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.

Enjoy!

MEDITATION

Meditation is sustained and unbroken concentration that leads to a highly focused mind. Meditation moves us from using our subconscious mind to our conscious mind. Living in the conscious mind, trains us to live with more focus, proficiency and creativity and less disorganized, chaotic and scattered.  Meditation will actually help you to think in new ways and gain deeper perspective on experiences. You will find that you are not bothered by things that might have bothered or even upset you in the past.

Other benefits of meditation include:

• Slows the release of hormones in response to stress
• Stronger immune system
• Reduction of anxiety
• Lowers blood pressure
• Decreases muscle tension and headaches
• Increases serotonin production (low serotonin levels are linked to   depression, obesity, insomnia and even headaches)
• Substance abuse, alcoholism and cigarette smoking have all been helped by meditation
• Increases compassion for others
• Self Acceptance

The list goes on and on and these are just a few ways  that meditation can be life changing.

HOW TO MEDITATE?

Find a nice peaceful area, and sit quietly (don’t lie down), set your timer (by setting a timer you are not constantly interrupting your practice by opening your eyes and checking your clock) and just clear your mind. As thoughts come in, imagine an ocean wave rolling in and pulling them away, gently, slowly then return to silence. Another visual is to see the words falling off a cliff then the cliff is empty. Any visual will work, have fun with it. Remember, meditation is a practice and even people that have done meditation for years for hours per day still call it a practice. The human mind must be trained NOT to have thoughts and it takes practice! So be easy on yourself.

Meditation seems difficult to some people, I often will hear, “I have tried but I can’t!” YES YOU CAN! Meditation is the simple act of quieting your mind. For many people having a focus, like a mantra helps them with mediation. Pick a mantra like “peace” or “OM” or any word that you are drawn to and simply state it over and over again, slowly. You can even sing it out loud or to yourself. The point is to concentrate fully on that word and that word only. When other thoughts drift in, repeat your word/mantra.

You can meditate while walking, riding a bike or even driving! It’s simply clearing your mind and thinking of nothing! Try driving home from work without your cell phone to your ear or the radio on and repeat your mantra out loud for 10 minutes, it’s so incredibly powerful. The next time you go for a walk be present moment with what you are noticing, do NOT bring your iPod or your cell phone, remain present moment and focused on what’s around you!

HOW LONG TO MEDITATE?

Meditation is not something that you have to do 60 minutes a day to begin with. When you first begin a meditation practice, begin with 2 or 5 minutes per day. Stick with that for a week until you feel you are ready to extend your time. Continue extending your time to 15-20 minutes per day and if you can maintain this amount of time-great! If you can only commit to 10 minutes per day this is great too. Spending even a few moments a day of being mindful is far better than not spending any time. It would be nice to have a goal of 20 minutes per day at some point; this may take some time to accomplish and it’s OK.

Be easy on yourself and celebrate even your smallest accomplishments, even your 2 minute victory. You may feel like 2 minutes is nothing but I guarantee you, you are benefiting your brain in more ways than you could ever imagine.

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.

Here’s what happens:

Quantum physics has proven that when you break the human body down to the smallest particle, it’s energy vibrating. Likewise, our thoughts and emotions are also energy. Negative thought or negative emotion vibrates slower (which is why it feels heavier) and positive thought or emotion vibrates fast (which is why it feels light). Our energy field expands when we are in a good place, in fact, the more we step into a happy, or positive emotional place and feel it, the larger our energy field expands. Just to give you an idea, your energy field (if you are in a really great mood) can be in a 30 foot radius outside of your body.

Someone that is in a bad mood has dense, heavy energy around them and their field may be only inches off of their body. When you with your huge energy field, sweeps through their energy field, you pick up all of their “stuff,” all of their negative emotions. Now you have someone else’s despair, anger, frustration, stress etc. in your field and it weighs you down. This can happen at the grocery store, the mall, work, at lunch with friends etc.

A few of my own examples: A while back I had coffee with a friend. I had just finished writing a new workshop that I had been working on and was on cloud 9! We met for coffee, she had a smile on her face the whole time and things seemed great. However, I left there feeling so exhausted and depressed (out of the blue) and could not wait to get home to lie down and take a nap. I got home and before lying down I went outside and did a few things to “clear my field” and my energy bounced back to where I was before our coffee. I called my friend and I asked her how she felt during coffee and she said she was great until the end when we were getting ready to leave. She was hoping to see the guy she wanted to date and she didn’t and immediately felt depressed and exhausted. She had to go home and take a nap! So I picked up on her emotions, cleared them and “my” depression and fatigue immediately lifted and I went on with my great day. Another example happened recently with my husband. I was in a really energized, good mood, ready to stay up late and work after the kids were in bed. He got home from work and we had a conversation, after that my energy began to get low. I begrudgingly finished making dinner and could not wait to crawl into bed. I told my kids to call my husband for dinner and he was taking a bath and had fallen asleep! He came out and could not stop yawning. We put the kids to bed at 8:30 and crawled into bed, both of us exhausted. I lay there for a moment and remembered how energized I was, I traced it back to our conversation and realized his emotional state “slid” after our conversation and I picked up on him! I cleared myself and felt much better again. He later told me that your conversation really made him feel “off” emotionally. What you can do if this happens to you/clearing techniques:

1. Stomp your feet outside on the earth (or inside if it’s freezing out) and shake your arms then legs, as if throwing the energy off of them. You can also brush (with your hand) the energy off of your arms and legs as well. Hold the intention that you are shedding all energy and emotion that is not yours.
2. If you are a yoga person, the beginning of the sun salutation where you sweep your hands over your head, cleanses your energy/auric field.
3. Draw figure 8’s or the Infiniti symbol in your energy field, all over, big and small.
4. Visualize yourself taking a shower with beautiful cleansing light washing over your body and energy field. Again, hold the intention that you are cleansing your field of all negative energy and emotions that are not yours.

Awareness is the key to this. Pay attention to how you feel and when your feelings shift. It’s amazing how often we lose our happiness because of someone else’s emotions on us. Enjoy these easy techniques for maintaining your balanced emotional place.

There are actually many ways to keep in balance and not get sucked into the collective consciousness of “holiday stress.” The holiday’s can be joyful from Thanksgiving through New Years. In fact the tools that you will read about throughout the next 6 weeks are tools that can be used throughout the entire year to maintain peace, balance and joy in your daily life! So learn the techniques now and continue using them throughout 2010.

The first tool that in this holiday series is:

MEDITATION

Meditation is sustained and unbroken concentration that leads to a highly focused mind. Meditation moves us from using our subconscious mind to our conscious mind. Living in the conscious mind, trains us to live with more focus, proficiency and creativity and less disorganized, chaotic and scattered.  Meditation will actually help you to think in new ways and gain deeper perspective on experiences. You will find that you are not bothered by things that might have bothered or even upset you in the past.

Other benefits of meditation include:

• Slows the release of hormones in response to stress
• Stronger immune system
• Reduction of anxiety
• Lowers blood pressure
• Decreases muscle tension and headaches
• Increases serotonin production (low serotonin levels are linked to   depression, obesity, insomnia and even headaches)
• Substance abuse, alcoholism and cigarette smoking have all been helped by meditation
• Increases compassion for others
• Self Acceptance

The list goes on and on and these are just a few ways (relating to holiday stress) that meditation can be life changing.

HOW TO MEDITATE?

Find a nice peaceful area, and sit quietly (don’t lie down), set your timer (by setting a timer you are not constantly interrupting your practice by opening your eyes and checking your clock) and just clear your mind. As thoughts come in, imagine an ocean wave rolling in and pulling them away, gently, slowly then return to silence. Another visual is to see the words falling off a cliff then the cliff is empty. Any visual will work, have fun with it. Remember, meditation is a practice and even people that have done meditation for years for hours per day still call it a practice. The human mind must be trained NOT to have thoughts and it takes practice! So be easy on yourself.

Meditation seems difficult to some people, I often will hear, “I have tried but I can’t!” YES YOU CAN! Meditation is the simple act of quieting your mind. For many people having a focus, like a mantra helps them with mediation. Pick a mantra like “peace” or “OM” or any word that you are drawn to and simply state it over and over again, slowly. You can even sing it out loud or to yourself. The point is to concentrate fully on that word and that word only. When other thoughts drift in, repeat your word/mantra.

You can meditate while walking, riding a bike or even driving! It’s simply clearing your mind and thinking of nothing! Try driving home from work without your cell phone to your ear or the radio on and repeat your mantra out loud for 10 minutes, it’s so incredibly powerful. The next time you go for a walk be present moment with what you are noticing, do NOT bring your iPod or your cell phone, remain present moment and focused on what’s around you!

HOW LONG TO MEDITATE?

Meditation is not something that you have to do 60 minutes a day to begin with. When you first begin a meditation practice, begin with 2 or 5 minutes per day. Stick with that for a week until you feel you are ready to extend your time. Continue extending your time to 15-20 minutes per day and if you can maintain this amount of time-great! If you can only commit to 10 minutes per day this is great too. Spending even a few moments a day of being mindful is far better than not spending any time. It would be nice to have a goal of 20 minutes per day at some point; this may take some time to accomplish and it’s OK.

Be easy on yourself and celebrate even your smallest accomplishments, even your 2 minute victory. You may feel like 2 minutes is nothing but I guarantee you, you are benefiting your brain in more ways than you could ever imagine.