I read that the main causes of stress according to the report which surveyed 1,382 people aged 18 and over were said to be difficulties at work and financial stress. So presumably if we could afford to have more holidays we'd all feel much better!.... Talking of holidays. Of course we can be stressed out exactly because we can't take holidays...but keep reading...
During holidays you laugh and smile more, life is more fun. Why does this happen? Being on a relaxing holiday allows your your sympathetic nervous system to quieten, and it increases output by your parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes feelings of ease and emotional balance.
So the question is: can we switch this mechanism on without needing a passport and a flight to "Disneyland" or a tropical island? Can we give ourselves and our nervous systems a regular mini-holiday. The answer is: Of course you can!!!... and if you read on I'll give you several tools you can start on today that will make a profound difference to the way you feel. The first of these is the breath.
Breathe
If you regularly feel stressed and want to transcend an anxiety-ridden existence, I encourage you to give the following tip a try:
Every hour, or even more frequently if possible (like Stephen Chernisky recomends: every red light), close your eyes and breathe deeply for a full minute. Do your best to focus on nothing but your breathing. Feel your abdomen go in and out as air enters and leaves the deepest corners of your lungs. This get your body alcaline...but that's another topic (stay tuned")
This simple exercise has a powerful effect on your nervous system. If you keep your eyes closed as you focus on deep breathing it works much better as the less stimulation your nervous system has to process the quicker you relax.
This tip is simple and free, which means that most people are likely to underestimate the effect that it can have on their health over the short and long term. If necessary, post highly visible reminders around your work and/or living spaces that will help make this breathing and relaxation exercise an unbreakable habit in your daily routine.
Rest When you body is upright your nervous system is relatively alert, when you're horizontal your nervous system prepares itself to go into stand-by mode. So lying down increases the effectiveness of most relaxation tools, except if you want to prevent going to sleep.
If you are tired, and if you're stressed its likely you are also suffering from some level of exhaustion, so its probable you will fall asleep as you begin to relax.
Over time as you continue to make time for a daily period of relaxation you will find you can stay in the delightful in-between state of deep relaxation that comes before sleep. The two best times of the day for resting are lunch time or when you first get home from work.
If you do fall asleep try setting an alarm for 30 minutes for a very effective power nap.
Sleep Talking of sleep, your sleep is an excellent barometer of the health of your nervous system. If you can fall to sleep easily and stay soundly asleep during the night then you already have a huge advantage in tackling stress. If on the other hand you lie awake for an hour or two, thinking about the day you've had or worrying about the next day; or if you are woken frequently during the night then the time when your body should doing its repair and revilalising is being lost.
Seek Help: Our bodies are designed to have regular periods of relaxation and long periods of sleep, however many of us have allowed our nervous systems to become chronically overstimulated. Like a run away train, an overstimulated nervous system is takes some slowing down. Symptoms of exhaustion, tension, anxiety, depression and anger are just a few possibilities.
At this point I would suggest taking the folowing actions in addition to the hourly breathing exercise described above: begin a daily relaxation practice of at least 20 to 30 minutes. .
Practice this technique lying down for enhanced effectiveness. begin taking professionally prescribed herbal remedies to nourish and support the nervous system therby making it much more able to switch off.
I recomend products from the Univera company because had help me and you can get them in this link, http://www.zwyssig.myunivera.com/ but there are more good products, just make sure to research the science behind.
Have weekly sessions of acupuncture to retrain your body and mind in how to relax. One suggestion is to check out: http://www.the11forgottenlaws.com/?p=2895. I hope you find these tips on stress and relaxation helpful, as always I love to hear your thoughts.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Simple Basics to Meditate
Colibri's eye
Meditation requires practice. To get the most from meditation you need to do it every day. This requires a place and time where you will not be disturbed.
1.Sit with a straight back. Don't try to meditate lying down because you are likely to fall asleep. Meditation brings relaxation and peace but at the same time this is a dynamic peace. Meditation is quite different than the relaxation of sleep. When we really meditate, we are fully alert and conscious. Our sense of awareness is heightened. Afterwards you'll have a positive feeling for the world and a renewed sense of dynamism.
2.Don't eat before meditating. After a heavy meal your body will be lethargic with digestion.
3.It is not necessary to mediate in the lotus posture. It is fine to meditate in a chair, as long as the back is straight.
4.Burning incense and having a candle are not necessary, but they can add a little extra inspiration.
5.It is good to meditate early in the morning. It is said the best time is 3am, although.
Meditation requires practice. To get the most from meditation you need to do it every day. This requires a place and time where you will not be disturbed.
1.Sit with a straight back. Don't try to meditate lying down because you are likely to fall asleep. Meditation brings relaxation and peace but at the same time this is a dynamic peace. Meditation is quite different than the relaxation of sleep. When we really meditate, we are fully alert and conscious. Our sense of awareness is heightened. Afterwards you'll have a positive feeling for the world and a renewed sense of dynamism.
2.Don't eat before meditating. After a heavy meal your body will be lethargic with digestion.
3.It is not necessary to mediate in the lotus posture. It is fine to meditate in a chair, as long as the back is straight.
4.Burning incense and having a candle are not necessary, but they can add a little extra inspiration.
5.It is good to meditate early in the morning. It is said the best time is 3am, although.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Touch Your Audience with Stories
Apr 19, 2010 2:27 PM Touch Your Audience with Stories from Mi Colibri
It was stormy and almost midnight. On an isolated country road in Missouri, my truck plowed into a section of flash flooding. Water shot up on the right and left and over the hood. The engine died. And it wouldn't start. All I could see was water in every direction and tree branches floating in front of the truck. There would be no traffic until sunrise...
This is a true story. It happened to me. It has become an eight-minute vignette with lessons learned and several laugh lines along the way.
Stories grab your audience. Listeners will remember the drama and the humor, and chances are good they'll remember your point as well.
But what comes first_the story or the point? Personally, I never start with a point and then look for a story or joke to fit it. I used to do that, but I've found that it works better to find the story first and then discover the natural points that flow from it. A good story will usually make at least two or three insightful points. And with a good arsenal of stories, you'll be able to support almost any point you want to make.
You can come up with great stories just by being alert to everyday events. I recommend zeroing in on the following five areas when looking for story material:
Look for difficult and traumatic events. Obviously, these events aren't funny when they happen, but sometimes an event will generate a thought like "Someday I'll laugh at this." I wasn't laughing the night I was stranded in the flood waters! But after the ordeal is over, I look for the humorous twists. The process of always being on the lookout for stories often becomes a helpful coping device. When a challenge hits you, you might think, "What a speech this will make!"
Focus on lessons learned and personal growth that resulted from tough times. These provide story material you can use to teach others.
John Kinde
It was stormy and almost midnight. On an isolated country road in Missouri, my truck plowed into a section of flash flooding. Water shot up on the right and left and over the hood. The engine died. And it wouldn't start. All I could see was water in every direction and tree branches floating in front of the truck. There would be no traffic until sunrise...
This is a true story. It happened to me. It has become an eight-minute vignette with lessons learned and several laugh lines along the way.
Stories grab your audience. Listeners will remember the drama and the humor, and chances are good they'll remember your point as well.
But what comes first_the story or the point? Personally, I never start with a point and then look for a story or joke to fit it. I used to do that, but I've found that it works better to find the story first and then discover the natural points that flow from it. A good story will usually make at least two or three insightful points. And with a good arsenal of stories, you'll be able to support almost any point you want to make.
You can come up with great stories just by being alert to everyday events. I recommend zeroing in on the following five areas when looking for story material:
Look for difficult and traumatic events. Obviously, these events aren't funny when they happen, but sometimes an event will generate a thought like "Someday I'll laugh at this." I wasn't laughing the night I was stranded in the flood waters! But after the ordeal is over, I look for the humorous twists. The process of always being on the lookout for stories often becomes a helpful coping device. When a challenge hits you, you might think, "What a speech this will make!"
Focus on lessons learned and personal growth that resulted from tough times. These provide story material you can use to teach others.
John Kinde
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Can we ever understand relationships?
The relationships we have with other people, we think are real, and they are in a certain way, but they are projections of the first relationships we developed within ourselves very early in life. Our external relationships and our internal relationships are in fact the same relationships but all aspects of them are mixed. Thats why they seem different we look at them through the lenses we learned in society.
Let's consider why this is true. Where do all our relationships exist? They exist in our thoughts. Our relationship with another person is whatever we imagine it to be. Whether we love someone or hate someone, we are right.
Now the other person may have a completely different view of the relationship to me, but my idea of what someone else thinks of me is also part of my thoughts.
So your relationship with someone includes what you think of that person and what you believe she/he thinks of you. We can complicate it further by imagining what the other person thinks you think of him/her, but ultimately those internal ideas and believes are all we have.
Even if your relationships exist in some objective reality independent of your thoughts, (yeah right!) you never have access to the objective viewpoint. You are always viewing your relationships through the lens of your own consciousness. The closest you can get to being objective is to imagine being objective, but that is in no way the same thing as true objectivity (and we better leave that subject to the brave minds) that's because the act of observation requires a conscious observer, which is always subjective! .
So If you are having relationship troubles... better watch out what are your ideas around your other half.
At first it might seem troublesome that you can never hope to gain a truly accurate, 100% objective understanding of your relationships. You can never escape the subjective lens of your own consciousness. That would be like trying to find the color blue with a red lens permanently taped over your eyes. That doesn't stop people from trying, but such attempts are in vain. If you fall into the trap of trying to think of your relationships as objective entities that are external to you, you will be using an inescapably inaccurate model of reality.
So the likely outcome is that you will frustrate yourself to no end when it comes to human relationships. You will make relating to other people a lot harder than it needs to be. Intuitively you may know something is off in your approach to relationships, but you will remain stuck until you realize that every relationship you have with another person is really a relationship that exists entirely within yourself.
Fortunately, once you embrace the subjective nature of relationships, you will have a much easier time relating to people. It's easier to get where you want to go when you have an accurate map. The subjective view of relationships implies that you can change or improve your relationships with others by working on the internal relationships within yourself. Furthermore, you can improve your internal relationships, such as your self-esteem, by working on your relationships with others. Ultimately it's all the same thing.
Here is a basic example of how this works:
Having a messy room is a habit for my son was a habit and being organized was a concept forever alien to him.
On the other hand, I grew up in a house that was always neat and tidy. Even as a child, I took pride in keeping my room clean.So it probably comes as no surprise that I often push my son to be neater and more organized.
If we try to look at this situation "objectively," you might suggest solutions like me working on becoming more tolerant of disorder, My son working on being neater, or a mixture of both. Or you might conclude we are incompatible in this area and that we should try to find ways to reduce the level of conflict. Basically the solution will be some kind of compromise that seeks to mitigate the symptoms, but the core issue remains unresolved.
Let's see what more subjective lens has to say now.
The idea is that my relationshiphs are purely within my own consciousness. So my conflict with my son is just the projection of an internal conflict. Supposedly my desire for him to be neater and more organized means that I really want to improve in this area myself. Is that true? Yes, I have to admit that it is. When I criticize him for not being neat enough, I am voicing my own desire to become even more organized.
This is an entirely different definition of the problem, one that suggests a new solution. In this case the solution is for me to work on improving my own standards for neatness and order. That's a very different solution than what we get with the traditional thinking. To implement this solution, my son needn't even be involved.
For a lot of people this solution seems rather foolish. If anything it will only backfire. Wouldn't my working on becoming neater just increase the conflict between me and him?
When I actually tried the subjective solution by going to work on myself, my son suddenly began taking a keen interest in becoming more organized himself, clean the room !
I encourage you to experiment to see how your external relationships reflect your internal ones:
Try this simple exercise:
Make a list of all the things that bother you about other people.
Now re-read that list as if it applies to you. If you are honest you will have to admit that all of your complaints about others are really complaints about yourself.
For example, if you dislike George Bush because you think he is a poor leader, could this be because your own leadership skills are sub par? Then go to work on your own leadership skills, or work on becoming more accepting of your current skill level, and notice how George Bush suddenly ...seems to be making dramatic improvements in this area!
It can be hard to admit that your complaints about others are really complaints about yourself, but the upside is that your relationship issues reveal where you still need to grow. That's why a fantastic way to accelerate your personal growth is to build relationships with others. The more you interact with others, the more you learn about yourself.
I believe the true value of human relationships is that they serve as pointers to unconditional love. , when you forgive, accept, and love all parts of yourself, you will forgive, accept, and love all other human beings as they are. The more you improve your internal relationships between your thoughts, beliefs, and intentions, the more loving and harmonious your human relationships will become. Hold unconditional love in your consciousness, and you will see it reflected in your reality.
Let's consider why this is true. Where do all our relationships exist? They exist in our thoughts. Our relationship with another person is whatever we imagine it to be. Whether we love someone or hate someone, we are right.
Now the other person may have a completely different view of the relationship to me, but my idea of what someone else thinks of me is also part of my thoughts.
So your relationship with someone includes what you think of that person and what you believe she/he thinks of you. We can complicate it further by imagining what the other person thinks you think of him/her, but ultimately those internal ideas and believes are all we have.
Even if your relationships exist in some objective reality independent of your thoughts, (yeah right!) you never have access to the objective viewpoint. You are always viewing your relationships through the lens of your own consciousness. The closest you can get to being objective is to imagine being objective, but that is in no way the same thing as true objectivity (and we better leave that subject to the brave minds) that's because the act of observation requires a conscious observer, which is always subjective! .
So If you are having relationship troubles... better watch out what are your ideas around your other half.
At first it might seem troublesome that you can never hope to gain a truly accurate, 100% objective understanding of your relationships. You can never escape the subjective lens of your own consciousness. That would be like trying to find the color blue with a red lens permanently taped over your eyes. That doesn't stop people from trying, but such attempts are in vain. If you fall into the trap of trying to think of your relationships as objective entities that are external to you, you will be using an inescapably inaccurate model of reality.
So the likely outcome is that you will frustrate yourself to no end when it comes to human relationships. You will make relating to other people a lot harder than it needs to be. Intuitively you may know something is off in your approach to relationships, but you will remain stuck until you realize that every relationship you have with another person is really a relationship that exists entirely within yourself.
Fortunately, once you embrace the subjective nature of relationships, you will have a much easier time relating to people. It's easier to get where you want to go when you have an accurate map. The subjective view of relationships implies that you can change or improve your relationships with others by working on the internal relationships within yourself. Furthermore, you can improve your internal relationships, such as your self-esteem, by working on your relationships with others. Ultimately it's all the same thing.
Here is a basic example of how this works:
Having a messy room is a habit for my son was a habit and being organized was a concept forever alien to him.
On the other hand, I grew up in a house that was always neat and tidy. Even as a child, I took pride in keeping my room clean.So it probably comes as no surprise that I often push my son to be neater and more organized.
If we try to look at this situation "objectively," you might suggest solutions like me working on becoming more tolerant of disorder, My son working on being neater, or a mixture of both. Or you might conclude we are incompatible in this area and that we should try to find ways to reduce the level of conflict. Basically the solution will be some kind of compromise that seeks to mitigate the symptoms, but the core issue remains unresolved.
Let's see what more subjective lens has to say now.
The idea is that my relationshiphs are purely within my own consciousness. So my conflict with my son is just the projection of an internal conflict. Supposedly my desire for him to be neater and more organized means that I really want to improve in this area myself. Is that true? Yes, I have to admit that it is. When I criticize him for not being neat enough, I am voicing my own desire to become even more organized.
This is an entirely different definition of the problem, one that suggests a new solution. In this case the solution is for me to work on improving my own standards for neatness and order. That's a very different solution than what we get with the traditional thinking. To implement this solution, my son needn't even be involved.
For a lot of people this solution seems rather foolish. If anything it will only backfire. Wouldn't my working on becoming neater just increase the conflict between me and him?
When I actually tried the subjective solution by going to work on myself, my son suddenly began taking a keen interest in becoming more organized himself, clean the room !
I encourage you to experiment to see how your external relationships reflect your internal ones:
Try this simple exercise:
Make a list of all the things that bother you about other people.
Now re-read that list as if it applies to you. If you are honest you will have to admit that all of your complaints about others are really complaints about yourself.
For example, if you dislike George Bush because you think he is a poor leader, could this be because your own leadership skills are sub par? Then go to work on your own leadership skills, or work on becoming more accepting of your current skill level, and notice how George Bush suddenly ...seems to be making dramatic improvements in this area!
It can be hard to admit that your complaints about others are really complaints about yourself, but the upside is that your relationship issues reveal where you still need to grow. That's why a fantastic way to accelerate your personal growth is to build relationships with others. The more you interact with others, the more you learn about yourself.
I believe the true value of human relationships is that they serve as pointers to unconditional love. , when you forgive, accept, and love all parts of yourself, you will forgive, accept, and love all other human beings as they are. The more you improve your internal relationships between your thoughts, beliefs, and intentions, the more loving and harmonious your human relationships will become. Hold unconditional love in your consciousness, and you will see it reflected in your reality.
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