Today I began a 21-day reset to optimum physical wellness, mental clarity, and wholeness of being. Twice a year — in January and September — I embark on a three week program I’ve personally developed through the years that puts me back in fit form, embraces mindfulness, and brings alignment, ease, and harmony to my inner world. These resets are so powerful that often the practices I incorporate become more than a temporary undertaking and end up continuing as a part of my lifestyle. Such was the case in 2015 when I decided to remove caffeine from my diet during a reset. I’ve been off it ever since. The beauty of a health and wellness reset, unlike a New Year’s resolution, is that there is no overwhelming obligation to make the practices permanent. Therefore the mind has less resistance to them. When the mind views something as temporary the threshold for tolerance is much higher. So with little to no resistance you are able to handle, and dare I say, enjoy the variety and novelty of a reset. 

Here’s a sneak peek of my 21-day mind, body, spirit reset for this month: 

MIND

This January I’m working on cultivating the art of attention, where attention eclipses thought. Attention is about the now. Thought is about the past or the future. Attention is about experiencing the reality in front of you, unattached. Thought is about judging, classifying, or identifying with the reality your mind creates. My intention for these 21 days is to constantly keep my attention so that my thoughts do not take me for a ride. This includes focusing only on what is essential and not getting caught up in what my mind is trying to convince me must be done.

BODY

My body reset plan is intense but extremely fulfilling. In short I do the following:

• 60-90 minutes of exercise a day (for me that’s Yoga or Barre).
• Consume one gallon of water a day.
• Eliminate alcohol, dairy, grain, meat, eggs, corn, soy, potatoes, sugar, and chocolate from my diet.
• Fast from 7pm to 7am.
• Use PH strips to to test the alkaline/acidic levels of my body throughout the day to ensure I am maintaining a balanced state.
• Bed by 9:30pm, with a minimum of nine hours of sleep per night.

SPIRIT

While working on correcting the mind and body it’s essential to feed the spirit. To that end, I commit to the following spiritual practices for my 21-day reset:

• A 10 minute morning body sensing meditation immediately upon waking which consists of sitting in a chair with a straight back and soft gaze forward and scanning the body from feet to head.
• A 30 minute afternoon or evening Kelly Howell guided meditation.
• Application of geranium essential oil upon waking and before sleep to my temples and wrists.
• Limiting television to two hours per day — no violence, no intense drama, and no reality TV shows. I usually end up watching a documentary or foreign film. 
• No reading or watching the news.
• No phone or computer use in the first thirty minutes of waking and in the two hours before bedtime.