My goal is to spend as much time living in balance as possible. Being that we are human and have ego’s that feed us fear based thoughts we all get thrown off from time to time.

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?

In addition to meditation, I use a variety of breathing techniques that create a balanced state. One of them that I love is “Pulling in Light.”

Here’s how to do it:

Imagine a round ball of light (like a disco ball)  about 2 feet above your head.

Take a deep breath in and imagine from the disco ball, light coming down through the ball in through the crown of the head and into the body. Imagine the light being any color that comes to mind OR a golden or white light. This light rests first in the heart then after filling up the heart center and lung area, it moves down with every inhalation, filling up the solar plexus (3rd chakra area -above the naval), then the 2nd chakra, (below the belly button)  and eventually the light pulls into the ground roots us on the earth. See the roots shooting from the bottom of your feet into the earth.

Next, imagine the light coming down through your crown and resting  in the throat area and now  filling this area up. Next, pull the light into the  6th chakra/3^rd eye (between the brows) and lastly, imagine the light coming into the top of the head (crown) and then shooting back up to the heavens.

Continue to breath in the light and go back to the heart center, watching it in your minds eye, expanding out and eventually filling up the entire room. There is no time requirement to do this. 1 minute would be of benefit if you don’t do any other  intentional breathing, but doing this for 5 minutes minimally would be ideal.

This breathing exercise pulls an abundance of universal light into your body which promotes healing on all levels of your being (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual). It is also extremely relaxing and centering. You may see colors and that’s fine. You cannot get this wrong, only right, which leads to total relaxation….

This is a partial re-post from a post I wrote months ago and felt the need to post it again due to my “rebirth into balance.” One of the things I had let go for 6 weeks were my meditations. This is a brief explanation of meditation as well as how to meditate.

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 looked around my house at all the laundry, the dishes, the cleaning up, the office that needs cleaning, filing, my voice mails, my emails that I haven’t looked at in 2 weeks and more, and asked myself, “How will I ever get all of this done?” The more I looked around the more rapidly my heart was racing and I realized that I felt anxiety! So much to do and not enough time…I then stopped myself and said, “What happened to me?”

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.