Life Renewal: Take a Regular Sabbath Day

(c) 2014 Ken Nelson

In recent blogs, I’ve been discussing the importance of taking breaks during work and making good use of the time before and after work.  This helps us to manage stress and avoid burnout.  But, for me, it’s not enough.  I also need a regular Sabbath day to stay at the top of my game.

It is a wonderful  lifestyle practice to have a day each week dedicated to self-renewal. If the demands of your life are so great that you can’t imagine taking a full day off, perhaps you could a half day.

Ideally, our sabbath is not a day that we take off from work, but stay busy catching up on household projects. It is a day without any to-do list, without any commitment to accomplish anything. This is our time to slow down and just be with ourselves or with our loved one(s).

It is a day to do whatever nourishes and renews us. The key is not to do anything because of shoulds. If exercising is joyful and renewing for you, be all means do a workout.  But, don’t go the gym because you think you should when you’d really rather be taking it easy.

Traditionally, the Sabbath is a day we dedicate to God.  After 6 days of taking care of our worldly responsibilities, we turn our focus as fully and deeply as possible to God. The God I know lives in me and in all of life. He/She is infinitely loving, always available, and present in each moment. To connect most deeply with God on whichever day I choose as my Sabbath, I let go of all concepts and shoulds, relax as fully as possible, and come into the present moment.

Let any activities you chose to do on your Sabbath day flow naturally out of your joy in being. If you feel inspired to paint the ceiling, to bake bread, or to go to church, by all means do so. But, if possible, don’t do any activities from a sense of pressure or obligation.

Intermixing activity and times of rest or non-doing is a wonderful alternation, a powerful way to explore a new, easier way of doing.

Taking a sabbath day is a wonderful gift to give to yourself.  If you’re not already doing so, start taking regular sabbaths now.

 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

Stress Management Strategy: Shift Your Energy After Work

I have a friend named Roger who runs a large healing center. He supervises a staff of more than twenty people and deals with almost constant financial crises. We travel in similar circles, so I often run into Roger at evening gatherings.  I’ve noticed how fresh and relaxed he always seems to be.

Recently, I asked him what his secret was. He told me, “As soon as I leave the office, I do something to totally shift my energy.” His favorite way of doing this is to put his favorite CD on at a high volume in his car as he drives down the freeway. When the CD comes on, it’s a signal both to his conscious mind and subconscious, that work is over and it’s time to play.

Roger’s strategy is a good example that each of us can emulate. Brainstorm different things you could do immediately, or as soon as possible, after work which shift the energy and help you to mentally, as well as physically, take a total break from work.

If you work out of a home office, rather than commuting to work, this might be even more important for you.  With a home-based business, it can be all too easy to never really stop work.  It’s very important to take a break and ideally have several hours of down-time before bed.

Below are a few ideas of after-work energy-shifters that have been effective for me or people I know:

1. Exercise

2. Take a nice long shower

3. Call or get together with a friend or significant other

4. Watch the sunset (of course, this only works certain times of the year)

5. Meditate

6. Relax in a hot tub

Be creative, come up with some of your own ideas. Experiment until you discover what works best for you.

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

Why Be Grateful When Things Don't Go Your Way?

First, a reminder that our Thanksgiving Eve meditation call from Mt. Shasta is this Wednesday.   For more info, please click here.

It’s easy to be grateful for a good friend, a beautiful sunrise, things we enjoy.  The challenge comes when things don’t go our way.  Someone cancels an important meeting at the last minute.  Our computer breaks down at an inopportune time.  It seems counter-intuitive to be grateful for unwelcome events.  But, if we can do so, it is a huge doorway to freedom.

When things don’t go our away, our first reaction will often be anger, fear, or judgment.  These emotions aren’t coming out of nowhere.  They are rising from our own subconscious.  As long as they remain buried, such emotions often run our lives.  When they are triggered into the light of awareness, this is our golden opportunity to get free from their hold on us.

The key is to shift attention from the story in the mind about what went wrong to feeling the sensations  and emotions in the body now.  When we can meet whatever is rising with grateful awareness, we get free of old patterns.  We realize that Life is our ally, not our enemy.  It always gives us the perfect experiences to set us free.

Andrew Oser guides retreats and sacred site journeys on Mount Shasta.  He, also, offers spiritual life coaching session worldwide by phone and Skype.  For more information, please click here.