What I have learned that helps is to have a “Default Thought” when we feel ourselves begin to slide emotionally. A default thought is a thought we can  immediately go to when something causes us to slide out of balance emotionally.

It can be a place in the past, present, future or even a made up place. We imagine that place when anything throws us emotionally. It will help us to disassociate from the situation causing us stress and bring us back to balance.

Buddism teaches us that when something happens in our experience, we need not let it “hook us,” to pull us in, to get lost in it feeling like we can’t get out.  When it “hooks us,” we begin to slide down the emotional scale, drowning with the emotion. We then reach for something to pull us out like food, alcohol, tv to numb our pain. We can accomplish the same relief in a positive way when we pull in our default thought.

Research has shown that a human emotion lasts only 1.5 minutes and it’s released. If we are feeling anything after 1.5 minutes, we are choosing to hold it unto ourselves.

Many people ask me how to let go of thoughts or emotions that are painful. This is one way to do this. It’s not as much about us letting them go or pushing them away it’s about changing our minds and focusing on something else. Then our distressing thought fades.

I have a friend who works as a teacher in a very rough inner city high school with gangs and lots of daily fighting. It is extremely difficult for my friend to pull herself out of bed and go to school everyday as every day is a challenge. I told her she only has 2 more months left but those 2 months feel like 10 years to her. I asked her if there was ever a time this year when she had a rewarding experience, one that made her smile and made her feel really great inside. She said yes, however there were just a few. I asked her to to focus on just one experience and how great it made her feel and when her thoughts guided her down a path of hating her job and couldn’t bare the thought of another day etc. I told her to force herself to think of that one experience that made her feel good (her new default thought). By doing this, the vibration of her being will shift into another emotional place, a new, balanced, peaceful and maybe even happy place.

Spend some time finding your default thought. It could be anything that evokes a feeling of peace, joy and/or happiness. It could be the day you met your true love, the birth of your child, a favorite place, a spot in nature, the ocean, a beautiful field of flowers, a tree where you used to sit under as a kid, laying in your bed. It could be anything.

After you find your default thought, practice “going there” even when you are not feeling emotionally out of balance. Then when you feel yourself slip and need to regain balance, quickly pull up your default thought. Close your eyes and be in your default thought. Spend as much time as you need in that thought. Tune into your body and notice if there is any tension left. If there is, sit longer, if not then continue on with your day. It will change your emotional state to that of more peace. Who doesn’t want to live with that?

There are a couple factors to consider as to why we are feeling so much fear.

The first is that of law of attraction. This law states that like attracts like, in other words, like thoughts attract more like thoughts.

The second is the amount of fear on our planet right now. This is happening for a few reasons. The first we can consider is Iraq and the war we have participated in for years. Secondly we have had numerous natural disasters over the last few years.  Lately these events have been one right after the next, major catastrophic events all over the US and even the world, from hurricanes and flooding to earthquakes. How does this affect us?  When one single person has a fearful thought, it literally launches out of us and finds other like thoughts and they collect or clump together. This is also known as the collective consciousness, a collection of thoughts that collect that are similar.

Think of the smog in San Francisco. It’s a thick layer that rests over the city. This is what happens to all of our thoughts only it’s two fold. All of our fearful thoughts get launched out into a collective consciousness “smog” in our atmosphere that sits there and continues to accumulate. Here’s the problem, we not only add to it but we have easy access to it when we have a fearful thought. Remember because of law of attraction, like thoughts attract like thoughts, so when we have one fearful thought, we have an entire planet wide collective consciousness of fear that we pull from that adds to our already negative feeling. It literally dumps into our own consciousness when we have one negative thought.

The third and final ingredient to this is something people are already talking about which is 2012. I plan to write a separate posting on this but for now I will say that with 2012, it is NOT the end of time, in fact it’s a very exciting time. But what is happening as we approach 2012 is that time is speeding up. What this means for us is that we are attracting in these fearful thoughts much faster than in the past. So we have one fearful thought and it attracts in the smog (collective consciousness) from our atmosphere of other heavy negative thoughts, one comes in and another one and another one. It happens incredibly fast these days. It’s a real slippery slope once it starts.

I have asked so many people lately if they are experiencing this and I get a unanimous, “YES!” “What is going on?”

So now we know what’s going on but how do we prevent these moments, hours or even days of anxiety, sadness or even depression?

First of all, know that it’s not really anxiety or depression, so don’t run out and grab anti-depressants. At least until you try a few things.

Here are some tips to help stay out of the fear consciousness:

1. WATCH YOUR THOUGHTS! We must stay on top of every thought. When we experience one little thought that comes from fear, we must turn it around immediately. Don’t let them build. This means we must live very aware, very present moment. Do not let them slide down the slippery slope creating anxiety/depression.
2. STAY GROUNDED Make sure to do exercises that keep your energy in your body. Do yoga, take a walk or go for a run, do some visualizations for grounding. Get your feet on the earth.
3. SALT WATER BATH Soak for 20 minutes in a sea salt bath to cleanse your auric field. The aura (the energy field that sits outside our physical body) is a collection station of all thoughts we have as well as other people’s thoughts that we are near. Put some quiet music on in the bath, do some deep breathing and/or meditate. Relax and release while soaking. Use 2 cups of sea salt in your warm bath.

If you have already slipped down the slippery slope, here’s what to do:

1. GROUND YOURSELF
2. REMIND YOURSELF WHATS REAL. Our negative thoughts tend to take us on a crazy roller coaster ride down very quickly. Just today my husband texted me while I was getting on an airplane to head home and he said we needed to cash out our investments and that the stock market was going down and had fallen 200 points today already. We have lost almost everything 2 years ago for various reasons and I was not about to lose our last and only investment. I texted my husband and told him to do it but realized it was in my name and his hands were tied. The flight attendant came on and told us to turn off our phones. My head began to race…”We are going to lose everything like our friends did in the market crash after 9/11.” “Why didn’t I sell last month like my sister told me to, blah, blah, blah” .” My thoughts continued and I felt the knots in my stomach arrive and then the tension in my neck and shoulder then I said to myself, “WAIT A MINUTE…STOP!” “Michelle, you are out of balance!” I promised myself not to let that happen and to be as conscious about these moments as I possibly could be. So I immediately stopped my thoughts, closed my eyes and began some slow deep breathing, ceasing all thoughts. I then reminded myself of what was real,” would we really lose everything in 1.5 hours during the flight home?” I decided to chose the thought “No.” I began to ask myself a list of questions that were real and in the moment like, “if we lose almost everything could it someday come back?” I decided yes. I asked myself if I knew for sure that the market was going to crash today. I decided, I did not know for sure but felt like maybe not totally crash.  I began to climb out of the dark hole I had fallen into. I forced myself to reach for the thoughts that made me feel better. This 10 minute process (at the most) turned me around from sliding into complete anxiety and panic to peaceful and calm. I then began to put in positive empowering thoughts about our finances (creating in a positive way and not negative). I felt great, got off the plane got home and called my planner and found that the stock market had begun to come back and now it was only down 90 points.

All that stress for nothing! BUT it was an amazing experience and was so happy to experience myself fall out of balance and then shift back into it in 10 minutes. It’s really that easy, it just takes desire and effort.

During this time of so much fear on our planet the greatest tool I have utilized for myself has been awareness. We MUST slow down and catch our negative thoughts and our negative feelings before they take us down. It’s imperative that we do this and we do it as soon as we experience the slightest negative thought or feeling, it will maintain balance within our emotional state and not allow the fear to creep in and take us down.

My mind kept telling me that it would only get worse as the work/travel for work/sports/school- schedule went on. Less time, more to do, less time, more to do….(the broken record in my head). I began hearing myself state to my friends and family, “I have no time to get it all done!”” I’ll never get everything done.” “I’m so stressed!”

The kind, ever so perfect universe and the law of attraction simply matched my thoughts and beliefs of “so stressed and not enough time” and created for me more and more items on my to do list! So today I awoke with rapid heartbeat and the slight anxiety that I had had for days was full on anxiety, as I replayed my drama in my head.

I knew the only way out of this anxiety was to sit. Meditation is THE BEST drug on the market AND it’s FREE!  My ego/mind kept telling me for days that I had so much to do that I had no time to sit and “do nothing” (as my mind would tell me-(to meditate) so I kept pushing it off.

I chose to do it anyway…

In my meditation after a few minutes of silence I asked for guidance on how to help me to “find my way home.” I needed to hit “reset” on my life and get back to balance.

I immediately felt a “whoosh” in my heart center and then felt warmth fill me up and then expand out into the room. I sat in silence for minutes (which felt like an hour) and asked how to maintain this state. I heard very clearly the word, “Live in the Present.” I felt so light and peaceful, as if a warm comforter had been wrapped around me. I sat in gratitude for a few moments and decided to get up and go for a walk.

As I walked I saw the birds and the colors so differently, they were vibrant and beautiful, like I had never seen! I then had a thought about how I could not wait to blog about my experience and I began to think about what I was going to say. As my mind began to race again I heard very softly, “present.” I realized that I was completely out of the present and had allowed my ego/mind to take over and bring me into the future of writing my blog. I couldn’t believe how easily I had slipped out of that magnificent state. I chose to jump back in and as I did my power walk, I looked at everything as if seeing the outdoors for the first time. It was work to stay present moment as throughout the rest of the hour my mind kept drifting to the past or future and then I would redirect to present.

What an amazing walk I had. For those of us that have a difficult time sitting in silence and meditating, this is another fabulous way to meditate-Walking Meditation. It takes work and practice to live in the moment but the more we do it the easier it becomes.

Anything that can shift anxiety to peace in minutes is worth trying and incorporating into our daily routine. Even if it’s just for a few moments a day, practice living in the present, it’s where anxiety and stress DON’T live.

I then realized that it had been 2 months since my last blog post, 6 weeks since my last true meditation and a week since my last deep breathing session. And what do you know…I feel out of balance! I asked myself how did I get here and realized how tricky the ego/mind can be. I remember so many times hearing myself say, “Oh, I need to write about THAT,” and “Wow, I really need to meditate or do my breathing.” And what I would inevidably hear every time was…”Later…”

When the ego takes over (or when we allow it to take charge) it feels that we need to “do” more and more to feel good and feel calm. The problem is that it’s the exact opposite! We need to stop what we are doing and meditate for 5 minutes or do some deep breathing or just STOP the treadmill we are on and just be for a few moments. It’s in these moments of “nothingness” that we find peace and regain balance. When we don’t stop, we fall out of balance. The ego/mind has it backwards it tells us to do more, go, go go, don’t stop!

It’s amazing to me how quickly we can fall out of balance when we don’t take time for ourselves. One of my favorite things to do is to write and it would wind up last on my list!

I have learned a lot about balance in the last 2 months and now feel grateful for the experience as I can write about it. We all have our things that will pull us out of balance if we let them. Meditatation/breathwork/quiet time is like hitting reset on our computers, clearing the slate. It lets the ego/mind release the grip it has on us and our to do list. It allows for us to hear our own God given guidance, our intuition to guide us to what we do next and what we cross off our list next.

This piece is partly a review of Eva Hoffman’s book Time. But Father Martin Boland frames this with his own reflections:

We can become so focused on busyness and speed that we begin to lose a proper sense of ourselves. Individuals can feel that their lives are “spinning out of control” or worse, are about to “break down”. The common response to the question, “How are you?”, has become “I’m busy.” We define ourselves in terms of frenetic activity. At the same time, other aspects and dimensions of our life (family, friendship, the social and the spiritual) are eroded by the constant pressures on our time. “We are money rich, but time poor.”

We MUST stop for ourselves and reset. It will create more time, but more importantly peace and bring us back to balance.