May 08, 2024Beings Of The Month

Being Of The Month: Ati Balding

We love to meet many people in the wellness industry, and after I met Ati sometime ago in a restaurant near Borough market, I instantly loved her energy and became friends! Ati is an amazing wellbeing therapist, healer, counseller, hypnotherapist and much more! She has collaborative with us many times and if you get the chance to work with Ati, you will not be disappointed! After attending one of her sessions, you leave literally melting away!

We asked Ati the following question....

What are your top tips for improving your mental health?

Self-care is a huge part of my life and has helped with so many things such as supporting my voice. When I was a child, I had a debilitating stutter and my mum taught me mindfulness and unbeknownst to me I didn’t know it was called mindfulness! She asked me to peel a pomegranate every night after our evening meal and just the act of slowing down peeling the fruit slow down my mind and my thoughts. I eventually started to talk again and so I still have this practice at home and when I’m sitting down or feel a little bit stressed about something I will have a pomegranate or peel an orange really mindfully.

This carries over into everything that I do, including the way I massage my hands greeting my face with the Luna goddess and massaging my scalp every night.

That literally takes under five minutes every day and sets me up for good nights sleep.

Another thing that I highly recommend recommend for boosting our well-being is to reduce the amount of time we spend on social media and screen time. The way I do this for myself is I put a timer on my phone. Boundaries around this are so important I know that I can get carried away on the screen if I don’t have a structure around it. It also helps me manage social media my own way rather than someone else telling me what to do and how to do it.

Being in nature and finding ways to feel grounded in that has been hugely helpful for over the years. If you don’t have access to green space near you even standing on the floor with bare feet really helps for one minute just closing your eyes and feeling the ground beneath you.

Staying hydrated again hugely important. Especially during menopause which is what I’m in at the moment. I’m post menopause now but every time I feel a hot flush coming on or I feel agitated or worried about something I always check in and make sure that I have water to hand. Staying hydrated is so important for our wellbeing.

Meditating has also helped me and there can be such confusion around mindfulness and meditation but the two go hand-in-hand. You can incorporate mindfulness in everything that you do and that’s just focused awareness on your activities. By staying mindful you’re not living in the past and fast forwarding to the present you’re being in the present, what emotion presents itself.

I record my own audios and I love to listen to 10 minutes of hypnosis to calm down my nervous system.

A balanced nervous system goes a long way to integrate the mind and body and we often forget that they are both linked. In fact all of our limbs, muscles, atoms and cells in are linked and we often think that they are separate and treat them that way, but if we think of them as one thing we can treat the whole thing with kindness rather than separate them. I also remind myself that life is so short and whatever we feel is transient and those of us that are living can incorporate that as part of our daily gratitude practice