How do you live your best life? How do you live a life that matters to you? Your values shape how you live. In an ideal world, your day-to-day activities and your sense of what is meaningful are connected. Life is not always ideal, though. What could change? How do you motivate yourself? Counselling is a safe and neutral place to examine this: to find ways to line your behaviour up with your values, to come up with a plan, and to find ways around the obstacles that arise.

Vince Lombardi once said “the man on top of the mountain did not fall there”. Just as it takes planning and effort to scale a mountain, it also takes effort to plan and maintain a spending plan, set financial goals, save for emergencies and retirement. All we do contributes to either the realization of our goals or leaves us short of reaching them. We all want to live our best lives, so get out the pen and paper or Excel spreadsheet and start. Step by step and soon we will be there.

Aging is a natural process affected by the environment, genetics, lifestyle, and health, and is unique to each individual. To maintain independence and control requires an active and healthy lifestyle: exercise, healthy diet, intellectual activities, and a variety of social activities. Careful planning is required to maintain basic levels of functioning. Physical inactivity makes your body age faster, causing loss in bone strength, muscle strength, heart and lung fitness, and flexibility. Active living and physical activity improve posture and balance, self-esteem, and weight maintenance; lead to stronger muscles and bones; and contribute to relaxation and stress reduction.

Whether it’s the long daylight hours or relaxed daily schedules, we seem to let fewer things bother us in the summer. Things are just right for something new or a change!
A very big part of change through clinical counselling is AWARENESS. When we become aware of what we are feeling, thinking, or physically doing, we open a door of opportunity to potentially new choices and decisions that may be better; more of what we genuinely want to feel, think, or do. July can be your month for awareness and change! Contact a registered counsellor for help.

Proper functioning of our skin cells is the foundation of healthy skin, and healthy skin is beautiful skin! As our outermost defence layer, our skin is susceptible to damage: scars caused by acne and burns, stretch marks, hyperpigmentation, and of course wrinkles and fine lines. Micro-needling can treat the root of this damage. During a treatment, special micro-needles are used to create thousands of micro lesions in the dermis, and this stimulates growth factors that induce collagen and elastin production in the skin, improving the function of the cells and thus the texture and appearance!

Brain-imaging techniques have revealed the brain’s plasticity and have identified networks that music activates. The brain areas activated by music are not unique to music. These networks also process other functions. Musical and non-musical functions share systems. For example, motor control and executive control share circuits with music. Music can activate and drive complex patterns of interaction between the other two, so that a stroke patient and someone with Parkinson’s increases movement, and someone with traumatic brain injury increases cognitive functioning, such as problem solving or decision making.