Feeling relaxed is a natural feeling when you are in a state of balance. In order to understand balance, you must first allow yourself to experience a state of true relaxation, so that you have a reference point for what it feels like to be in balance. Why is this important? For some people, anxiety feels natural.
How might you gain greater balance? An important tool to practice using is “mindfulness.” Mindfulness is actually a natural activity that we can all use to help us discover and sustain balance. To be mindful means to bring your attention fully into whatever you are doing or experiencing at the moment. For example, if you are washing a glass, you focus on and experience that activity without letting your mind wander into some other task. You notice the feeling of the warm water and the soap on your hands, the feeling of the sponge as you hold it to wash the glass. If you are eating a bite of an apple, you eat it slowly and taste and feel that bite. Mindfulness can change even routine behaviors, and in turn, can enhance your life.
Most of us make a life of multi-tasking which generally means our mind is rarely focused on where we are, and we’re not fully present to the experience we’re having. If you learn to bring greater mindfulness into even a small fraction of your activities, you can add years of quality experience to your life. Research suggests that there are tremendous health benefits to mindfulness.
From an energetic perspective, love and mindfulness vibrate at a similar frequency, and we know that love is the highest vibration there is. By practicing mindfulness, you can create a stillpoint to return to in moments of chaos or anxiety.
One of my clients did a class project on mindfulness which she called “stopping.” She simply sat very still in a chair and took several deep breaths and relaxed for five minutes each day. She didn’t do anything during that time nor did she try to “think” of anything. This activity, she reported to her class, at first was so hard for her! She was so used to keeping her mind and body busy at all times that she felt like she was wasting time. Yet as she stayed with her project every day for 8 weeks, she came to realize that this stopping was a time when she began to let herself “feel” rather than to keep “running from herself.” By slowing down and becoming more focused, she became more purposeful about where she was putting her energy and what she was choosing to do and how.
If you’d like to practice mindfulness, a wonderful exercise is to use awareness of your breathing as a balancing force. Sit calmly in a relaxed position and focus on your breathing for a few moments. Breathe in slowly and notice your breath as you breathe in, feel the expansion of your chest, and then release slowly–feeling a state of surrender on your exhale. Breathe in and out for several moments with full awareness.
In the words of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh– “The secret of your transformation lies in your handling of this very moment.”