Category Archives: Stress

What do you give Space for?

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What do you give Space for?
You know what you give money for and what you give your time for but, what do you give space for?
What is in your life that you stop, relax and open up to just being with?

This question will point you towards how mindfully and embodied you live your life.

How much time in a day or week do you spend where you can feel space around you and within you? This is different from down moments where you are exhausted, sleeping, smoking, eating or busy ‘relaxing’ watching TV. Although with watching TV, clients will often say that they just zone out and don’t really watch. If you do this, what you are actually doing is meditating with the noisy TV in the background. Why not just switch it off and meditate properly and give your mind and body a real proper deeper rest?

If there is no space in your life, it will feel like your life is rocketing by, without feeling like you are accomplishing much of what you really want. You can even begin to feel like a slave to others.

The more space that you allow – the more fuller, wiser, healthier, less-stressed, freer and fulfilling you will feel and be. Time then begins to slow down to what it really is….

…just this present moment.

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.

“George, how do you remain so calm and balanced all the time?”

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An executive client (while I was on location at a corporate client site) recently asked me ‘George, how do you remain so calm and balanced all the time?’ He had observed me over a six month period while I was working there with a variety of issues and employee behaviors and stresses that I had to deal with and help with.

That was a very good question that I’d like to answer a little bit here and give some insight into with four major points.

How was it that the whole time I was working with that client I never stressed out, complained, got impatient, got reactive to another employees behaviour, but was always calm, balanced and fully available?

On one level it’s a great testimony to this therapeutic work, meditation, mindfulness and body psychotherapy.
You can walk into a place and pretend to keep your cool and try hard to not react and stay balanced, that’s an interim step to the real thing. But what you really want is to be so present in the moment that normal stresses just flow through you, creating a little bit of a wave maybe, but pass through you and the present moment. Or if you do react, the reaction completes very quickly and flows out of your system so you are back in balance very quickly, within seconds sometimes, with very little lingering on.

So here is part of what keeps me in that balanced state the majority of my day:

1.
Do your personal work. Preferably Body based Psychotherapy (my bias).
Having had a lot of personal sessions over the years has been the biggest foundation to being able to be more present than ever before. When I first started having sessions for some issues, I didn’t realize just how much I had buried within me. So as it came out, more arose that I became aware of. So I began a number of years of flushing out the past build up. Without that flushing out, (if you have a lot buried within you) it is very hard to stay present and calm in the face of reactive people that trigger your past unfinished business. So this foundation step is not a quick fix. It took some time which has paid off for itself handsomely over the past 20+ years.

2.
Meditate every day.
Preferably every morning. Each time I arrived at that client’s site, I would stay in my car for 10 minutes, close my eyes, engine switched off, doors locked and I would meditate, centre myself, arrive, get more present. Let any stress from the drive there release.

3.
Be mindful of the present moment – often.
During the day, stay in mindful touch with your body sensations where ever you are at. This helps to keep you out of your head and more embodied in the present moment. You can’t be responding to the present moment appropriately if you are off thinking other things in your head other than being with what is in front of you in the moment.

4.
Be in the Zone.
People who do their job well, professionally, usually have mastered doing the work ‘in the zone’. That’s another way of saying – only be in the present moment now. So my client who wondered how I always stayed that relaxed was seeing me working ‘in the zone’ doing my job, focused, present, attentive, there to accomplish a goal. That’s different from the more casual state that you can be in outside of work hours, where you let your hair down. That professional ‘zone’ produces quality output.

So there you have four major points for how I stay calm and present when I’m busy and/or in a challenging environment.

Consolidation Meditations

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In this post I’d like to focus a little on Consolidation Meditations.

What is that?

Once you learn to release within you, it can get addictive to keep releasing continually. Doing this to much can fragment or destabalise you. So it is good to stop occasionally and do a few meditations for consolidation. That is, for pulling together all the gains you have made and bringing them more into alignment with each other.

It’s like the cleanup after a lot of good work has been done. Pulling together all the little pieces you have released and teased out – all back into one piece again.

Most people need help with learning how to release, so I emphasise this aspect much more in sessions, to make it easier to let go. But once you can do that, then consolidations are important. Without the ability to release, consolidation meditations will not do much for you, they will at best help you keep the status quo, and sometimes this is important especially when you have been run ragged at work or very stressed.

Over consolidating brings no change, just the status quo. No movement, no growth. That can become a stuck and rigid place to be in. But coupled with release work it becomes a powerful tool to help feel the full richness of the gains you have made.

When to Practice Mindfulness Meditation

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Mindfulness meditation is a very useful and practical skill to develop. It is a fundamental part of my life. I have been doing this practice for so long now that I forget just how ‘normal’ it is for me.

One way this shows up, is in where I do this practice. The traditional place is in a quiet spot at home for about twenty minutes, preferably in the morning.

But, when do I personally do it?

Yes, normally in the morning (after breakfast,) but also…

1. When I arrive somewhere in my car (and I am alone in the car,) I will park, switch off the engine and stay seated, close my eyes and centre for two/three minutes before exiting the car. (I don’t mind anymore who may be watching. The benefits far outweigh the exposure.) This is mandatory if I have been driving through peak traffic for an hour!

2. When I walk along the beach, I will always stop at a bench or rock and sit. Again, for a few minutes, close my eyes or often leave them open. You don’t need to close your eyes when you have a beautiful ocean expanse to let in!

3. When I first wake up in the morning, if I am not feeling 100% ready to jump out, I will stay in bed, sit up in bed (pillow up behind me for support) and meditate there immediately. I don’t wait for later in the morning.

4. Almost always in between each client – five to fifteen minutes.

5. Regularly if I am in a public toilet at a restaurant or cafe. It’s a great private place to just center a bit more for a few minutes.

6. Almost always in waiting rooms. (Again I don’t mind who might be looking, to me this is very normal now.) In fact it is not normal to not do it.

7. If I have been reading or on the computer for a long time and my brain feels heavy. It’s very easy to close my eyes for a few minutes, seated where I am.

Everyone should do this at work. It should be common acceptable practice. And I believe one day soon it will be. Why? Simply because the benefits are just huge.

There are more times and places, (on buses, on trains, in taxis) but that’s just a few off the top of my head. Basically anytime I have some time alone, I will close my eyes and center. Even a few minutes can do wonders to focusing you into the present moment and clear your excess thinking, as well as other benefits. The smart phone has eaten away at this centering space because we carry it everywhere. So it is even more important today to cultivate this habit.

SPACE

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I highly recommend doing some mindfulness meditation everyday.

Because I have been doing this process for so long I sometimes forget just how beneficial it is. Earlier this year I went for a short period, without any daily mindfulness meditation. It that period I was very busy and was getting lots done but I began to notice something every interesting – my mind wasn’t thinking as clearly as before, I was more stressed, less intelligent in my decision making. When something went wrong, it took a lot more thoughts, effort and time to sort it out. I was also slightly more reactive to outside circumstances and my mind was beginning to race a little. It wasn’t pleasant.

I was very functional, and from the outside I looked fine to everyone and everything, but from the inside I wasn’t at my best, I wasn’t working from my highest quality of being.

I quickly realised that what I had lost in my mind was SPACE.

Still Space.

Quiet Space.

For in that still quiet space is where your real and best intelligent thinking, healing and decision making gets done.

I quickly returned to daily mindfulness meditation, let go some old thinking (that said I didn’t need it,) and I was back centred again. Back to having that SPACE within me and between my thoughts.

This SPACE should be with you throughout your day. It is a buffer between you, your thoughts and the external environment. Without it, it is very hard to function at your intelligent and satisfying best. It is also harder to heal yourself.

It is a very smart company that would teach this to their employees and allow everyone to practice this everyday at work. The benefits of creating this space to intelligent decision making in business are enormous. Huge.

And it still baffles me why every child isn’t taught this in school.

‘BE’ and still get everything done!

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Spending quality time for self centering and whole body contact with yourself is crucial in this day and age. Especially with all the distractions, demands on our time and our highly over worked society. There is so much ‘doing’ that the ‘being’ part of us, our more real nature, is squashed or put on hold with ‘some day I’ll…’ or ‘one day I’ll….’.

It is very important to step off the over worked ‘doing’ cycle and allow yourself to have ‘arrived’ in the present moment, to just ‘be’ again. (Which is what the over doing most times is trying to accomplish, to get you to where you can just ‘be’ again.)

Most people don’t realise that they can just ‘be’ and still get everything done that they need to. Rather than the other way around that we are brought up with (and much less efficient way) in our western culture, ‘I’ll do do do, so then I can ‘get there’ to relax and be myself. You rarely get there in this way.

So if you allocate some regular time to ‘being’ each week, your ‘doing’ becomes much more efficient, creates less drama, is much less erratic, more fulfilling, and you feel more in control of your life. No one else or thing is running you.

How slowly or quickly this happens will depend on how much you are carrying from the past and how easily you can accept, feel, release and let go that past, over time.