If you’re watching this, you care about your family, so have compassion for yourself. Then, practice compassion for your kid(s) – they’ve only been alive a much shorter time and they only know of the world what you’ve shown them by your example, your mood(s), your energy. Practice this compassion, practice stepping into their experience, remembering who you were then, asking them about their life, even asking them what you can do better for them. Compassion rules.
Mindful Smack: Reminder to Meditate
Take 5 minutes to invite yourself to sit and turn all that’s changing, and all that’s difficult, into food for your clarity and your growth. Bring it all to your heart. Meditate. It always helps.
Mindful Smack: Reminder to Meditate from Elena Brower on Vimeo.
Mindful Smack: Why Meditate?
Why meditate? Meditation helps me to respond with elegance instead of react. Sitting regularly helps me see where I’m hosting tension in my body, and helps me feel more connected to myself as a bastion of love. It helps me be less afraid and more real. Meditation keeps me kind and patient with the folks around me, and brings me a far more relaxed internal state, which my body and mind need to stay well and whole. May we all feel the healing calm of our practice.
Mindful Smack: Defining Prayer
W.H. Auden defines prayer as a way to pay “careful and concentrated attention to something other than our own constructions.” May we make everything a prayer, our interactions, conversations, ways of listening, relationships. May it all be a prayer.
Mindful Smack: Work Backwards
Now that January is coming to a close, here are three super useful reminders about your resolutions and how to make them stick, with love.
1. Work backwards. From the perspective of December 2013, what happened this year? What were you proud of? What was accomplished?
2. Tell EVERYONE: Post, friends, family, everyone. Let them expect greatness!
3. Make your resolution(s) FUN, but also SCARY. That combination of fear and excitement will keep you in your heart.
And thank you Lauren Zander, co-founder of the Handel Group. This is her wisdom.
Mindful Smack: Pure Presence
Been trying to figure out how to shift negativity out of my mind, out of my life. I’ve found that I’m perpetuating complaints, frustration and anger by giving them reckless voices without consciously choosing how i express myself. If i can do it while I’m teaching, what do i need to know to do it elsewhere?
To transmute negativity into pure presence, know that we can HOLD it, for a finite period of time, a moment, an hour, a day, and SEE the immediacy of the negativity from a place of presence within… then choose HOW to express or use it.
I can choose to say something in a constructive way, I can even choose to discard it and never need it again… but if i don’t take the time to HOLD it, I cannot choose anything. And the real victim of that negativity is me.
Here’s to transmuting negativity into pure presence.
