Take a “Time-out” From Your Mind
When I was growing up my father would often help me with my homework, as parents often do. When faced with difficult math problems or deciding on a topic for an English paper, I would become very frustrated. The more frustrated I got the worse the situation became. My dad had an interesting way of coaching me through this. Instead of forcing me to concentrate more, he advised me to step away from the table, go in the other room or take a walk outside to clear my head. He assured me that upon my return to the problem at hand I would have my answer. This much needed “mind time-out” was usually all it took to overcome the current challenge.
Our minds enjoy thinking of past and future events, especially in business. We are constantly planning for the future and reflecting on the past to prevent future
mistakes. This process works well, but many times it can overshadow the significant benefits a brief “mind time-out” can reap. Taking a break from the continuous “mind chatter” can help to propel us forward with less struggle.
Quiet your mind.
How often do you just rest your mind? Can you sit for several minutes with a quiet
mind or do your thoughts continue to race— thinking of what you need to do the
rest of the day, tomorrow, or next week?
Try this test. Sit comfortably and close your eyes.
Take a slow deep breath in, hold for 4 seconds and exhale slowly. Try not to think.
When a thought comes in, visualize it in a bubble floating up and out of your mind.
Continue putting thoughts in bubbles until your mind can remain quiet for a few minutes at a time.
With practice, you will be able to remain quiet
for longer and longer stretches.
At first, practice this exercise for a couple of minutes every morning. A great place for beginners is in the shower. As you are able to quiet your mind on command, you will benefit from being better able to overcome challenging, stressful situations as they arise.
Doreen Amatelli, Certified Professional Life Coach holds an MBA and has spent over 18 years working at major corporations and small business in finance and marketing. As a certified professional life coach at Way to Goal! www.waytogoal.com Doreen specializes in helping others manifest positive personal change in their lives. Copyright 2011 Doreen Amatelli. All Rights Reserved.
5-Minute Candle Meditation
The use of focal points can help the beginning meditator settle their active mind and get centered. If you just can’t settle down, try using a focal point such as an aquarium, a candle or the trees blowing in the wind to calm your harried mind. My favorite is a candle. Yep, a plain old candle (scented or unscented, your choice). Here is a short exercise that some of my clients have used:
5-Minute Candle Meditation
- Get a single-wick candle of any size, shape, color, scent. If you enjoy a particular scent like vanilla or lavender, these are always good scents to use since they help to calm the nervous system. A fire safe candle holder and a sturdy table are also recommended.
- Find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably and alone for about 5 minutes. You can set a timer if you need to. Sit where you can comfortably look at the candle. Remove all other things about 12 inches around the candle itself to eliminate distractions
- Light the candle. Put both feet on the floor and your hands resting on your lap.
- Watch the flame of the candle burn. Watch how it flickers, stands still, sways from side to side, grows or shortens with the air current.
- Breathe slowly and gently in and out of through your nose (not too strong or you’ll blow out the candle). Notice how the rate of your breath is calm and slow. If any thoughts come up for you, that is ok. Just refocus your attention back to the flame.
- If you feel like it, you may close your eyes but only briefly. You wouldn’t want to fall asleep and forget the candle is burning.
- At the end of the 5 minutes, take a slow, deep breath in and out and gently blow out the flame.
You can do this exercise anytime you feel you need a short break to refocus. You will be amazed at what this short period of time can do for you.
Trouble with Morning Meditation
I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to meditate in the early morning. Many gurus will say that it is the first thing you should do when you wake up. Even before breakfast???
This morning, like many mornings I awoke to the sound of the alarm clock. The immediate thought I had was, “Oh my nose feels stuffy and my throat is a little sore…. Darn!, I’m coming down with a cold!” Then my mind jumped to all of the items on my “have-to-do” list today and strategized how I could work in some time for self-care to attend to my seemingly oncoming cold. I lied in bed for another few minutes until the voices in my head said, “Get up and get going!” So, I headed for the shower even though my body (and my mind) wanted to stay in the nice warm cocoon under the covers.
I am most receptive right when I wake up, but thoughts usually race through my head including the dreams I just had the night before, what I have to do today and what I forgot to do the day before and of course, what I can’t wait to do today. So sitting with an open, clear mind goes against the grain of what my brain is naturally guided to do.
Earlier while I was learning to meditate, one of the things I remember most was to listen to your self. So to me that meant to listen to my body clock and recognize the time of day that it most conducive to effectively meditating. Typically this means after I take care of my morning routine (shower, breakfast, checking my emails). Yes, checking my emails I had to do before meditating. It bothered me all the while I was sitting there, trying to clear my mind, wondering what surprises lay ahead for me in my inbox. So, why not get those emails out of the way first. Ahh! Once I was able to get all of my morning rituals out of the way, then I could add one more very rewarding one…. meditation.
Bottom line, respect your own needs. If you are reading this, then there is something telling you that learning meditation may be what you want or need in your life, for whatever reason and therefore you’re respecting your-SELF to explore it. Why not also listen to your-SELF to discover the best time of day to meditate.
- For 1 week, experiment meditating at different times of the day – early morning, mid-morning, before/after lunch, dinner time, evening, before going to bed.
- Choose one or two of those times you found to be the easiest to settle down and follow that schedule for another 2 weeks
- Once you know the best time of day for you, then you can experiment moving your meditation session to another time that may be slightly more challenging for you. Do this slowly, there is not hurry, no race to win, here.
Please share your comments about this entry.
No Time to Meditate
Meditation was definitely not for me, (so I thought). I was a busy working mom who just didn’t have the time to sit around and stare into my mind or chakra or whatever! What good could come of just sitting around doing nothing?
I had been brought up in a fairly masculine dominated household – dad was a building maintenance supervisor for a large manufacturing plant and two older brothers (one, a successful sales vice president; the other, a highly esteemed design engineer who holds several patents for medical devices and other mechanical inventions). Mom kept very busy as a stay-at-home mom or “homemaker” as they called them in those days. My dad and both my brothers worked in their respective companies for 20+ years each, so having a good work ethic was a fundamental value in our home.
Until 2001, I had associated meditation with something akin to “drinking the Kool-aid” with Jim Jones. It was a strange practice, I thought, that required incense, chanting weird, nonsensical, embarrassing words and sitting crossed legged for hours on the ground wearing only a sheet.
After that turning point in my life (see “The Beginning”), being mindful became an integral part of my life, but not meditation. I stumbled upon visualization techniques since I had always been interested in methods and techniques that successful people used to achieve personal, professional or athletic success. I read stories about successful athletes like Bruce Jenner (before he was “Mr. Kardashian”) and Billie Jean King who had used various forms of mind management tools to complement their training. Bruce Jenner posted a large poster over his bed of himself breaking the finish line tape as he won the race so he could “meditate” on that image each night. Billie Jean King did a similar thing by hanging a real tennis ball over her bed. Some say these techniques are more visualization rather than meditation, but to me it didn’t matter because they were effective. FYI, Tiger Woods recently reported that things started to wrong in his life when he began to neglect his Buddhist philosophy of which meditation is the cornerstone.
At that time, meditation to me was still “airy-fairy” so I leaned toward learning some basic visualization techniques. After a few months, I was gaining some benefit but I wanted more. I wanted to go deeper and learn to gain more clarity and solve my career and work problems. So, I picked up a book on mediation and tried it during a business trip to Paris. Ugh!… sitting there in my hotel room for 1 minute was excruciating. It seemed like forever. But, then after a couple of weeks of practicing maybe every other day, I could extend the time to 2 minutes, then 5 minutes then 10, 20, 30 minutes, then once in a while, an hour. With each sitting I was able to and wanted to sit longer.
At home, I used to feel embarrassed if my son or husband, or anyone saw me meditating. I could sense when either of them peeked into the room where I sat meditating. Then I’d hear them snicker which would ultimately break my concentration early on and I’d get up and start going about the rest of my day. Soon, I experimented with doing meditation when the house was empty, generally in the morning after my husband went off to work and my son off to school. I’d sit in my big comfy chair, close my eyes, breathe and meditate. Ahh! Much better… no distractions. After I got the hang of it, I was so engaged that I used to have to set an alarm clock to sound after a period of time so I wouldn’t be late for work.
Did I always practice consistently? No. Some days I just couldn’t sit there for longer than 5 minutes without my mind racing from one thought to the next. Some days my mind would open and I’d be there for an hour.
After about 6 months of meditating at various lengths of time every other day or so, I remember starting to feel significantly calmer during the day at work. One day, one of my co-workers noticed a difference in me one day. She frantically came into my office, but then stopped suddenly and looked at me kind of curiously and said “Hi Doreen… Uh, are you ok?” I was feeling so centered that day that I really didn’t even respond right away. I just chuckled inside and replied “Nothing, I’m feeling really great!” with a big content smile and nod. From then I knew meditation had amazing powers to shift my state to a more resourceful one (and maybe shift those of others). It would always be a part of my life.
Discovering Mindfulness
About nine years ago, soon after 9/11, like many people, I began my search for what life and in particular what my life really meant. I had a young son, a loving husband, a new 4-bedroom colonial home in suburban New Jersey. My career was well established as a marketing executive in a large corporation that allowed me to travel to international cities and provided a generous income to support a comfortable lifestyle for my family.
The job I held was quite demanding with an international travel schedule that most people would envy (Rome, Florence, Paris, Stockholm, London to name a few). Being a wife, mom and marketing executive as well as the primary breadwinner of our household eventually took its toll on me. I was wondering how everything on the outside, my “outer life” seemed so perfect while I felt so empty and stressed on the inside, my “inner life.” As much as I tried to ignore this disconnect, the more I struggled. Trying to see the good in my job wasn’t working. And because of this struggle, my family life was suffering. Don’t get me wrong, I liked my job, most of my colleagues and the income but something definitely was missing. My family was healthy, happy and secure, but still something was missing. And worst of all, I felt embarrassed to talk about this to anyone, since everything seemed so perfect on the outside.
One day, as I drove home from work, I stopped my car on the side road just before the entrance to my development. I felt utterly alone, empty, in great despair. I knew I had to make a change. But how? What kind of change? After about an hour of sitting there, crying over the steering wheel in self-pity my mind got quiet… really quiet… strangely quiet… serene calm, then… clarity! Suddenly, I realized that I must turn things around in my life or I was going to self-destruct. I either had to learn to tolerate my job or get a more fulfilling one. I had my first glimpse into what I now know was a meditative state, which gave rise to a solution to my problem which was a key turning point in my life.
From that day on, I wanted to learn what this amazing experience was and how I could have more of them and use them to help me solve other problems in my life.
The benefits of meditation, visualization and other mind management tools I have enjoyed in both my professional and personal lives are numerous, which I will explore through this blog. Meditation and various other mind managment tools and techniques have helped me become more calm and relaxed, improve my creativity, solve business and personal problems, and make better decisions.
If you are a professional, executive or business owner, you may be looking for ways to help you at work or in your personal life and meditation just may be something that can help you. But getting started and maintaining the practice can be difficult, even frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be and tips and insights on this blog can help.
Whether you are a beginner to meditation or have been practicing for awhile, I intend for you to share with me and others on this blog, the benefits, challenges and insights you encountered along the way in experiencing this not-so-strange, highly effective tool for finding clarity, calmness, creative expression, solutions to problems, inner peace or other applications to live a more fulfilling life.
