As a psychotherapist and life coach,
I use a handful of tools to help clients work with their emotions or to work with problematic thought patterns or to help them change behaviors that might not be working well for them in their life or causing them to stress.
So I do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy,
Emotion-focused therapy,
A lot of behavioral modifications,
But I've also come across some contemplative practices that have been life changers for me.
I use them not only in my private practice every day,
But I use them in my life every single day as well.
I never imagined that I would be one that would fall in love with meditation.
So we're going to introduce you to mindfulness meditation.
It's pretty simple actually.
It's a process of purposely paying attention in this very moment in a unique way.
So often our mind is constantly drifting.
We're thinking about the past,
We're future tripping.
It's rare that we're really present and centered in this very moment.
That's what mindfulness meditation is really all about.
We'll talk about mindful walking,
Mindful movement,
But I wanted to introduce you to mindfulness meditation because it really has become a game changer in my life.
I'm always feeling behind.
I always feel like I don't have enough time.
I have to deal with my own stress levels and my own anxieties and then working with clients as well.
It can all be a little bit overwhelming.
I have a partnership to manage,
A home to manage,
So I constantly feel like I'm on the go.
A lot of times I don't get in the exercises I want to,
Although I try at least three times a week to get some mindful movement in.
But really I don't have a lot of downtime.
I've always been a night owl and over the last couple of years I've been trying to figure out how can I structure my life in a way that will allow me to get some personal time because I don't have much and allow me to really focus on the here and now so that I can really ground myself for the work that's ahead of me each day.
When I learned about mindfulness meditation,
I was immediately hooked and I had to figure out when to fit it into my life and that's the great thing about meditating.
You can meditate when you're walking.
I can meditate in between clients.
I usually have about 10 minutes in between clients so I can do about a five minute meditation or a 10 minute meditation.
And we'll go over several different types of meditations here but I just wanted to introduce you to it.
So I started to get up at five o'clock in the morning,
Which is rare for me.
As I mentioned,
I'm a night owl.
I love my morning sleep especially.
There's something about you wake up early and go back to sleep for a little bit.
It starts today just right.
But I started to discipline myself and get up at 5 a.
M.
And turn on a mindfulness meditation track or do my own meditation.
The benefits of morning meditation are instrumental.
No longer do I wake up and immediately start to think about the endless to-do list or the clients that I have on my case or that day or dwell on being tired and overwhelmed,
Which I often am feeling.
Now I'm starting to wake up and instead I feel peace knowing that the next 30 minutes will be all for me.
I don't have to compromise.
I don't have to be communicating.
I don't have to be practicing active listening.
I just get to focus on what's going on with me,
My thought processes,
My emotions,
My breath,
My body.
So meditating in the morning provides me an opportunity to really set an intention for the day,
Which is really important.
Energy flows where our attention goes.
So if I can wake up and even though I've got all my automatic and instinctive thoughts that are flowing about how busy I am for the day,
I can set an intention.
I can tell myself and give myself the biofeedback that I want to slow down.
I want to be grateful for this day.
I want to practice carving out some personal time and self-care time.
So it helps me to set my pace and it focuses my mind and it really helps me to see the abundance that I always have already have in my life.
It's really become for me my go-to self-care tool.
And I can't tell you enough how much it boosts my mood.
It resets my energy or brings my energy forth for the day,
Slows down my thinking and really prepares me for what's to come.
I like to keep my meditations pretty consistent.
So we typically start with some breath work followed by focusing on the body and doing some body scanning.
And I like to introduce a topic,
Something that I might be struggling with that day or struggling with in life.
It might be a perpetual problem that I'm always working on or just can't quite seem to figure out.
So I'll bring that into my meditation and really focusing on that.
Always bringing it back to the breath,
Always bringing it back to the body.
I like to bring in mantras or what we call self-affirmations.
Those are very grounding and help to calm the body and tap into the parasympathetic nervous system,
Which helps to slow things down.
So we'll move forward here and introduce you to a few more meditations.
And I really encourage you to run through the meditations.
You'll get a feel for them.
I want you to bring non-judgment.
I want you to normalize your experience.
I want you to accept whatever experience is happening.
Mindfulness meditation teachers will tell you that there's no right or wrong way to meditate and I couldn't agree more.
In fact,
What we know about meditation is that when we fail,
We're actually strengthening the neurons in the brain.
What I mean by that is each time my mind drifts away to the past,
To the future,
To what needs to happen that day,
To something I might be struggling with,
If I can pull my focus back to this very moment and I can practice active listening to what's going on in the track or whatever teacher I'm listening to,
Or I can pull my focus back to this moment,
This breath or whatever's going on inside my body.
Each time I do that,
I'm training my brain.
I'm training my focus.
Our neurons are constantly firing.
So that means our thoughts are constantly firing in many different directions.
And if we listen to all of them,
It's pretty damn overwhelming.
Same thing with our emotions.
So if we can pull ourselves back to this moment and this breath becomes very anchoring and very grounding and the body starts to respond.
Thank you for listening and we'll get started with a few meditations.
