Free Up Internal Resources So You Can Serve More This Upcoming New Year
Are you getting the sense that your life's evolution has come to a stand still? About six years ago, I felt as if mine had. This was in spite of the fact that I'd been engaging in a great deal of self-care. I was exercising, doing yoga, maintaining a healthy diet, I was going to a chiropractor frequently and getting massages. Nonetheless, it became obvious to me that I had reached a plateau.
And then I discovered meditation. Meditation is the art and science of training your attention muscles. If we wish to make further advances in our personal development, we've got to refine our awareness, meaning we have to be able to feel and do and think something new. If we keep replaying the same emotions, thoughts and behaviors, we can't expect our body and life to be different than it has been. The key to fine tuning our awareness is to strengthen our ability to use our attention to notice more and notice more specifically. Once I began meditating, things began to change in a positive way. I had the insight that, yes, the chiropractic work and massages and everything I'd been doing was great, but to some degree, I wasn't participating like I could be. I wasn't participating with my attention to the degree that was possible, and therefore I wasn't as involved as I could be in the process of my own personal growth.
My body and life got unstuck from the moment I chose to bring more attention to the process. Does this sound familiar to you? Meditation might be something you should consider. I recommend a bit of a retreat every single day where you are spending some time with yourself. It doesn't have to be a long time, maybe five, ten or twenty minutes.
Frequently people have the wrong idea about meditation. The implication is that we're retreating from the world. In fact, the purpose of meditation is to invite more of the world in and have a closer relationship with it. If you're consistent, the changes that will happen in your body and life will be irrefutable, as time passes.
Not long ago I took a longer retreat. For seven days I stayed at a retreat cabin in the middle of no where and didn't do anything except yoga and meditation all day, every single day, and I didn't see anyone else the entire time. I was in this small cabin with only me to keep me company; everything I needed and nothing I didn't need. When there aren't any distractions like that, it's amazing how all of my fragmented parts come to the surface and start clamoring for my attention.
Fortunately, through meditation, I had learned methods to listen and communicate with all of these parts of me. Over the course of the seven days, there developed a much greater awareness of how I had been relating to those parts and to the World, largely unconsciously.
Any time my relationship to my parts is other than conscious, my relationship to parts of the World is unconscious, and then those unconscious parts secretly run my life.
By the end of the retreat I had clearly formed a new relationship with the parts of me that I had been pushing away. As a result of entering into a more complete relationship with these parts of me, I realized the awareness that what counts most is our capacity to be aware of our gifts and then give them. That's where it's really at. There's a profound degree of satisfaction that comes from being aware of what your gifts are and being able to give them to others; a fulfillment above and beyond the surface level of happiness that one might get from getting a certain job, or a specific amount of money, or a certain relationship, or even having your body work as if you think it should.
I highly recommend meditation, and eventually retreat, to strengthen your attention muscles and develop a profound life satisfaction. It could be said that your life depends on it.
I'm looking forward to serving you--serving your body and your life and your soul in 2018.
If you'd like some help freeing up those internal resources click the link for a FREE, 30-minute phone consult.
Happy New Year!
