If we earnestly made efforts to ramp ourselves down toward sleep, and if the universe (our children and pets) cooperated, then hopefully many of us have had the good fortune to have risen from a restful sleep.
For those who did not get that sleep, the rest of us will show respect for your struggle by being especially grateful for the fact that we’re all meeting every challenge of the day with a better reserve of energy and clarity. Hopefully the fatigue helps in the staying -relaxed process. It can often have that beneficial effect.
MORNING MEDITATION SEVEN
Today’s meditation is straightforward. Our success depends on how conscious we manage to remain on a moment to moment basis. This is important because our body has signalling systems to let us know when we will need to check into our interpretation of reality.
No one’s complaining in life about things that are positive or happy or loving. That makes fear, anger and sadness our focus. That means job-one is to find out where our body carries its tension and low feelings. Jaw? Neck? Shoulders? Back? Chest? Stomach? Once we find our internal physical gauge, all we have to do is monitor it.
The first part is to find where the tension shows up. The second part is to become aware of how often we sense ourselves feeling that feeling for the rest of the day. We can count them if we like. Other than maybe noting where and when we are, or who we are with, we are best not to unnecessarily add to an already negative mix of thoughts.
We should silence any compulsion our ego might feel to scold us for having engaged in any negative, or fearful thoughts. We’re already doing these exercises to develop our negativity avoidance skills, so it’s illogical for us to complain about the fact that we don’t completely know what we’re in the midst of learning.
Finding peace and clarity through a clearer vision of reality is not about us fixing our broken selves, it’s about realizing that there never was such a thing as ‘normal’ and therefore no such thing as ‘broken.’
Much like cheetahs live one way and seals another, human beings are best to simply live lives in alignment with who they are. As impressive as both cheetahs and seals are, neither would do very well if they traded places.
Before we know how to be where we are, we have to have a more rounded understanding of who we are. Finding our where we carry our tension, and becoming more aware of when it arises, is an extremely valuable awareness when it comes to helping us learn to shift to a healthy and/or productive headspace.
See you here later tonight for the evening meditation. In the meantime, enjoy your day!
peace, s
EVENING MEDITATION SEVEN
This evening’s meditation is another easy but meaningful one. First we want to choose an order that we’re going to cycle through the various parts of our body. We want head to toe, front to back.
Face, neck, right shoulder, back of right bicep, back of our forearm and then back of our hand, and then through our fingers and back up the front of our arms where we would enter our chest, then down to our diaphragm and then into our stomach, then hips, etc.
The idea is to have some memorable order to move through, as we shift our awareness to different parts of our bodies. As we come upon any tension, we want to pause and focus on that region.
Once we have it isolated in our awareness, we want to take three very slow, very deep breaths that we hold in for a few seconds before exhaling. We should feel the muscles relax a bit each time.
Each time we go through our order, our bodies we will find new tensions to release because when we drop the initial ones, we will expose others. The idea is to repeat this circuit until we note that we feel considerably more loose and blobby. Those are great states to head to bed in.
Keep taking these seriously and they will pay off –I know for some of us they already have.
Sweet dreams everyone.
peace, 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.