Chinese Wellness Morning Routine I Wish I Started Sooner

When I was young, every time a glass of cold water with ice would arrive on the table, my mom would quietly ask for the ice to be removed. And until today, every time she catches me drinking something cold, her eyes would go wide and she would be like, you're drinking cold things again, they aren't good for you. And for the longest time in my life, I thought cold things can't be that bad for you. I was wrong. I was actually dismissing a whole philosophy of how you should treat your body from the morning. You've just come out of sleep. So you need to ease your body into the morning as it's still waking up. It needs more time to warm up, to feel energized. And so one principle that we follow is you don't want to shock the body in any ways, regardless of whether it is to do with food, to do with how you get out of bed, to what you drink, to what kind of exercise you do in the morning. Everything I'm about to show you from the way we eat, drink, and move follows the same principle, but practice in five different ways. And the principle essentially is to be as gentle as possible to your body, especially in the morning, so we can nourish and nurture our body in the best possible way for us to ease into the day. Before I started practicing this Chinese wellness, slower morning routine, I used to be very harsh with myself in the morning. I would wake up very early. And I think during that intense period, it was about 5.45 and then I'll skip the breakfast, drink coffee on an empty stomach. I lifted a lot of weights and I had just no regards for how my body was feeling. The morning is how you set the tone for your mind and your body. And if you set it in a rush and harsh way to the body, it sets a really bad tone that makes it much harder to correct throughout the day. The first one is actually the most counter cultural one. It happens before your feet even touch the floor. Most morning advice tells you to spring out of bed the moment you hear the alarm ring, but Chinese wellness says otherwise. You should actually spend some time just stretching for three to five minutes, moving your limbs and waking it up and just telling your body, hey, it's time to wake up. It's a much more gentle way to wake up the mind and body, even though it's a small thing, but it sets the tone of the day because you're telling your mind and body that you're giving it some time to ease into the day and it's not abrupt, so you don't accumulate as much tension in your body from the morning. For most of my life, I used to wake up as soon as the alarm rings just because the alarm bell is so loud and I was always scared of falling back asleep. But since my health scare five years ago, I started to learn to be more gentle with my body because your body is going to be the only thing that carries you through life for the rest of your life. And a lot of the time we think our mind is floating above the body and not remembering that it is the very thing that allows your body to exist. So ever since I started realizing the importance of that, I started to give myself the morning grace. I will wake up without storming out of bed. I would give myself the time to say my grateful five, to read the Bible and to meditate just for 10 minutes. And I can see a significant difference to how I feel because I'm not bombarding my mind with so much information and so much noise as soon as I wake up and my body just feels much more at peace, which makes the day also feel much more peaceful. Next, always drink a glass of warm or at least room temperature water to start with. Never cold. What I like to do usually is I fill my glass with some cold water and I pour some hot or warm water in it. And I always drink the whole glass of water before I eat or drink anything else. My mom avoided cold drinks her whole life and she always taught me to do the same. She would always say that our spleen and stomach needs a very warm and stable environment to effectively process food. If we were to drink cold drinks all the time, the TCM people say that that can weaken the digestive fire, which can lead to bloating, sluggish metabolism and fatigue. The TCM experts always emphasize on how persistent cold things can be so hard on the spleen and the stomach, especially for women. Cold things can really damage the womb and the womb is related to everything else, including how well we age, our skin health or how calm the body feels. There's literally a condition in the TCM world called the cold womb syndrome. And there's many different kinds of TCM recipes that can help with that, but that can also affect how fertile you are. So it's really important to pay attention to that. And that's also why my mom would always be extra careful around that time of the month, because that is when your body is the most fragile as a woman and needs the most care towards. To be honest with you, my mom taught me all of this growing up, but I never really followed it strictly. And I only started doing a lot of those religiously for the past three to five years, because as I got older, I started to feel the consequences much more immediately. If I were to have cold things in the morning, I would have cold hands and feet even on a warm day. My teeth were hurt and I would almost have a dull stomach ache sometimes and bloating. So I moved my cold morning breakfast to lunchtime because I still want to enjoy my yogurt. So for example, I used to have cold milk with cereal or cold yogurt with berries in the morning, but now I will only have it during lunchtime and I feel that my body feels much more comfortable having it at lunchtime. It doesn't shock my body as much, especially if I were to have cold things before or after that time of the month. The next month I will have much worse period pains. The effects are so immediate that even I am still so shocked by it because the body literally talks back to you. And especially when you start paying more attention to your body, you can start to see all the ways that your body is trying to send you a message on what it likes and doesn't like. If you have coffee, and I do, the principle still holds. Never drink coffee on an empty stomach. There is almost a collective common knowledge in Chinese culture that you should never drink coffee on an empty stomach because it's so damaging for your stomach. And whenever people catch you doing it, there's almost like a collective wince that people are like, you're drinking coffee on an empty stomach? It's as if you just committed a crime. And that is how serious people take this in Chinese culture. And whether or not you believe in TCM, coffee is very acidic. So it's always recommended that you line it with something soothing, such as congee. That's what they like to have in Chinese culture. Cereal could be good. I sometimes have a boiled egg, as you probably know now if you watch my other videos, or I have a banana or steamed sweet potato. And if I'm not feeling like having food just yet, I usually have a spoon of extra virgin olive oil. That just helps align my stomach and makes the landing of the coffee less harsh. Every time I would have coffee on an empty stomach, because on a particular day I might be traveling and I don't have the olive oil with me, I would always feel that I almost have a stomach ache. And it makes it much more uncomfortable when I have my first meal in the morning. Next, of course, is breakfast. The most traditional Chinese breakfast consists of congee, hard-boiled eggs, and sweet potato. Sometimes they can taste plain because you never add too much sauce or different kinds of cooking methods, or even salt to it. They're mostly boiled and steamed, but they're very good for yangshen, which literally translates to life maintenance or nourishment for life slash for the body. And if you think about it, it's just all the little things that you do or not do every single day that helps to keep the body in a healthy state. The reason for this is very simple. Your body has just woken up, and so your stomach is also just waking up. So you want to give it the most gentle, most easy to digest food, so you don't set yourself into a food coma before the day has even started. It follows the same principle. Since the body is barely awake, you want to feed it something that is barely there, something gentle and kind, so we can ease into the day. Next is movement. In the Chinese wellness sphere, it's believed that the morning is the best time for you to move your body. And there's a beautiful logic to it. It's believed in the TCM world that the morning is where the body's young energy begins to rise. And doing qigong, you can see how I like to do it in this other video that I posted if you're interested, is one of the most excellent ways to move your body because there's lots of deep breathing and slow stretching that helps you to ease into the day. It helps with the stiffness from sleep, and also it helps to calm the mind before the noise of the day begins. Sometimes I like to do qigong, sometimes pilates, sometimes I'm practicing some ballet movements that I've learned. Whatever it might be, try to ease your body into the day with more gentle movements before you accumulate it to the stronger ones. And if you like to go to the gym in the morning, maybe don't lift as heavy when you first start, and then ease into it as you go. What I notice is whenever I skip my exercises in the morning and try to do it in the afternoon instead, it's much harder and it just requires so much more willpower because my body is in a different state. That is what has worked well for me is in the morning, what I do is I plant my feet on the floor. I'm not wearing the right clothes for it right now, but just imagine I am, right? And you want your legs on shoulder width, your arms pointing forward, and you don't want to be too stiff where your shoulders and arms are. And you want to swing it down for five times, and on every fifth swing, you're going to do a squat bounce. And every time, you want it to be about the same strength and momentum that you're putting in. So for example, I'll do one, two, three, four, five bounce. One, two, three, four, five bounce. And I do this for 15 to 20 minutes, depending on how much time you have. And I noticed that this is a very simple movement that you can do in the if you don't want to commit to a full hour or any kind of other more serious exercises. It just helps you to ease into the day. So let me know what you think about this because I also recently added this to my routine not long ago. When you put these together, the slow rising, warm water, lined coffee, gentle breakfast and movement, it's all part of the same idea. The morning is not a race to begin, but rather a body to be eased awake. And that is what most of us forget all the time, including myself, which is there is no life to live without this body. And that's why it's all about paying more attention and being more gentle with it. That is what wellness means to me. It's not about performing a routine, but rather paying more attention to what your body really needs. If this resonated with you, my Sunday refinement letter goes deeper. The link is below. Thank you so much for being here. And I hope to see you in the next video.