Take Ten: Meditation 101

One of the quickest and most effective ways to start a daily routine is to introduce it into your life in small doses. Commit to yourself that each and every day you will give yourself 10 – 20 minutes to just rest, breathe and recharge. You recharge your cell phone every day; doesn’t your body deserve at least that?

Meditation can be very intimidating and many people who try it give up because they feel like they are not doing it correctly or that it is too difficult for them. I would like to very clearly say – THERE IS NOT A WRONG WAY TO MEDITATE. Whether you choose to embark on a great spiritual journey into meditation or you opt to simply learn and practice deep breathing and relaxation techniques, meditation should become your own unique retreat from the busy world.

Every person’s daily schedule is different, so you will have to decide on the best time of day and frequency that works in your life. If you are unrealistic about your ability to carve out a few moments for yourself, you will only add to your proverbial cluttered inbox by trying to force it into your life. If you find yourself struggling to come up with a workable schedule, consider waking up or doing to bed 15 minutes earlier than you normally do. One of the best times to meditate is first thing in the morning before starting your day.

First, create a space that is calming and relatively quiet. If you are a busy mom, ask your children or significant other to please help you have a few uninterrupted minutes. Turn off your cell phone, the television, your computer and anything else that might provide an interruption. Many people like to play music very softly to help their mind relax and refocus. I would suggest something without words as they can prove distracting. Another option would be a CD of natural sounds like water, wind, ocean waves or a crackling fire. These types of CD’s can be found in almost any department store.

Situate yourself so that you are comfortable. You can be sitting or lying down, with or without pillows, as long as you are comfortable and can relax.

Close your eyes and slow your breathing. Inhale deeply through your nose with your mouth closed as you mentally count to four. Then exhale through your mouth making a slight blowing noise as you mentally count to four again. Focus your attention on the sound of the air entering and exiting your body. Continue this exercise for several minutes until you feel that your mind is clear and the breathing has become comfortable for you.

For the first few days you practice this technique, focus only on the breathing and keeping your mind clear. Although some people have no trouble clearing their minds and focusing only on their breath, most people will struggle to keep their thoughts from wandering back to work or other issues in their lives. When this happens simply refocus your thoughts again to your breathing in and out. If you find it very difficult to keep your mind free of cluttering thoughts, try mentally keeping count on the exhalation breaths. Do this until you have exhaled 100 times. When you are finished you should feel calm and relaxed and ready to face the world.

A Time To Rest

One of the great sorrows of my life was coming to the realization that I had been swept up in the torrential current of today’s rushed society. Thanks to the wonders of technology – cell phones, email, internet connectivity, satellites – our world is built upon expectations of instant access and instant gratification. It’s amazing to see some of the reactions if I don’t answer an email within a few minutes of receipt. Am I ok? Is our internet down? Have they upset me? Ummm… no actually I was in the restroom…

That kind of mass information exchanging every second has created an incredible pressure in the workplace. Volumes of information are accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As the technology network expanded, the average work day expanded right along with it. Work days that were once 9am – 5pm with an hour break in the middle of the day became 8 am to 5pm with a 30 minute break for lunch. Many employees never leave their desks for lunch, opting instead to eat while plowing through emails and spreadsheets in the hope that one day they might catch-up on the backload of work piled up in their in-box. The average worker is constantly behind and virtually never caught up or comfortably ahead.

Even our vacations and weekends have been invaded by the workplace technology monsters. It’s far too easy to open up your laptop, cell phone or blackberry while you had intended to be building sandcastles with your kids, skiing with your spouse or just relaxing alone by the pool. We almost never slow down and disconnect long enough to ever really recharge. So, like our work that is ever behind and struggling to be caught up, our spirits are in the same cluttered in-box right along with everything else that we’ll “get to eventually”.

What we as a society ~ and I mean everyone – CEO’s, electricians, secretaries, bankers, stockbrokers, programmers, waitresses, processors, teachers, students, doctors, stay-at-home mom’s, TV news anchors, single-dad’s – EVERYONE ~ need to realize is that because we never slow down and recharge, we are never able to work or live at our fullest potential. Equally sad is that the frenetic pace doesn’t allow us to truly see many things in the world around us. I recently went to Los Angeles and one thing I vividly recall was in the airport, everyone was rushing by, heads down, texting or talking on cell phones as they hurried along. There was the most beautiful picture hanging on the wall in the airport that I stopped a moment to look at and I had to wonder if even one in every hundred thousand people that pass by it ever even notice it is there. Probably not.

So what can we do about it? To undo such an enormous societal error is too incredibly daunting to even contemplate. Arguably, that is the exact thought process that got us into this mess in the first place. Most people see a big problem and try to generate one gigantic solution, quick and efficient, and if that is not an option we table the issue for another day and add it to our “in-box” of life. The days of breaking down problems slowly and methodically and then focusing on long-term solutions to the parts that make up the whole are all but gone, overridden by the era of instant gratification where we don’t have time to contemplate and test theories because something else bigger and more important will surely happen while our attention is focused elsewhere! The constant state of urgency that our world is in today is positively daunting.

So my answer? Relax. I know – impossible, right? Then make it possible. Make it important again. Make one of your top priorities in your life to allow yourself the latitude to recharge yourself. Do you have the time? Probably not, but you can use that as a starting point to reclaiming your SELF. Take some private time back from your heavy workloads, busy schedules, and myriad of responsibilities you have heaped upon yourself in this chaotic world. Start with ten minutes a day – just for yourself. No work. No TV. No people. Just you.

It will drive you crazy at first if you are as busy as I was and in some respects still am. I read an article about making 10 minutes for yourself to just sit and breathe, relaxing yourself and your mind to help promote inner peace. The first time I tried it was a complete failure. I sat down on my bed, soft music on with no other distractions. I took deep breaths… and then quite suddenly my mind was assaulted with things I hadn’t done at work, people I forgot to email, friends I hadn’t talked to in far too long, appointments I was afraid I might miss or had forgotten about… it was insane. That was when I truly realized that I had to actually learn how to turn off the never-ending stream of chaos from everyday life and just RELAX.

That is what this blog is dedicated to. I want to share practical ways to give yourself back a little bit of what is stripped away by the stress and pressures of day to day life. It will also be a journey of sorts for me, as I am constantly growing and learning, spiritually, physically and mentally. I hope that I can offer you tools to start recharging your spirit and a haven filled with ideas that will breathe life back into YOUR life and the lives of those around you. You see, that is truly the secret to change – you start with yourself. If everyone did that, the job would be done in no time at all!