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 my meditation this morning, I was sitting in silence and began asking a few questions about my day and how I may serve. I immediately “knew” the answers. It happened so quickly it amazed me.

I realized that all of life’s answers are in the present moment because this is where God sits and waits, patiently, lovingly and without judgment, for us to come and merge with him.

When we sit present moment and stop our thoughts, we begin to feel and remember we are part of something MUCH greater. We merge with the divine and we remember there is no separation, only the oneness. It is the ego that wants us to believe we are separate, not worthy, not good enough, not loveable etc. and wants to pull us away from the silence, the oneness.

I was amazed at what I automatically just knew this morning. Even more than what I knew it was the feeling that came over me, the calmness and peace. God emerges through us and we step into the all knowing stream of truth. All of the answers and wisdom that we seek are sitting there waiting for us in the present moment.

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.

My friend said to me a couple weeks ago, “How am I going to get it all done?”

She said, “I am in the process of moving from one house to another house, my husband is out of the country, I have 4 kids under the age of 8 (twins under a year) and I have not even begun decorating or shopping for Christmas!”

And we thought we had it tough…

The fact of the matter is, we ALL have a ton to do and even more of it to do around the holidays. As Christmas approaches it’s as though time gets eaten up twice as fast as usual and you end the day asking yourself, “Where did the day go?”

Getting back to my friend from above, my response to her was, “Do nothing.” Well technically not nothing but for the moment you do not do a thing. What we forget to do when we get crazy busy is to pause and prioritize.

When we feel overwhelmed with a million things to do we forget that we have the universe on our side.  What I mean by this is the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction states that what you think about comes about. So if you are thinking, “I am too busy and don’t have time to get anything done!” Guess what will manifest for you? That EXACT circumstance!

So here’s the plan for manifesting exactly what you need to get done right on time.

1. When we feel crazy busy, like we are spinning out of control, the first thing you do is STOP! Even if it’s for a couple minutes, a pause is quite necessary to give your brain a break. We must slow the ego down, this is what is driving us to “think” we have no time.
2. Prioritize. Write a list of the things that need to get done, with the top of the list being the most important.
3. Keep your list out in plain sight, so you can see it and others (physical and non physical) can too.
4. Focus all of your energy on one task at a time. When #1 is done, cross it out-it’s incredibly fulfilling and gratifying to cross out a completed task.

I write my lists on a big dry erase board where I can see it and notice what I am to focus my energy on next. When we divide our energy between multiple tasks, it actually takes longer to complete each task.

What I find is that once I take my tasks and pull them from my head into the world on a board or on paper, many items get crossed off my list without me lifting a finger.

Recently, I had on my list to stop at a store in the mall to pick up a Christmas gift for a friend. A few days after I had added this to my “to do list” a friend of mine called me to talk and when I asked her where she was going, it turned out she was walking into the mall to go to the same store I needed and was happy to pick up the gift I needed.

Things like this happen ALL THE TIME for me. I put on my board that I want new office space. I have yet to drive around looking for space but have had 3 clients in 2 weeks come in to tell me about perfect office space, exactly what I am looking for. All because I paused for a moment, decided what kind of office space I wanted and wrote it down (which launched it out into the great universe), the space can now find me. It’s that simple.
During this holiday season, pause and set your priorities. Allow the universe to cross off some of your “to do’s.” It will make your life magically easier.