If you feel you’ve been to the Grand Canyon enough times and want to see more of Arizona, why not go to Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “de Shay”)?

A three-day weekend trip to this national monument near the Four Corners can be both educational and mystical. You will come back having learned a little more about the high desert and the Navajo way of life, and with a heightened awareness that only a journey to a place like this can bring about.

A good choice for the first night’s stop is the La Posada, just a little over an hour’s drive east of Flagstaff. This railroad hotel, with its intriguing history, has such a great ambience that just going there and nowhere else, can make for a real vacation.

My life is not perfect. My mental health is not the best. However, with my training, education, and openness to life experiences, good or bad, I have constantly tried to be healthy as much as possible. Being the first article I am writing for the Health and Nutrition section for AFF, my main goal is to share some ways to live a better and more fulfilling life that hopefully you could learn from and practice accordingly to have healthier mind sets and better life skills.

And in this premiere article, and just like any course or program in counseling and psychology where knowing oneself is an important key, thus I want to ask you: Do you truly know yourself? Do you know what it is that you want to achieve in life and what are you doing to accomplish that? What makes you laugh, cry, and feel all the rest of the emotions that you can identify? What makes you motivated or feel lazy about to do something? How well do you process information and make the choices that you decide? How do your experiences, education, cultural influences impact you as a person? How well can you think critically or your opinions are the be-all-and-end-all of what reality is? In short, who are you?

And whether we accept it or not, our fears get the lions share in the pie of obstacles to success. Because of this intense and persistent fear, many people often lead a constricted life.