Soulful Healing

Each season brings with it a natural series of changes.  Spring.  Summer.  Fall.  Winter.  Birth. Growth. Aging. Death.  These are the systematic cycles that affect not just the weather and landscape, but also our body, mind, and emotions.   Even if you couldn’t tell by the 100° L.A. weather, Fall is officially upon us now.  In Ayurveda — the sister science of yoga — Fall is the season ruled by vata energy.  Vata is light, dry, cold, subtle, and mobile, like the wind.  People with dominant vata energy tend to be creative, energetic, and lively.  As such, however, they are often ruled by their emotions.  Depending on your own primary constitution or dosha (vata, pitta, kapha, or some combination of the three), you will have different responses to the increased vata energy that Fall brings.  Some find the cooler temperatures, falling leaves, and wind to be refreshing, while others find this light, dry, mobile energy to be unsettling or even aggravating.

The seasons aren’t the only cycles that affect our lives.  There are also cycles that span our days, months, and life-time.  Vata energy is most prominent during the hours of 2-6 each day, both in the early morning and in the afternoon.  Because vata is so energetic and creative, we must be careful not to exhaust ourselves during these times of day.  They are times that call for mental and physical rest.  As I write this, I am reminded of the many cultures around the world that call for an afternoon rest period.  It is so common for people to feel unfocused and tired during the early afternoon hours, U.S. workplaces would do well to establish a post-lunchtime rest.  When I am being mindful (which hasn’t been happening enough lately!), I will take 30 minutes sometime in the middle of the day to rest.  I might take a power-nap, engage in silent meditation, practice yoga nidra, or listen to a guided meditation.  And believe me when I say this is an ongoing process for me…  playfully dancing between the pull of opposite poles.  At any rate, honoring our natural cycles promotes better productivity by taking advantage of the best times for work, rest, and play.

Balanced vata energy is creative, vibrant, and full of life.  It is what gets us moving and doing things.  Out of balance, however, it can be forgetful, disorganized, anxious, emotionally overwhelmed, and eventually exhausted.  As we go through these daily, monthly, and annual cycles, it is important to note how we are affected.  How is your mood at this time of year?  Do you feel energized and full of ideas?  Or do you find yourself feeling annoyed and overwhelmed?  Are you forgetting things and starting too many projects?  Or are you accomplishing things and feeling good?  This is where practices like mindfulness and self-reflection come in handy, so that we can observe the effects of these cycles on the body, mind, and emotions.  When we quietly observe what is happening externally and internally, we can uncover what is balanced and imbalanced within us.  Then we can make conscious changes that will balance our energies so that we can be at our best in our relationships with ourselves, our families, and our work.

If you’re not so sure about the mindfulness/meditation thing and you live in the L.A. area, join me for my next FREE meditation class on Monday, November 7^th at 7:00pm, in North Hollywood.  We’ll be focusing on mindful practices to incorporate into daily activities, such as eating, working, and interacting with others, keeping in mind the increased vata energy of this season.  You can also give me a call for your own personalized dosha analysis and yoga plan to balance your energy.  If you’re outside of L.A. and would like to learn more about how to balance your energy, you can use these links to find a yoga therapist or Ayurvedic practitioner near you.  Enjoy the Fall season and until next time, be well!

This month’s blog post is actually a guest post for Sherry Gaba, LCSW.  She is the author of the book “The Law of Sobriety,” in which she applies the concepts of the Law of Attraction to help people recover from addictions.   Her life coaching and therapy skills have also been featured on VH1′s Celebrity Rehab and Sober House. Please hop on over to her Law of Sobriety blog to read my post on mindfulness and sobriety.  Thanks for reading!

Sundays are one of my favorite days.  It’s a day to reconnect with friends, family, and Spirit.  Yes, even on this  Sunday when much of the U.S. is keenly tuned to their TVs for hours of football fun.  On a slight tangent, it’s awfully hard not to use the actual words for today’s big game, but that’s how trademarks work…  Check out this great article on CNET about blacklisted words.  At any rate, I’m not much of a football fan, but because I like rituals, I like today’s football game.  Sometimes I even watch it, but that’s really more for the commercials, the food, and the fun conversations with friends.  Rituals are important; they help us mark the passing of time and can give structure where none would exist otherwise.  Birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, anniversaries, days of remembrance, rites of passage.  All these are important to satisfy the very human desire for order, but they also are a way to help us be more mindful.  Mindful of who we are, mindful of our past, mindful of where we would like to go from here, mindful of the people and places that nurture us.  

So in the interest of having a restful day, I am listing here some of my past articles on relaxation, rejuvenation, and reflection.  Whatever your ritual is today, I hope you enjoy it and bring some of that joy into the rest of your week.  Be well!
– Reconnecting with your Soul
– Time Out
– Emotional Balance
– Make Rest a Priority
– Coping with Stress

I was reminded recently of the importance of stepping back and doing a little self-reflection.  Having reaped many physical and emotional benefits from the practice of yoga, I was feeling stuck in regard to one particular challenge I’ve experienced for years:  chronic tension/pain in my right shoulder.  Fluctuating from mildly bothersome to headache-inducing, this shoulder pain situation has  frustrated me for probably the past decade.  In one of my early yoga therapy courses, I was excited to learn about various ways we can use a combination of movement and stillness to help the body heal itself.  Armed with my enthusiasm for studying anatomy and biomechanics, I started trying to figure out ways to make my shoulder feel better.  Over the next few years, I found that proper posture was generally helpful to my entire upper body and I started trying all kinds of different stretches to release the tension in the complex network of muscles inside the shoulder joint.  I would find relief anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but it would never leave completely.  I was in so much pain at one point a little over a year ago,  that one of my physical therapist friends gave me an excruciating massage to help liberate the bad juju hiding under my shoulder blade.  I won’t lie, there were tears!  Despite attempts to keep my shoulder at ease, the pain still came back.  Stress made it worse and the pain led to more stress, so it was a vicious downward cycle. 

At any rate, I really was perplexed as to why whatever I was doing was NOT working.  Over the holidays, I took a complete vacation from my asana practice.   This wasn’t specifically because of the shoulder, but because I’d had a pretty stressful year and figured that some complete relaxation was in order.  Between resting, meditating, and occasionally using the back of a chair to massage under my shoulder blade, my right shoulder started to feel better.  Then I returned to regular life and wouldn’t you know it…  There was my old friend the shoulder pain  So I decided to take a restorative yoga class at a local studio as a means of re-starting my asana practice.  It was wonderful and gentle and got me thinking that maybe what was unhelpful about all the stuff I had tried before was the way I had approached my yoga.  I have a rather driven personality and enjoy being active.  Being still isn’t easy for me!  But that’s why I’ve loved yoga…  I can move, move, move, and then enjoy the peaceful inner and outer stillness that comes from that.

My experience in that restorative class prompted me to get back to basics.  I figured if what I had been doing wasn’t working, I needed to start over again.  I needed to stop pushing myself so hard and getting frustrated over my own limitations.  In other words, I needed to take the recommendations I regularly give my clients and apply them to myself.  That whole thing about walking your talk isn’t always easy!  So I pulled out my yoga therapy books and created a basic series that addresses shoulder pain.  Then I actually practiced it.  And let me tell you…  My shoulder has never felt better!  For two weeks now, I’ve been focusing on a few specific movements for shoulder issues, focusing on strengthening & lengthening the right combo of muscles to create a healthier me.  I notice how my right shoulder is very reactive to stress; it tries to jump into my ear at the slightest hint of stress!  But what’s different now is that I can breathe and move and keep the tight ball of badness from coming back.

If you’re feeling stuck, take a step back.  Do a little self-inventory and see what you find.  What are you doing that isn’t working or isn’t helpful?  What are you doing that is helpful?  How can you decrease the unhelpful and increase the helpful?  Find your way back to your Self and let that put you back on your best path.  As one of my favorite authors, Dr. Clarissa P. Estes writes in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, ‎”If you feel you have lost your mission, your oomph, if you feel confused, slightly off, then look for … the ambusher of the soul in your own psyche.”  Mine was an imbalanced approach to my life and yoga practice.  What’s yours?

I’ve been on a communication kick lately…  In both my professional and personal worlds, I’ve been observing what makes an interaction between people go smoothly and what makes those inevitable snags become waaaay bigger than necessary.  One of the most daunting challenges in communication is telling the difference between your thoughts and feelings, then sharing those with important others.  I truly believe that being aware of our thoughts and feelings is essential to effective communication, so I thought I’d go a little deeper into communication this week.  As you already know from your own experiences, communication is a tricky endeavor…  Being mindful of our own stuff, determining what is being asked of us, working through our automatic responses, and then stringing all these feeling-thought-ideas together in a cohesive sentence is difficult work!  In my experience, good communication requires that we S–L–O–W our internal reactions long enough to sort through everything.  We need to first create time-space between the internal reaction and the external response, then we are able to practice making our external responses match those of our highest Self.

This allowing for time and space in between urge and action is not easy.  First of all, feelings and psychological processes are powerful stuff…  The mind can either be a safe harbor for peaceful contentment or a mine-field of self-derision and negativity, as well as everything in between.  Our default way of responding to the world can be learned from our culture, our circumstances, and our families.  It can also be linked to our own genetic and neurological make-up.  Whatever the source of your automatic responses, the idea is to shift from automatic to conscious.  Often this process requires the help of a guide, whether that person is a friend, mentor, spiritual leader, shaman, therapist, or psychiatrist.  Regardless of your chosen guide, becoming more aware of your own internal process and communicating with others more effectively is a completely achievable goal.  As with so many things, it takes commitment and active practice.

One communication strategy that I and many therapist-types will share with others looks like this:   I feel ____________ when ____________.  You may hear this referred to as an “I statement,” because the idea is to get away from making assumptions about others in favor of discussing only your own feelings and observations.  The simplicity of this statement is deceiving.  This is because, again, you have to know what you feel before you let all the other junk racing through your mind just pour out.  Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) method, adds another step to this statement, encouraging the speaker to identify what needs/wants trigger the feelings being expressed.  I really like this extended “I statement” because I believe it helps the speaker focus in on their own needs and how those needs create emotional responses.  So instead of saying, “It hurts my feelings when you don’t want to spend time with me!!” one might instead say, “I felt hurt when you said you have other plans, because I need to know that my interests are important to you.”  Yes, I know, this latter statement is longer and perhaps more tedious.  But this longer, more conscientious statement makes it easier for the listener to truly hear the speaker.  So instead of the defensive response, “Oh, get over yourself, you’re just being sensitive!” the listener will hopefully access her/his own compassionate nature and offer an empathetic response.  This is probably because “you don’t want to spend time with me!” sounds like a judgment at best and an attack at worst.  The NVC-inspired statement is simply an expression of the speaker’s emotions and thought process.  It’s the ultimate in honestly expressing what’s going on inside, without accidentally (or on purpose) attacking others.

If you are intrigued by this brief glimpse into the possibilities of Nonviolent Communication, here are some links:
– Center for Nonviolent Communication
– Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (Book)
– Nonviolent Communication Companion Workbook

Happy New Year everyone!!  I hope you all enjoyed the holiday season and had some time to rejuvenate.  Whether spending time alone or with friends and family, the holidays offer up many opportunities for both self-reflection and figuring out how to communicate with those we love.  I often find that many difficulties in communication stem from getting our thoughts and feelings confused.  In my graduate school therapy internships, we would have to complete these complex grids called “process recordings” about our therapy sessions.  These were to help us figure out what observable statements and behaviors occurred in the session, what we believed the client was thinking and feeling, and what we were thinking and feeling.  It took some time to gain skill at differentiating between the thoughts and feelings of both myself and others.  Just in case you aren’t planning on getting trained as a psychotherapist, I’ll take a few moments here to discuss the basic differences between thoughts and feelings!

Thoughts
The term “thought” is usually applied to the processes of the mind or intellect.  With our thoughts and ideas, we solve problems, figure out what we like or dislike, and identify how to get from here to there.  The thinking mind can even be used to sort through feelings and determine what action to take next.  All this is to say that thoughts are very different from feelings.  When clients talk about communication challenges they’ve encountered, I’ll ask them to identify what they were feeling during that given situation.  A common response might be, “I felt s/he was being a jerk!”  Okay, show of hands…  Which of you out there has said something like this before?  Yup, pretty much all of us have.   It is not a common part of our culture to take the time to notice the difference between our thoughts and feelings, or even to really figure out what we’re feeling.  The statement “I felt s/he was being a jerk!” reflects a judgment, whether correct or not, about another person or situation.  Planning, judgment, assessment, observation, problem-solving…  These are the stuff of thoughts.  But sometimes feelings disguies themselves as thoughts:  “I’m never going to get that job,” or “S/he hates me,” or “S/he doesn’t love me because s/he didn’t e-mail me back right away.”  These are not rational statements.  These are feelings masquerading as thoughts and can get us very confused if we don’t take the time to sort them out.

Feelings
When I hear statements like the “jerk” one above (whether from myself or others!), I will point out the lack of a feeling word and help the person figure out exactly what they are feeling.  When someone finds this exercise particularly challenging, I might even pull out a list of feeling words.  With the above example, the emotional response might instead be, “I felt hurt” or “I felt angry”.  Note how these feelings statements reflect an internal state of being on the part of the speaker.  One of the challenges around honestly identifying how we feel (instead of proclaiming others’ jerkiness) is that doing so makes us vulnerable.  This is especially true of our more unpleasant emotions.  Sad.  Afraid.  Hurt.  Worried.  Insecure.  Who wants to feel those things?!  And so we cover them up with judgments about others and irrational thoughts.  But I often find that in trying to run away from feelings, we only make things worse.  If we don’t allow ourselves to feel, allow those feelings to pass through us, and allow others to know how we feel (when appropriate), then the feelings get stuck somewhere in the mind and body.  If you are interested in expanding your own emotional vocabulary, here is a great list of feeling words.

Remember that feelings are not facts and they do not last forever, though it often seems they will.  Consider attending to your breath as a means of allowing your thoughts to settle and your feelings to pass.  Thanks for taking the time to read and have a great week!

This week, we continue with the Body Meets Soul series.  This is an ongoing discussion about the koshas, or different layers of human experience.  So far, I’ve written about the physical body, energetic body, and emotional body as unique aspects of our awareness.  This week, I’ll turn to the intellectual body.

Vijnyanamayakosha

Pronounced vig-nee-AWN-uh-mai-uh-KOH-shuh, this layer of human experience is governed by the intellect or wisdom.  This is not to be confused with knowledge, ego, or cleverness.  This layer is concerned with intelligence, conscience, and wisdom.  This kind of intelligence is that of wise discernment, not an inflated sense of self-importance.  The goal of wisdom is to unify our individual consciousness with our cosmic consciousness.  When first learning about these concepts of individual and cosmic consciousness, it was described to me as the difference between the small “s” self and the big “S” Self.  You might think about it this way…  There is a you that, when left to its own devices, may do whatever it takes to uphold the status quo, maintain inertia, make decisions that benefit only you.  We might call this the ego or the small “s” self.  Then there is the You that is your Higher Self, the one that perhaps believes in compassion, loving-kindness, and caring for the world around you.  These aspects of the self can often be found arguing with another…  Do I do what my ego wants to do right now  (“Food, drink, sex, pleasure, distraction… NOW!”)?  Or do I follow the path to which my Soul is calling me (faith, patience, perseverance, stillness, quiet)?  Remember that food, drink, sex, pleasure, and distraction are not problematic in and of themselves and can indeed be full of soul…   And that is the key question:  How can you make this next action one that connects you to your Soul?

In her book The Places That Scare You, Pema Chödrön writes, “It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament.  Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and – without even knowing it – we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity.  Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.”  Insecurity and fear are emotions that can prevent us from connecting to our inner wisdom, our God-consciousness.  We experience these emotions and tense up, gripping, grasping, holding on for dear life.  Yet when we are able to soften our outer defenses, turn our attention inward, our wisdom can point us to our truth.  Try this as an example…  Tighten up your fists, really squeeze, feel the discomfort and watch your knuckles whiten.  Nothing can flow through when your hands are clenched this way.  Now open your hands, allow the discomfort to pass, feel the softness of hands willing to accept whatever they find.  Here we connect to the flow of life force and energy that is always moving around and through us.

My earlier statement that intellect and wisdom should not be confused with knowledge is not to say that knowledge is a bad thing.  In fact, self study and spiritual study are great ways to exercise our wisdom.  It is just that our educational achievements can puff up the ego, getting in the way of truth.  You are not your education.  You are not your job or career or lack thereof.  You are not the clothes you wear or the car you drive or the stuff you collect.  I know…  Our society says that you are and measures your worth based on these things.  But when you connect to your Higher Self, you know better than all that.  You know that health, family, and friends are all far more important than how many square feet your house is.  And if these first three are hard to come by in your life, then contentment in the struggle is something to strive for.  Radical acceptance of the present moment.  Seeking wisdom may involve asking yourself, “What is this moment trying to teach me right now?” particularly if the moment is something you want to run from.  Another question is, “How can I share what I have learned with others?”  This kind of sharing may be in a formal classroom or it may be in the simple act of a smile or hug or laugh or nod of understanding.  When connecting to your wisdom and sharing this with others, what you do does not matter as much as how you do it…  Approach the next moment, person, place, thing with loving-kindness and see what your own wisdom has to teach you today.  Have a wisdom-filled week, my friends!

Hi everyone!  I’m so glad to be back here at my computer, typing away on this blog.  I hadn’t intended to take two weeks off from blogging, but my health had other plans.  I’ve been fighting off a couple of bugs and needed time to rest and recuperate.  When I wasn’t sleeping or otherwise resting in the past two weeks, I spent a good amount of time with my plants.  Nurturing the growth of plants and flowers is a wonderful way to develop our own healthy habits.  Since I’m based in Los Angeles, many of my mindfulness and healing suggestions are centered around the challenges of urban living.

I grew up in a small town, where there is plenty of land and space and trees and other green stuff.  My parents still have an extensive garden with seasonal vegetables, fresh herbs, and shockingly colorful flowers.  So I grew up appreciating green spaces and that sticks with me today, even in the urban landscape around me (just last night, I saw wild clover growing around a tree near a favorite restaurant and got excited!).  Having a lush garden can be difficult in the high density housing most of us in urban places occupy.  Unless, that is, you happen to be lucky to have a house with a good chunk of land (and that’s hard to come by even in this low real estate market).

Regardless of how much land surrounds your current residence, you can still keep a few plants around to help lift your mood.  I have several potted plants, some for indoors and others for outdoors, including a small herb garden.  If you enjoy cooking, fresh herbs are really the bee’s knees.  They taste more vibrant than the dried kind you’ll find at the grocery stores and, with the right amounts of water & love &  sunshine, they are endlessly renewable.  You can stop spending $3 each for a plastic box with two sprigs of thyme in it, and either buy a few herb plants or grow your own from seed.  And think of how great it will be next time you need parsley to flavor a dish and don’t have to buy a huge bunch of it, most of which will go to waste.  Growing your own herbs is more affordable, better for your taste buds, and will add that spark of new life to your kitchen or patio.

If fresh herbs aren’t your thing and the idea of growing things is intimidating, you might try getting some succulent plants (think cactus) that don’t need a lot of water or hardy, tropical plants that are hard to kill even if you ignore them for weeks.  Go to your favorite nursery (not the baby’s room…  the place where they grow and sell green things) and ask what kinds of plants might be good for your lifestyle.  There are also lots of “kits” these days where you can get a pot, soil, starter plant, and instructions all in one.  There are also ingenious indoor gardening set-ups that can have you growing even things like tomatoes right in your own kitchen.

Lastly, if you want to hone your gardening skills but don’t have the space for it, you might check out a local community garden.  These gardens that are tended to by any group of people are a great way to develop new friendships, preserve open space in increasingly urban communities, and be able to grow your own food even when you live in a small apartment.  Community gardens also help educate children about where food really comes from and they often help low-income communities and food banks improve access to fresh, healthy, affordable fruits and vegetables.  To learn more about community gardens in your area, check out the following resources:
– Los Angeles Community Garden Council
— American Community Gardening Association
— Capital District Community Gardens (upstate New York)
— GardenWeb

Here’s to your health and wellness!  Happy gardening!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on this three-part series on self-reflection.  In Self-Reflection, Part 1, I go over the various benefits of engaging in a self-reflective practice.  In Self-Reflection, Part 2, I share some ideas for bringing more reflective experiences into your life.  Here, in the third and final installment, I’d like to discuss some of the signs that one might be doing too much self-reflection.  It’s all about balance, as we are forever dancing between seemingly opposing concepts.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Like so many helpful practices we can use to further our personal growth, self-reflection has many benefits.  There does come a time, though, when it may be too much.  Remember the myth of Narcissus?  He fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away.  This kind of self-obsession is possible for us, with the symbolic shriveling of our other relationships.  Remember in all of this that your relationship with yourself is not the only relationship you have.  Relationships must be nurtured in order to thrive.  Be careful to balance your self-relationship with those social connections that help you to be a whole person, giving to each relationship what it needs to be sustained.

When utilizing self-reflection as a strategy for personal development, an important distinction to make is between the little “s” self and the big “S” Self.  By little “s” self, I mean the ego, while the big “S” Self represents the Soul. The ego is a tricky character.  Its voice can be whiny and entitled and demanding.  The ego wants what it wants and wants it NOW!  And when the ego’s demands on the rest of your psyche don’t work, it can resort subtle, insidious messages of maintaining the status quo.  It can be challenging to differentiate the voice of the ego from the other aspects of your Self.  Usually, the ego wants anything that is immediately pleasurable and rejects that which requires any effort to achieve.  So as you embark on your chosen self-reflective practices, watch out for a few ego reactions, such as tantrum-like thoughts & emotions, as well as prideful, entitled ones.  The ego may try to trick you into self-obsession, as well.  Anything to keep things exactly as they are!  But the whole idea of self-reflection is to grow and learn, not maintain the status quo, right?

Soulful Self-Reflection

Obsessing over your thoughts, feelings, and actions will not be helpful for you or anyone else in your life.  The idea behind soulful self-reflection is to set aside a specific time to make your observations, then let… them… go…  Release your judgments, worries, and plans over the things you have noticed and allow your Soul to do the rest.  There is so very much about your experience that your mind cannot figure out.  This is where the Soul/Source/God/Higher Power/Great Spirit/I AM comes in.  Trust that just engaging in the process of reflection has done what it is supposed to do:  slow you down, clear out the clutter, and make room in your psyche for your Soul to do its mysterious work.  There’s a reason why some of the best advice we can get is to “sleep on it”.

If you do the best work you can do on the conscious level to sort through the gobbledy-gook of your thoughts and feelings, well, that just needs to be good enough, doesn’t it?  The rest can be sorted out on deeper levels that take time and mystery and the willingness to embrace the unknowable.  And I am certain that there is a hefty part of all of us that is not fully knowable by anyone, at least not by the small percentage of our brains that we are typically using.  A good friend of mine once told me (and I have since shared this with many more friends and colleagues), “Some things you can’t know until you know them.”  Have faith, dear ones.  I believe you will one day have the answers you are looking for.  As for the questions that can’t be answered…  I hope you will learn to trust your Soul.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with a quote that gives me encouragement when my mind is working overtime to understand the magical mystery of this life.  Thanks for reading and enjoy…

“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~~ Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903, in Letters to a Young Poet

Today’s Mindful Monday post is coming up a little later than usual…  I decided to spend most of my Sunday resting.  I was on overload from a busy week of blogging and business networking.   When the exhaustion really set in on Friday morning, I decided that I needed to walk my talk and institute some down time.  So today’s blog is getting written on Monday evening, instead of Sunday evening

In a guest blog I wrote last week, I talked about how serenity can be found in things we otherwise might label as “mundane”, like our daily and weekly chores.  This inspired me to do a Mindful Mondays post about how to really dive in to the present moment of things we usually try not to focus on too much.  To try this mindfulness tip, pick a chore you need to do this week.  Maybe it’s laundry or washing dishes or mowing the lawn or whatever…  Pick one and join me in the following:

1)  Bring your full attention to the task at hand.  As you begin the task, take note of your five senses.  What do you hear/see/smell/touch/taste?  Observe these senses and describe them to yourself.

2)  Notice your breath.  As you continue with your task, blend your breath with your movement.  If you are washing dishes, for example, breathe in for a certain number of scrubs and then exhale to an equal or greater number of scrubs.  This can be applied to any chore…  Vacuum forward, inhale, vacuum backward, exhale…  Lift laundry out of the washer, inhale, place in dryer, exhale…  Be creative!

3)  Observe how this combination of breathing and movement affects your thoughts and feelings.  Are you able to stay with the present moment and the activity?  How often do your thoughts wander?  What are you feeling?

4)  Remember that above all, this is an exercise in non-judgment.  Mindfulness asks us to simply notice, without passing positive or negative judgment.  I know, easier said than done, but it gets much easier with practice!

In a new community building twist, I’ll post this topic up in the Discussion board on the Soulful Healing page on Facebook.  There, I invite you to discuss whether you tried this mindfulness exercise and your reactions to it.  Thanks for reading and be well!