|
 Fitting Spirituality into Your Busy Day
(Five One-Minute Exercises to Expand Your Soul)
-
Alan Seale
Whenever I teach workshops, I always hear this question: “How do I fit spirituality into my life?” People seem to believe that spiritual exercise, like physical exercise, requires thirty minutes to an hour a day.
Nonsense! Taking tiny moments throughout your day to give thanks, feel your body, empty your mind, acknowledge feelings, or become a vessel for divine energy is easy and highly satisfying. Making time to strengthen your intuitive powers has many rewards. You will feel calmer and your mind will be sharper. You will feel energized and more connected to others, and you will even find that you are more positive and productive at work.
We are all so busy with our families, jobs, and social life that it’s challenging to find time for regular spiritual practice, such as meditating. As long as you are trying to fit your spiritual practice into your already packed life, it will probably never happen—at least not in a rewarding way.
I ask clients and students to turn the question upside down in order to find a whole new perspective: How do I fit my life into my spirituality?
You can begin to do this by thinking of spirituality not as something you do, but rather as a way of life. Spirituality is not something you learn, something foreign to your soul. It is your soul’s natural state of being, all day, every day, no matter what you are busy doing. It is an unseen force with which we coexist. Your task, then, is simply to allow yourself to tap into that divine energy.
Think about the unseen forces in our lives, such as radio waves and electricity, that 150 years ago would have seemed pure fantasy. Today, not only have we accepted and incorporated the reality of these unseen energies into our daily lives and become more dependent on them, we have built whole technologies upon them and altered our daily lives accordingly. If we accept these unseen forces as coexisting with our physical reality, why not allow our perspective of day-to-day reality to include the mystical forces of the universe?
The first step toward living in this expanded awareness is to choose that awareness as your mental default operating system. This means disciplining your thoughts. However, disciplining your thoughts does not have to be an added time commitment in your daily schedule. It takes less than sixty seconds to find and partake of this peaceful energy, a bit like dipping a cup into a flowing stream, letting it fill up, and drinking.
Here are five exercises you can try throughout your day, each of which can be performed in less than a minute. You will be surprised and delighted at how much better you feel when you take even tiny moments to fit spirituality into your life.
1. Hold a vision. Take advantage of “mindless” time—such as standing in the shower, driving to work, or downloading new software—to picture something beautiful and hopeful for yourself. Once you form the vision, make a conscious effort to hold it, keeping it at the front of your mind, without letting other thoughts intrude.
2. Begin the day with breath. Right after your alarm goes off in the morning, but before you jump out of bed, take one minute to breathe deeply. Pay attention to each in-breath and each exhale. Try to focus only on your breath, not your to-do list.
3. Open the third eye. Focus your gaze on the tip of your nose for thirty seconds. Your eyes will cross and you will feel pressure at the third eye (located just about and between your eyes in your forehead). Relax your eyes. Now shift your focus on the bridge of your nose, directly between your eyes for thirty more seconds.
4. Who am I right now? Take a few breaths to calm down and get centered. Now, ask yourself: Who am I right now, in this exact moment? Allow the response to come as thoughts, words, feelings, images, colors, or sounds. Make no judgment about what comes to you. Write down your answers.
5. Release angry blocks. With your dominant hand, write the question: How does it feel to write with my nondominant hand? Then write the answer with your nondominant hand. With your dominant hand, write: Please tell me who I am. Answer with your nondominant hand.
Periodically throughout your day, revisit your peaceful place by taking just sixty seconds to close your eyes and focus on your breath. Allow your breath to find its own natural, steady rhythm. This simple practice will keep bringing your back to your own natural inner rhythms.
It takes only sixty seconds to get back into alignment with your soul. How often do you spend much more time than that fretting over how overwhelmed you are? A minute of intentional breathing and centering throughout your day will actually save you time. By sitting in the stillness of your breath and the expansiveness of your soul, you will discover solutions to problems, resolutions to conflicts, and be shown the next steps.
Make the conscious choice to be the keeper of your life rather than let your life be the keeper of you. Choose to live in the vastness of your soul. Then, when your supervisor calls you in for a conference, rather than choosing a fear reaction or immediately going on the defensive, choose to be in your magnificence and hold your supervisor in hers, as well. See how the energy shifts.
Choose to let the events of your life find their place within your greater spiritual awareness, rather than trying to figure out how to fit your spirituality into what life offers. This applies to your job, your relationships—every part of your life.
You’ll be amazed at how your life starts to fit into your spirituality and bring you a richness of being that you never imagined.
September
2005
Respond
to this Article/Story or leave YOUR comment
***************************************************
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alan Seale is a life coach and transformation specialist, inspirational speaker, spiritual teacher, and author of the acclaimed new book, Soul Mission * Life Vision. His first book, Intuitive Living: A Sacred Path, received the COVR Visionary Award for Best Book in Spirituality in 2001. Visit his website at www.alanseale.com or call toll-free (866) 353-4993 to learn more about his workshops, coach certification program, and mentoring programs.
|
|
.
