The second step also seems easy: Create Gaps
Take moments during the day to stop and touch in with your breath. Maybe at transition times between activities. Or going to a meeting. Schedule your day so that you have spaces between things. Practice pausing, or creating a gap. If you find things becoming a bit rushed, stop and take a few conscious breaths. Allow some space into your mind and into your body. Touch into life in the here and the now.
The first step seems the most evident: Each day set aside at least 5 – 10 minutes just for yourself, to do nothing.
As I have written before, finding quiet time isn’t a luxury; it’s essential for protecting your health.
So sometime each day just sit in silence. Go somewhere where you don’t feel pressured to do anything. There is no need to make it complicated, or to think of it as a sacred ritual. Maybe just sit with a cup of tea or coffee in the morning, before the work day starts. Become aware of your breathing. Become relaxed in the stillness. When your mind wanders, just come back to the awareness of your breathing. Let go of doing for a few minutes. Be good to yourself.
Dark and foggy. The mountains hidden. All we can be sure of is this moment. We do not really know what the future holds. We construct the future not by dreaming how we would like it to be, but by living the reality of what is in our life at this moment.
The future is completely open,
and we are writing it moment to moment.
Pema Chodron
All around the world the popular Christmas song, Stille Nacht/Silent Night is sung on this day. The German word stille has some deeper connotations than what is conveyed by the English word “silent”. It has its roots in the verb “stillen”, meaning to suckle, to quieten a child and put to rest. The mother feeds and comforts the hungry child so that it becomes calm and content, able to close its eyes and sleep. For us too, the calm which we all desire inside our hearts is related to our awareness of being safe, which allows us to become still inside.
As an adult, can we ever get back to this early awareness of calm? Maybe never fully, but there are some things we can do. It seems that this interior stillness is related to exterior quiet. It has been found that noise raises cortisol levels, the hormone related to stress and anxiety and that taking some quiet time lowers these levels. It has even been measured. Apparently 12 minutes of quiet will bring down cortisol levels in the brain and lay the foundation for calm. However, these days, this is not se easy to do. We are continually bombarded by noise: the TV, radio, iPods, mobile phones, and computers hardly stop for a second. We also live in an age of visual stimulation that leaves us craving louder and brighter, kinds of entertainment. These means that a lot of us are extremely uncomfortable with silence and have become so unfamiliar with it that even momentary periods of quiet are quickly filled with sound or anxiety.
And yet, we all long to silence the noisy chatter of our thoughts, the crying of our needs and emotions, and develop a place of quiet and calm within us. A place which is safe, away from the judgments, expectations and demands placed on us by our own critical mind or by others. At some times in our lives we find it relationships with others, or in the embrace of our family. However, what this day and all the wisdom traditions remind us, is that real, lasting peace is to be found within our hearts, a quiet space where nothing can harm us, untouched by all the stuff that others may wish to impose upon us. If we do not find that stillness within, it is hard to find it in the outside circumstances of our lives. Only when we have found this inner place of peace can we have contact with others without anxiety. We can rest, and be still, without fear of being hurt.
Each meditation session is a journey of discovery to understand the basic truth of who we are. In the beginning the most important lesson of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind.
But the meditation tradition says that mind doesn’t have to be this way: it just hasn’t been worked with.
Sakyong Mipham
The 2008 Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists at Imperial College, London was told that the evidence-base for the therapeutic value of meditation for a wide range of health problems was significantly stronger than most pharmaceutical products. A new meta-analysis of 823 randomly controlled trials of meditation, conducted by the US National Institute of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, showed the clinical benefits of meditation across a wide range of physical and emotional disorders.
Meditation is a way of life rather than quick fix achieved by using gimmicks such as incense, music and light, Dr Avdesh Sharma, past president of the Indian Psychiatric Association, said. It doesn’t work immediately. You need to practice it for several weeks before the effects begin to be felt. Dr Sharma added: If meditation was a drug, we’d all want shares in it. It has a beneficial effect on most physical health problems and is very effective for mental health problems significantly reducing levels of depression, anxiety and insomnia by improving relaxation, oxygenation of the brain, and energy levels.
Mindfulbalance 