Marco! Polo! Kid Safety at the Pool

Children are naturally curious, so it’s especially important to be careful with children around any body of water. According to the Centers for Disease Control, drowning is one of the top 10 causes of death for children in every region of the world. Most drownings in children under the age of 4 years happen in home swimming pools, whether at their own home or that of a friend, relative or neighbor. These guidelines can help protect children at the pool or near a lake or at the beach.

Pediatrician Amanda Kay, M.D., MPH discusses strategies including keeping kids at arm’s length, having designated water-watchers, learning CPR, and how to be COVID-wise this summer while having fun! Read more at https://news.christianacare.org/2020/07/whos-watching-those-tots/

Mindfulness Monday: The Anger Experience

Every Monday, the Daily Dose is dedicated to starting your week right with a brief guided mindfulness exercise. One emotion many of us are hesitant to acknowledge, especially in the moment, is anger. Like any emotion, in small doses and the right situations, anger has a job to do and can be beneficial. It is meant to motivate you and others to find solutions to problems. Tara Brach teachers us that, when anger is held in mindfulness, it can energize us to respond wisely to challenging situations. This meditation guides us in meeting personal or societal anger with RAIN – recognize, allow, investigate and nurture.

Feel Good Friday: Brooklyn eatery serves soul food — and food for the soul

Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Kiana Muschett-Owes treasured one spot above all: the family’s round dining table. There, family members would gather to recount their days, debate issues, celebrate any occasion they could think of — and of course, to eat. Along with basic nourishment, the table provided sustenance for the soul, says Muschett-Owes. She’s tried to replicate that feeling at her own restaurant, Katie O’s, which she launched six years ago in nearby Prospect Lefferts Gardens, specializing in soul food. And now, she’s trying to give a little of both — soul food, and food for the soul — back to her community, amidst a pandemic that has exposed just how easy it is to go hungry in New York by distributing between 1,000 and 1,500 meals to Brooklyn’s needy, accompanied by uplifting notes tucked into the boxes, with prayers or thoughts like “We’ll get through this” or “What doesn’t kill you will build you.” She also asks questions: how are people doing, whether they’ve lost their jobs. “This isn’t just, ‘grab your food and go,’” she says.

Read more about Kiana’s story in her AP News feature.

10 Simple Ways to Improve Your Health

While many of us have been well-intentioned before and during COVID in terms of resolving to make sweeping lifestyle changes, it is common to become complacent. Many have continued to aim to quit smoking, lose 20 pounds, AND start exercising daily. While it is good to have goals, the beginning of  better health doesn’t always have to mean making huge leaps and, in fact, should not! In today’s Daily Dose emphasizes that great change comes from taking one small step and mastering that, before moving on to the greater goal. The below article describes 10 potential ways to improve your health. Pick one (or choose your own) and see if you can slowly master it over the next two weeks. If so, great, move forward! If it is a challenge, taking a step back and consider a smaller, simpler goal to gain a sense of mastery before retrying the more advanced health behavior change. 

https://www.rush.edu/health-wellness/discover-health/10-simple-ways-improve-your-health

Mindfulness Monday: Self-Sooth

Self-soothing is something many of us learned to varying degrees from the time we were infants, through childhood, and something we refine throughout the rest of our lives. The core question when self-soothing is what simple thing can we do to make us feel better? These are usually based in the physical world, appearing to our five senses. The goal is to use them both proactively as well as when we are feeling distressed, when you feel that you cannot tolerate a situation anymore and cannot leave it. Today’s mindfulness exercise is brought to us by Tamara Levitt at Calm.com, who guides us through a 10-minute mindfulness meditation that can serve as an introduction to incorporating self-soothing into your day.

Feel Good Friday: “Forsooth: COVID-19 brings Shakespeare to Vermont backyards”

On an idyllic summer evening not far from the shore of Lake Champlain, the immortal words of William Shakespeare float from a lush backyard, professionally performed — for an audience of six. Jena Necrason of the Vermont Shakespeare Festival throws herself into the role of Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” lamenting the vagaries of the heart. Her husband John Nagle follows, performing Jaques’ famous soliloquy from “As You Like It”: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.”

Learn more about this adventure and the program that was established after COVID-19 forced the festival to cancel its summer season at https://apnews.com/12fa100833bb455df9c53b74f9e75ddc

Shifting Resilience Strategies as COVID Continues

As people in the U.S. mark six months of coronavirus, the challenges of coping with life during a pandemic continue to evolve. Most recently, reopening of parts of society under unsettled conditions and lingering threat are creating formidable demands on individuals and communities. By looking at how people have reacted to mass traumas in the past, psychology researchers can learn about which coping strategies have historically been effective.

Three strategies – cognitive reappraisal, problem-focused coping, and cultivating compassion and lovingkindness – seem particularly well suited to the shifting realities of the pandemic.

You can read more about these three strategies at https://theconversation.com/your-coping-and-resilience-strategies-might-need-to-shift-as-the-covid-19-crisis-continues-140507.

Mindfulness Monday: Being Present

Every Monday we bring you a mindfulness-based meditation to start your day and week off on the right foot. This week, we recognize that so much of what is going on can take our attention away from the present moment, and we miss out on important things. In this exercise, Tamara Levitt from Calm.com guides this 10 minute mindfulness meditation to restore and re-connect with the present moment.

Feel Good Friday: Colombian siblings launch market for Amazon farmers in need

The luscious fruits of the Amazon jungle still grow, undeterred by the raging pandemic. But many Colombian farmers and Indigenous communities have been left without a way to sell their harvests, and without the wherewithal to buy the staples of daily life. Seeing this need, two siblings launched The Harvest: Amazonian Barter. Now dozens of people line up every Friday in front of a truck packed with soap, rice, oil and other products that they exchange for fruits that would otherwise go to waste because of the virus. Read more of their inspirational story at https://apnews.com/602a36f9a1c6a8c3d96e9c3078dcbdf0

Bringing America Back: Fitness industry’s reopening challenges and more to know

As nearly every state loosens restrictions, gyms are facing slowed rollouts, lost revenue and legal challenges from customers. There are “serious challenges ahead” for the fitness market, according to Beth McGroarty of The Global Wellness Institute.

Health clubs have been expanding into spaces “once occupied by department and smaller stores at shopping centers and on city streets,” explained McGroarty. The widespread lockdown in March, however, decimated the revenue of gym owners and left them struggling to pay rent on their large retail locations.

Learn more at https://abcnews.go.com/US/fitness-industry-fight-regain-trust-gyms-reopen/story?id=70742734