Category Archives: Productivity

The Five Checks to do Every Morning

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Starting your day with a body mindfulness connection makes a huge difference to how well your day flows and how productive you are. The core questions to ask, and areas to check each morning are (in order of importance):

How grounded am I?
That is how well are you earthed to the ground. How solid do your feet feel below you when you get out of bed and start your day?

How centered am I?
Do you feel your center of gravity in, or just under, your belly button? Or is the centre of gravity in your head, where a lot of people have it? Which leads to the next question…

How embodied am I?
That is, how fully in your body do you feel? Are you residing in all of it, or just in parts? Are there parts that feel numb or hollow? Are there parts you don’t feel or can’t feel into? Do you feel a disconnect from the neck down? that is, does your head feel separate from your body?

How connected am I to the present moment?
How much of your awareness is operating in reality right now? How much are you aware of your present moment surroundings, without past and future thought forms and memories interfering?

They are probably the top four questions to ask automatically when you wake up each morning, the top four checks. Once they are handled, you can ask the next question…

How connected am I to the Universe?
Once you are in your body, then check how connected your awareness is to the outside world around you. Your sense of connection to the spirit of all people and living things. This plugs your intuition into the flow of the world.

Do all of the above each morning and you are in for a very productive and fulfilling day!

The Art of Achieving a Goal

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One of the ways you can use your Mindfulness practice is to focus on a positive goal that you are wanting to accomplish. How you do this is very important. Visualising an outcome helps reprogram your brain and nervous system to make this happen much easier.

But visualising alone is not enough. You need to be out of your thinking mind and in touch with your body to energise the goal. It takes all parts of your body to be aligned and active to achieve a goal. Especially if it is a new one that you haven’t done before.

If it is new and just out of reach (which is what you want) it can be difficult to visualise it clearly enough and that’s normal. So it requires repetition over and over, correcting and adding more detail each time. That detail should be positive, seeing the end result. It should also feel like you have it now in this present moment. To have that real feeling you need to be in that mindful deep state, in your body.

If you are not in that mindfulness alpha/theta state, then the goal is just a fantasy, a pie in the sky dream that has no legs to stand on. If you don’t take the time to repeatedly feel it throughout your body, nothing is likely to happen.

Your Mobile Computer Phone and your Racing Mind

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Body mindfulness is a great antidote to the racing mind and the constant presence of the smart phone. We first called them mobile phones (cell phones), then smart phones, but what they really are now is mobile computers that can take phone calls. A lot of our contact is not done by voice calls as much anymore. So you are carrying around a computer in your pocket which is always-on and always with you, probably 24/7. The intellect loves interacting with this device, and it represents the outward manifestation of the racing over used mind.

When we use this device we go into our head and our body goes on hold. There is little movement in your body and you are probably breathing very little (unless you are dealing with something very emotional or exercising at the time). You cut off your conscious awareness of your body to use this device. If this is overdone, it can create health problems, relationship problems as well as feeling lost in your head.

When your body is divorced from the decisions you make in your head you lose a lot of intelligence, creativity, you add stress to your thinking process, (so it takes longer to see things clearly) and so you lower your ability to make smart decisions.

Staying in constant contact with your body is crucial to better health and better decision making.

The mobile computer works fast, requiring you to think fast to keep up with it. Connecting with your body is slow, forcing you to slow down and take more care of the present moment. But what may seem slow is actually very fast and efficient in the long term and you get there with much less drama, less waste of energy/resources (less dead ends, less of the long way around to get there) and arrive healthier and happier along the right path for you.

Take time to put ‘on’ your body

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We take time to put on our clothes each morning. We should also take time to put on our body.

Try not to leave home in the morning without getting into your body first. Body Mindfulness work helps you to do this. Taking a few minutes minimum everyday to actually feel into your body can make a big difference to the quality of your day and mind.

You need to settle into your body like you are putting on your clothes. As you get in, you will feel what parts are comfortable to feel into and what parts are not. What parts need more attention, what parts are numb, what parts are stiff or flexible etc.

You are basically linking your awareness/spirit to your thinking mind and body.

When you don’t do this, you are more likely to have unfinished programs from the day before still running, clouding your mind and stressing your body. Especially the ones that run on automatic pilot because you haven’t paid them enough attention to realise they need switching off.

This is an over stressed way to live each day and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Remember to Remind Yourself

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For inner peace, happiness and fulfillment, in work, rest and play – I always recommend meditating a little every day. Especially in the morning.
The sooner you can remind yourself of who you really are, the less chance you have during the day of the habitual thinking mind, taking you over and running you.

For you to stay in control in the best way possible, you have to remind your thinking mind who really is boss here. We’ve been brought up to put thinking and science high on a pedestal – way too high. So high that we can sometimes forget where our real intelligence sits – who we really are – and it’s not the thinking.

Thinking is a tool to use, it isn’t you. Because we have over identified with thinking as ‘us’, we let it be the overriding ruler. So we create beliefs and programs and strategies and rules and truths and understandings and let them all run ‘us’.

A little reminder:

You don’t have to make decisions based on intellect thinking all the time.
You DO have a choice in the matter. In fact you ALWAYS have a choice.
Every moment…Right now ….forever.

And who is you?
That alive inner stillness. The being you. Throughout your body.
The you that is always here, no matter what happens.

This reminder is very important in the morning before work, especially if you work in a company surrounded by people who are over thinking and not very conscious.
It is very easy to get caught up in their over thinking and lose yourself again. Losing yourself to over thinking breaks the contact that you have with your intuition. You lose that very important intelligence and guidance which is the real you.

As a child, what did you sacrifice within you, to keep the peace?

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A question I’d like to ask you…

Q. What tension did you bottle up as a child?
As a child living in the environment of your parents and siblings, what did you sacrifice within you, to keep the peace?

Whatever that is, if you haven’t done the inner work to clear it, chances are it is still there, inside you, in your body, in your cells having a hidden influence. Holding you back (making you hesitate too often) or pushing you to overdo (over react in certain situations).

With body mindfulness deep meditative work, you can access more of this backlog tension. It often feels like an area within your body that has pressure or weight. It can also feel less flexible and doesn’t move easily. Or it could be a part within you that is shaky and vulnerable if there is trauma there too.

What we humans are so good at, is suppressing this unexpressed part because it was too painful to feel at the time and/or there was no one around to help us feel it and release it safely. On top of that, we are also very good at forgetting that we are even doing this! Yet, your behaviours show it out. They hint at what you have buried and sealed deep down. Over time your work colleagues or friends will treat it as your normal behaviour. “That’s just John’s personality”. But it’s not.

I highly recommend, to give yourself space each day, to honour the bottled up parts that need a good clean out. And often all it takes is a prolonged focused attention without pushing, for those parts to begin to release. Even the ones you have completely forgotten about.

It’s a great sign when you can feel a part in you that lets go. It feels lighter, freer and when you breathe into it, it moves, where before it didn’t. There’s often a relief feeling that goes with it. That inner stress gone. That often happens after a deep release. I witness this everyday in my practice but you can also do this work at home and progress a lot faster.

Nothing is more frustrating than battling with a bad behaviour that you can’t seem to shake off, for years, decades even. With body based mindfulness work, you can move through stuck parts often very quickly. And it doesn’t require talking. In fact the less you talk the quicker it can go and the unhealthy behaviour along with it. .

Are you living your life your way?

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“If you keep your attention in the body as much as possible, you will be anchored in the Now. You wont lose yourself in the external world and you won’t lose yourself in your mind. Thoughts and emotions, fears and desires, may still be there to some extent, but they wont take you over.” ( Eckhart Tolle – Page 117 The Power of NOW)

There are many benefits to Mindfulness body-based work. This is another major benefit. It gives you some separation from the demands of other people and organisations.

You begin to lose yourself if you take on too much of what other people tell you you should be doing, to succeed or to live. This also happens when you forget what feels right for you and you decide to follow the trend or herd. ‘They’ must know better because so many are living that way.

With mindfulness work, you come into your body field more. You begin to realise that you are a separate valid and important person and you can think for yourself. And only you really know what’s best for you. Even if it goes against the current norm. I loved it when my neighbour some years ago thought that I was ”weird” in how I ran my life. I loved hearing that because it confirmed I wasn’t living like the herd majority do. I was living my unique way.

An original. Free and alive.

Are you living your life your way? Or have you bought someone else’s plan entirely? Someone else’s plan is someone else’s plan! If it doesn’t include yours, then it’s not yours. That’s obvious to say, but unless you go within and contact yourself more, and therefore your body more, you will be all too easily swayed to following someone else’s plan, losing part of yourself to the external world. We are social creatures and need each other to survive well. But without deep contact within yourself first, you cannot be a clear and productive individual within your social and work groups.

I encourage you to live your way. That’s the best way 🙂

The busy persons guide to staying healthy and happy

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How does the busy person in today’s world keep centered, happy, clear and healthy?

If you are like many people, you are very busy, have a lot to do, have many demands placed upon you and you run from one thing to the next with few breaks. A lot of people hardly take holidays.

This is no way to live and it’s not healthy long term.

What’s more you can watch yourself doing it, know it’s not healthy and yet keep doing it out of ingrained habit. And don’t kid yourself that it’s only for a short period, or only for this project or only for this deadline coming up. No, I bet it reoccurs over and over again.

I’ve often heard over the years from clients, that getting a flu or getting sick or having a breakdown or an exhausted crash was the best thing that ever happened to them. And they had never relaxed so much before. Why? Because it forced the ingrained habit (spinning wheel) of over thinking, to stop.

Getting sick of course is not a good way to stop that old habit.

So what do you do?

Planning a fixed time each day (no matter what) to do a short mindful meditation, say 5 minutes, can really help. What’s 5 minutes, right? But that old habit can still be so convincing even with ‘losing’ 5 minutes in your day!

If 5 minutes is hard, start with 2 minutes. Surely 2 minutes won’t ruin your day’s productivity, right? If that’s hard too, then you know you have a runaway train in your head. And that should be setting off alarm bells – ”Big Crash highly likely coming” soon.

What it also says is that you, deep down are not content and that you are wasting your energy and resourcefulness – using too much energy to accomplish a task.

Stopping for 2 minutes (for a mindfulness meditation) breaks the mind dominant cycle of thinking in your head, gives you back more control over what you are thinking or working on which allows you to think more efficiently again, as well as reduce the excess stress in your body.

Don’t leave doing this for too long. It’s too easy to get used to the stress and think that being relaxed is feeling slightly less stressed, where even your relaxed state is no where near a healthy level for you, long term.

Focusing on Long-Term quality and growth

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It’s nice to be reminded (often) that you are more than just the thoughts in your head and that coming into your body, is one of the most beneficial skills to have in life for health, wellness and success. I cannot stress this enough.

When you begin to allow thoughts to run your life, you are more prone to the world running you. You are more easily influenced, swayed away from what truly matters to you.

Don’t let the world run you.
You run yourself.
Always choose quality over what’s popular.
That’s what’s real in the long run.

The more you focus on quality – quality time, quality work, quality connection with yourself and quality connection with others, the more you will accomplish longer term. This is easier to do when you have a good embodied contact with yourself. When you take the time to mindfully connect within yourself.

It’s a tricky thing because it is very easy to get caught up in doing things that give off a short term benefit or which produce a temporary feel-good feeling. If your life is full of short-term gain activities you are likely to rob yourself of the time required for the long-term quality activities that produce long-term deeper, more stable and more meaningful rewards.

Its like saving money. The short term reward is not much because you are not spending the money on something that will feel good now and the saved balance is small. But continue to put away a little regularly and the long-term rewards are deeper and very fulfilling as the money starts to grow and earn you more and more with less effort.

In order to do more of the longer-term activities, what helps is taking time to embody yourself. Take time each day to stop, slow down, and deepen further within, with body mindfulness. This way you connect with more of what really matters to you and you alone. Then the to-do activities that will produce the long-term more satisfying rewards begin to surface within you. It becomes easier to do the things that are effort now with no immediate reward. It becomes easier to do the things that need to be done when no-one is watching.

Destressing for sustainable long-term success

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Reading today in a local paper:
“The problem with technology especially email – is that it allows you to feel productive without really achieving anything. Of the tens of thousands of emails I’ve read and sent, there are less than a hundred that were real game-changes.” Scott Page – Barefoot Investor, Herald Sun Newspaper.

Learning to connect/disconnect from the constant information overload is important if you want to stay sane, healthy successful and satisfied with your life and work. The smart phone can take over your ability to be happily embodied within yourself.

When you begin to feel run by your phone, computer or employer, a good question to ask yourself is,

‘Am I comfortable in my body right now?’

In other words, are you centered, relaxed, calm, happy and settled in your body right now? Remember it’s from this place that you will produce your best work long term each day and every day. It is quite alarming when I regularly hear from clients how pushed they are from their employers to do more and work harder beyond a comfortable sustainable level.

If you don’t feel comfortable in your body, address it now. Don’t put it on hold. If you decide to deal with this internal stress at some point in the future, the damage could be far too great.

Remember you run your life, not your employer or smart phone. If you are working for an employer that wants maximum profits at any cost. Get out of there! They don’t care about you. They are entitled to run their business in this way but you don’t have to work that way. A true intelligent caring employer will aim for a fair profit and fair balance work load. A load that is sustainable long term. It is wise long term vision that produces the best most fulfilling success.

Success comes from having a successfully fulfilling present moment action. All your life is made up of this building block. So if you do not feel comfortable in your body right now, address it. Address it by adjusting the external factors contributing to creating this pressure and address it by adjusting the internal factors contributing to creating the pressure.

If you have had this pressure for more than a year, the alarm bells should be ringing. It’s time to take back more control. Don’t get comfortable with such high levels of stress. It’s not ‘this is just how it is’. No, this is not just how it is. It’s not like this everywhere. And it doesn’t need to be like this within you either.

There is a better way.