Living Energy Blog

Seven tips for taking the stress out of you holidays!

1. Define what you want.

2. Take a few minutes to prioritize what is important to you.

3. Make realistic timetables; delegate; eliminate; pad estimated time by 15%.

4. Set up a plan to make sure you accomplish what you truly desire.

5. Talk with family and friends, enlist their support, and poll them to see how they are willing to help.

6. Keep your plan handy; look at it frequently to see if you are spending time doing things that help you toward your goals or if you are getting sidetracked.

7. Look deeper at why you may be trying to do too much, please others, or remain forever busy and over committed.

Ah! The holidays, it’s a wonderful time of year … or is it? Do your holiday dreams match the reality? What gets triggered in you during this season? Do you like who you are when you go “home” or when you are with your family? Would you like to feel good before, during and after the season and throughout all the gatherings? Join us on on Blogtalk Radio @ 10 A.M., Monday, Nov. 22, 2010 as we discuss how you can use the tools of energy and consciousness to cruise through the holidays with ease.

Becoming more heart-focused in everything we do is one of the most effective things to begin to shift  and open to higher awareness. It also helps to improve health, enhance relationships and develop greater creativity, problem solving and intuition. Becoming more heart focused not only benefits ourselves, but also everyone we come in contact with. 

 To begin to become more heart centered, tune into your breath, and feel as though you can flow your breath in and out through the center of your chest, your heart space. Practice being absorbed in that experience or sensation. Create a sense of ease and flow through this part of your body and let your mind rest in feelings of openness and spaciousness.  Feeling gratitude or appreciation flowing with your breath can help ground you more deeply in this experience.  As you do this let yourself observe and directly experience people. places and things without judgment.

As you begin to play with this different point of view, your mind will of continue to throw up thoughts, judgments and its running commentary on the state of things! It is just what it does. Remove your attention and go back to the more open free flowing sensation of resting in your heart. 

As you practice being centered in your heart, over time you will discover that your stress level diminishes,your  attitudes begin to shift, and your overall experience of life deepens in a satisfying way. In addition, you will also notice changes in those around you and how they respond to you! Magic!

 When we learn to live more from our hearts, judgment is replaced by understanding and compassion.  Rather than feeling that we or others are right or wrong, we begin to understand perspective, how it forms and how seeing through a lens of right or wrong, good or bad keeps us locked in struggle.   We begin to see our way out of that prison and find our way to freedom.

 When your actions are heart-based you are operating outside the mind and outside the ego.  You begin to live and act out of a deep inner sense of love. This is more a state of being than a feeling of sentimentality, romance or attachment. It is a space you uncover, discover, and learn to live from independent of externals. Developing this way of being can help move you on toward enlightenment one human step at a time.

Practicing feeling gratitude opens the deepest doors of your heart so a deeper resonance can emerge, rippling out to touch every facet of your existence.

1. Give yourself some quiet time to relax/meditate, connect more deeply with feelings of peace, love, beauty. This practice builds energy and allows you to remain focused in the moment. It becomes easier to not be carried off by the stress, multiple demands, old patterns, & expectations.

Daily meditation provides the space to develop the qualities of acceptance, inner peace and surrender. Development of these traits enables you to just let things be what they are instead of exerting futile effort trying to force events or people to be what you would prefer.

We all have idealistic pictures of things as they “should be“. Holidays aside, we do it in our daily lives. It just becomes more pronounced at Holiday time. The external world hardly ever matches inner expectations. We really do know this inwardly but resist, always hoping it can be different. If we learn to accept rather than resist, things have a funny way of working out and often better than we imagine!

2. Get a massage. Relaxing the body can help the mind find ease.

3. Listen to music that relaxes you, makes you happy, picks up your energy while you are driving or doing mundane tasks. Also spend some time in silence, give yourself a break from constant input. Be aware of ‘aural hygiene‘. There is a lot of stimulation coming at us constantly. We can monitor this making sure we have more of what feeds our energy rather than depletes it or jangles our nerves.

4. Decide how you can bring more peace and beauty into your life in small ways. Make a list and implement those ideas. Take charge of your every day environment so that it feeds your senses. Focus on bringing color, texture, aroma into your life. Move things around, change them frequently. As we acclimate, we no longer notice what’s around us.

 5. Change small things: the way you drive to work; the side of the bed you get up on; where you have lunch; HOW you have lunch. These changes will help to keep you more in the present and aware of the aliveness in each moment instead of slipping into numbness.

6. Make it a priority to involve yourself in and enjoy all of your moments. Being present is a gift you can give to your SELF!

We just found out that More Magazine’s online edition has published our article, Navigate Change With Ease in its current edition, so we wanted to share that with you all! We hope you will click over to it and leave a comment and /or “like”it! Thanks!

http://www.more.com/2010/26176-navigate-change-with-ease

Caregiver Corner, Monday, Nov. 15 @ 10 A.M.

Forgiveness:What is it and how can you get some!!

What is “forgiveness” really? How do we let go of hurt, anger and resentment? What are the benefits of forgiveness? Does forgiveness mean that what “they” did is OK and we let “them” off the hook?

Listen in as we discuss how to really let go and move on from the past.

From 12 Keys for Life and Self Mastery…
The four concepts we have been discussing – the magic of surrender, developing an attitude of acceptance, letting go of regrets and suspending judgment – are all interconnected. Recognize that when you experience regret or when you judge others, you are blocking access to your energy, weakening it so you do not have all your creative power to bring to the expression of your full potential.

Opening your heart energy through surrender and acceptance is a sign of strength. Opening your heart helps create coherent energy. Practicing the grounding exercises we have been doing helps you to settle down and go deep inside, more quickly. The grounding exercises, combined with breathing from the inside out, provide a sense of safety and stability … a sense of inner connection to your Self that allows for an easier opening of the heart.  Turning each of these concepts into reality can be done through practice.

There is a tendency to associate letting go and grief with only death or other major loss. The truth is that we experience grief and loss in many other circumstances over the course of a lifetime. We experience it as we move on from a particular life stage, age, change jobs, leave relationships or places. Grief and loss are a normal part of our human experience.  Whether the transition is large or small, it is important to give it attention, respect AND a process for completion.

7 Steps for learning to let go:

1. Honor your experience by speaking or writing it out. Telling your story, honestly stating how it was for you without laundering it into what you think is acceptable, is crucial. Experience needs to be claimed and witnessed in order to be processed and released. The witnessing, whether by yourself or with another, is best if it is nonjudgmental and compassionate!

 2. Engage in a spiritual practice. Practices that help you connect with aspects larger than your ego self help make you feel that you CAN hold all your experience and not be shattered by it. Later you will realize that you can feel it AND let it go; this will give you more ability to feel what is there with courage because you can trust that you do not have to feel it forever.

 Spiritual practice also helps you to not feel so empty or isolated. It can provide an infusion of loving, supportive energy that assists you and holds you up when you cannot do it all alone.

 3. Seek out others who have been through similar situations. Sharing your experience, weaknesses and strengths is very healing. Both giving and receiving are a part of the natural flow of life. ..a core expression and rhythm of love.

 4. Take breaks in your process. Especially if your grief is a large one, it is crucial to the process to give it both active and receptive attention. It is okay to let things rest and gestate for a time.

 5. Provide an outlet for release of all thoughts, emotions and beliefs that have been stored up as a result of this loss for you. Create rituals, use intentions that help you to not only uncover and articulate but also for the letting go part.

 6. Channel your energy into something positive.  One family channeled grief about the loss of a child into a foundation that now raises money for research into childhood illnesses.  Another family is honoring the memory of their child by funding a house for families to stay nearby when their sick children are hospitalized.  These are two wonderful examples of turning grief into positive action … to process the grief and honor the past while improving the situation for others.

 7.  See a professional grief counselor if you feel that your grieving process has gone on too long or you feel stuck.  A professional can help you reclaim your Self.

 Grieving is healthy.  As you experience it, feel/ know that you are OK in spite of whatever pain or discomfort you feel.  Let go of resistance to all emotion, allow yourself to feel the sadness, despair and loss fully. Sometimes the simple act of not resisting and fully experiencing is enough for a natural letting go to occur. If not you may need to use intention and opening to the sensation of letting go.

 We are meant to grieve our losses, but not forever! Giving each phase of experience its proper place is the key to balance.

Holding on…holding up…..holding in….are familiar ways of being for many of us as we navigate the choppy seas of daily life and try to maintain some sort of balance and equilibrium. We tend not to realize that these “ways of being” have ramifications in body, mind, and spirit, that is, until they accumulate and cause us problems with our physical, emotional or mental health.

 How can you know when you have unprocessed life experiences or emotions hiding and building up within you? One of the quickest ways to know is to check in with your body. How do your shoulders feel? WHERE ARE your shoulders? Are they headed north toward your ears or are they nice and relaxed, supple and flexible? How about your midsection? Is it relaxed? Can you feel it at all? How about your lower back? Do you have muscle tightness, spasms or aching there? How do you tend to hold your body in general? Do you feel relaxed, easy, open and flowing in your posture and movements?

  Our bodies can tell us a lot about what is happening in our minds and with our emotions, as well as about how we are typically responding (or not) to the events of our lives.  

 In truth, we first react to our life experience through our energy fields. If we are in touch with our subtle energy, we can feel the effect of a person, place or thing immediately. However, we tend to be moving at such a speed through our lives that even those who may be more sensitive in that way may not attend to the wealth of incoming information our energy can provide. That being the case our bodies can give us clues as to how we are managing our energy, how it is being impacted and how we are holding in, up an on instead of freely experiencing, processing, letting go and flowing with life.

 We all hold on, hold in and hold up in some way. We are generally unconscious about how our bodies are reflecting what is happening in our mind and emotions. Through checking in with our body we can get a clue about what is going on in the deeper parts of our being. Once we do we are on our way to being aware of important information about ourselves. In addition, we can then know more about what we need to release so that we can move toward greater health, emotional freedom, well being and happiness.

 Next time: Once you know….how to let go?