Lifestyle Practice: Start Your Day Right

The most important minute of your day is the very first one.  During the transition between the sleeping and waking states , the door is wide open to deeply connect with your Self.

When we’re sleeping, we have a break from the habitual thinking most of us experience.   If you’re watching closely, you’ll notice that your mind will turn on almost immediately when you awaken.  It will seek to grab your attention once again, perhaps with thoughts about things you have to do during the day or unresolved issues in your life.  The key is to notice the thoughts but not get caught up in them.  Let the thoughts be background noise and put your attention elsewhere.

One place you can always focus is on your breath.  Simply feel the breath coming and out.  Enjoying that soothing rhythm will bring you deeply into the present.

You can also focus on your heart.  Perhaps put your hands on your chest to help bring attention to your heart.  If your heart is open, just enjoy the beautiful feeling of your own love.    If your heart is closed, gratitude is the simplest way to open it.  Give thanks for this day, for the breath, for whatever you are truly grateful for.

Before you get out of bed, spend at least a couple minutes, immersing yourself in the present moment.  If you notice attention following the mind into future or past, be grateful for the gift of awareness and come back to breath or heart.  

By taking even a couple minutes for this practice, you are setting a powerful tone to for your day.  You are deeply affirming to yourself that your true priority for this day is to be present and enjoy each moment.  You are breaking the hold of your mind/ego.

If at all possible, take some more extended time to deeply connect with your Self before you go to work or get busy doing things.  Doing a sitting meditation of at least 20 minutes is a wonderful practice.  If you don't know how to meditate, you might want to start with a guided meditation CD.  If you resonate with my perspective, try Come Home to Yourself, which combines my words with beautiful music by Anton Mizerak.

 If you have a sedentary job, perhaps you prefer a moving meditation.  This could be going for a walk or run, doing yoga or Qi Gong.  The important thing is to do your best to keep attention in the present, rather than letting the mind take you a wild goose chase.

When you’ve started your day like this, it will be easier to relax and drop into the present when you create gaps in activity (see Stress Management Strategy to learn more about this).   After deeply tasting the sweet nectar of the Now, you’ll remember the taste and want more.  No matter how busy your day is, you’ll  take breaks and fully enjoy them.

Andrew Oser has been offering spiritual life coaching, along with guided retreats on Mount Shasta since 1982.   Through hikes to little-known sacred sites, guided meditations, spiritual life coaching, and time drinking in the silence of the mountain, he helps clients to deeply renew themselves in body, mind, and spirit and receive clear vision for their lives.  For more info, please see www.mountshastaretreat.net

Lifestyle Practice: Breaking the Addiction to Doing

(c) MCStrom Photos

Just about everyone carries deep, unhealed pain from childhood.  Even if we had a relatively benign childhood with no major traumas or abuse, little things happen all the time that make a deep imprint on our young psyche.  From example, perhaps, we’re crying for mommy, but she’s busy with baby brother so she doesn’t come right away.  We feel unloved, perhaps unworthy of mother’s precious love.

We all come up with strategies to get away from this pain.  For some, it’s destructive activities such as heavy use of drugs or achohol, gambling, or poronography.  I’ve never been addicted to any of these things personally, but yes, I am an addict also.  My addiction has been to doing.

I had my share of pain as a young boy, much of it stemming from my father’s sudden death when I was 5.  As a child, I never did any therapy or any sort of healing process.  The only way I knew to get away from pain was working hard in school and playing sports incessantly in my free time, always staying busy.  I did get enough A's to get into Princeton and I also won quite a few tennis matches.  But, it was exhausting.

Getting  A's at Princeton took so much effort that by junior year, I was exhausted and burned out.  That Summer, a friend gave me an amazing book called The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey. 

When, I began applying the lifestyle practices from the book on the court, my whole life changed.

One of the key principles of the Inner Game is to use the alternation between points and breaks to maximum advantage.  For those of you who’ve never played or watched tennis, the game is structured so that after each point, there is a break of 20-30 seconds.  These gaps in activity offer a wonderful opportunity to drop into a non-doing mode.

My old habit was to use this precious time to think about the last point, perhaps beating myself up if I’d missed an easy shot, or to worry about the next point.   From Tim, I learned how to drop into the Present.  I brought awareness to breath, watching the alternation between inhalation and exhalation.  I looked at the trees, listened to the birds.  Simply enjoyed a beautiful moment of non-doing.

Almost immediately, I noticed a dramatic difference in my experience while playing the points.  Rather than being uptight, afraid of missing, I was very relaxed, simply enjoying watching and hitting ball.  I not only had way more fun, but also played a lot better.

That was the beginning of my recovery process from my addiction to doing.  As 12-steppers will tell you, recovery is a long journey.  Mine has been a very rich one.  I spent years doing tons of meditation, and spending large amounts of time in nature, getting as far away as possible from the busyness of the working world.  Eventually, during one of my camping retreats on Mount Shasta, I had a vision to move to Washington, DC and start a nonprofit. 

 In my next blog, I’ll share about how I learned to apply the alternation between doing and non-doing in that job.

Andrew Oser has been offering spiritual life coaching, along with guided retreats on Mount Shasta since 1982.   Through hikes to little-known sacred sites, guided meditations, spiritual life coaching, and time drinking in the silence of the mountain, he helps clients to deeply renew themselves in body, mind, and spirit and receive clear vision for their lives.  For more info, please see www.mountshastaretreat.net

Rhythms of Life: Doing and Nondoing

Alternation is a natural rhythm that is woven into the fabric of life on this planet.  We go back and forth between day and night and the seasons of the year.  By tuning into and aligning ourselves with alternation, we can come into deeper harmony with life.  When alternation is not naturally present, by creating it, we bring our lives into greater balance

Consciously alternating between doing and nondoing is a very powerful lifestyle practice.  It can free us from attachments and habits and transform the quality of our experience.

In our society, with its outside-in orientation, doing and achieving are generally valued more highly than nondoing and being.  We are constantly in motion, trying to make things happen the way we want them to happen.  We become human doings, identifying with our accomplishments rather our state of being.

This approach is very stressful.  We put ourselves under continual pressure to perform.  This self-imposed pressure often leads to erratic performance, not to mention unhappiness.

The antidote for this is to take frequent breaks from activity.  Be still for a moment and check in with yourself.  If there is an accumulation of stress in your body/mind, let yourself feel that for a moment.   Notice what is without judging or resisting.  Then, put your attention on the one who is noticing.  Take a moment or two to relax into yourself, feeling that sense of peaceful awareness that’s always present, just waiting for you to slow down enough to notice it once again.

When you resume activity, the movement will come from a very different place than before.  It will tend to be effortless and natural, perhaps even joyful.  The stress that comes from pushing yourself will be gone.

In my next blog, I’ll have more say about the benefits of this lifestyle practice and how to make it a regular part of your life.