconditionally we are loving ourselves completely. To love all facets of who we are, is to accept our whole being, our spirit begins to thrive and we can have the realisation we are made perfectly imperfect. This sets the path, for being able to also show more compassion and love to others and their imperfections. Creating more fulfilling relationships that we can treasure and have more respect and admiration for our own work. Our imperfections are part of our mental and spiritual growth.
“Nurture, nourish and cherish that person whom you will have to live with for the rest of your life, yourself.”
Honouring and Serving,
Simran K. Rattan MD
Content support Maria Peach