THE IMPORTANCE OF FRIENDS
Last week my sweet friend, Riki, forwarded on to me an email she received from a friend of hers. The message is so powerful that I wanted to share it with you. We all know how important friends are in our lives but do we know just how good they are for our health.
Here is what Riki's friend has to say:
"I just finished taking an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body connection--the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.
Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality "girlfriend time" helps us to create more serotonin--a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf? Yes. But their feelings?--rarely. Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.
There's a tendency to think that when we are "exercising" we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged--not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking! So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. Sooo let's toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it's very good for our health."
Are you making time for your gal pals? I am so very blessed with many friends and treasure their sisterhood. I want to thank you also for being there with your kind words and support over the last few years that I have had this blog.
I am aware of the importance of friends and schedule time almost every week to meet up with friends. My art group has a standing get together once a week. Those of us who can make it, walk about three miles along a beautiful creek in the coastal moutains to the ocean. Sometimes we linger there over a cup of coffee or tea, marvel at the beauty of the nature that surrounds us and share our current life stories. We then journey back to our meeting place, which happens to be located at a wonderful outside cafe, and we stop and chat some more over lunch. All in all we spend sometimes between 3-4 hours together. The closeness we feel, the safety in sharing our innermost joys, sorrows, challenges is most certainly heaven sent.
I hope that you all have a friend(s) that you can count on, to love, to share with, to create with and to celebrate your glorious life with.
Hugs
Diana
