Excluding the ever-present financial pressure many around the world are feeling these days, it appears that the primary challenges for most people involve a) charging themselves up in the morning, b) recovering from sudden explosions of emotion during the day, and c) avoiding fear-based insomnia at night.
Fortunately, I have a plan to help you with each of those.
At this point, we can choose to see these situations as struggles and that is reasonable. But we can also see them as opportunities, and that is equally reasonable. One leads to thought-based suffering, where we wish life was otherwise. The other leads to active change and a sense of growth and achievement.
Since everyone already knows how to suffer, my exercises focus on how to capitalize on this rare experience, and they are designed to enact and enliven our energy-based, spiritual selves. They are designed to teach us how to live with more intention.
The exercises will be designed to help awaken us, and to change us in lasting ways. And if you doubt you can make such changes, science says otherwise. In fact, many of our favourite athletes would not even be athletes had they not consciously changed their own minds. Check out this BBC video. You can do that too.
Deliberate Practice refers to a special type of practice that is systematic and purposeful.
We can use this massive shift in our daily experience to help expose the patterns in our lives. By more consciously developing our replacement practices, we will reprogram our minds to work in ways that serve us well into the future.
In this way, by using the same practices that elite athletes use, we can improve a parent-child relationships. Struggling couples can be reminded of the simple but meaningful value of their partner’s pure presence as a human being.
If we’re normally social, rather than ‘doing’ things to avoid being alone, the lonely can learn to genuinely value their own company, and the opportunity to simply ‘be,’ alone. (And by that I mean engage actively in the act of conscious ‘being,’ while alone.)
As a part of my plan to help others to make these changes, my first act will be to help you with what many are saying is your first struggle: mornings.
People are understandably baffled by the fact that they wake up longing for their old life even if they incessantly complained about it previously. But such is the nature of addiction. Yet, what benefit is there in servicing that? Especially when weighted against capitalizing on the opportunity that this crisis has created. Which is where my help comes in.
In an effort to help people to develop more meaningful morning habits around setting intentions for each day, I invite you to join me for a weekday tone-setting, 9am (Mountain Standard Time) morning meditation. You can subscribe here or, if you prefer, the video will be streaming via facebook live. The first one will commence on April 7th, 2020.
Sometimes these will be consciousness-raising exercises, sometimes they will be revealing meditations, but each will be designed to rewire our minds in helpful ways.
If your time zone allows you to tune in live, great. But if not, simply watch the meditation on your next morning. And if you do watch them, feel free to make requests regarding what aspects of your mornings you would like help with in future installments.
As the video linked above demonstrates, ideas that fire together wire together. We can improve our flow of energy in the morning. And we can learn to focus that flow of energy on things we value, like our relationships, our jobs, or on our connection to those around us, and with the world itself. Anyone can do this.
A good morning can make the rest of the day much easier. So please do consider joining me/us for these live sessions each morning of the crisis. Together, we can engage in some simple awareness-raising exercises that will literally change our brains in ways that will help us to live the rest of our lives much more consciously.
I’ll look forward to commencing our first morning meditation tomorrow (April 7th, 2020) at 9:00am MST (Mountain Standard Time) here, via facebook live. Until then, take care everyone. Do your best to stay healthy and to keep others healthy too.
peace. s
PS As we feel gratitude for this unique and truly powerful opportunity for personal change, let us not forget that many around us are in profound pain as they or their loved ones suffer. Rather than being debilitated by that awareness, let use the love we have within us to simply spend a few moments of each day by simply ‘being’ with others in that spiritual sense that knows no time or distance.
Whether we are religious or not, everyone can relate to the sentiments behind ‘a moment of silence.’ It would be a healthy act for all of us to stop for a moment, periodically throughout our days, just to remind ourselves of how big the world is, and how unfortunate some people’s experiences truly are. And then we can take a moment to do nothing but feel our compassion for them, fully within our hearts.
In ways that are difficult to describe, that small act can pay mysterious dividends. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.