Meditation In Daily Life

Practicing Wholeness

Hello Beautiful Souls,

During my recent retreat, I revived a practice from my time in Thailand, Gazing. Gazing is quite simple to describe. You simply look into the eyes of another for the duration of the practice. Breathe and notice what arrises. That’s it.

Sounds simple, right?

It is. And it’s one of the most profound practices that I know of, mainly because at first it’s INCREDIBLY confronting. And once you get past that, things get deep fast.

Since I was on retreat alone, I did this in a mirror, gazing into my own eyes. This is a bit easier, and after years of doing it, not nearly as confronting as gazing with another, yet the depth is still here.

For me this is where the body, the mind, the emotions, and all of the rest of me show up and begin melting together.

I literally begin to SEE (if we can call what happens seeing) that I am more than body, more than mind, more than emotions, more than unconscious… I’m a multi-dimensional, multi-density whole. All is here in one ‘place,’ overlapping, interlacing… overlacing, interlapping… intertwined. Here.

To Practice Gazing

If you’d like to do this, start by deciding how long you’re going to do the practice. (Start with 2-5 minutes if you’ve never done it before. A mere 20 minutes blows my head off in the best way possible.)

I prefer doing this in plenty of natural light, because when things get weird visually, sunlight is comforting.

With Two: sit or stand so that you can see each other’s eyes clearly, and far enough away that you both have ample personal space.
Alone: Stand or sit in front of a mirror that you don’t have to hold, close enough that you can see your eyes clearly.

Gaze into the eyes of the other or your own. You might be able to see both of the others’ eyes at once, or just see one eye at a time. Do your best to not get too concerned about this, as both situations are fine, including changing around what you’re looking at. This will settle itself out during each practice.

Allow yourself to blink naturally, and relax your eyes as much as possible while still looking at the other eye(s).

Stay here. Stay present. Notice what arrises.

The biggest challenge of this practice is, Can you stay here (present) and keep gazing through the discomfort?

Can you stay through what your body reads as confrontation (looking directly into someone’s eyes for a long period)? The reflex to fight, freeze or flee? The conflicted social feelings? The strained, nervous laughter? The ‘get me out of here!,’ even though all you’re doing is consensually looking at someone’s eyes? Maybe even your own?! It’s a bit nuts how confronting this is at first blush.

As you get past that stage, relax your physical eyes even as things get visually wacky. Things will go black and white, transparent, wavy, etc.. All kinds of visual ‘anomalies’ will happen. (One notable time, my friend’s face was replaced by a long series of other faces… men, women, children, young and old, modern and ancient… past lives? ancestors? my imagination? her imagination? I have no idea.) If you freak out at any of this and force your eyes back to ‘normal’ focus, that’s fine. Simply breathe, relax again and see if you can stay a little longer through the discomfort.

As you are able to, the payoffs are huge.

First, your capacity to be present for longer and longer periods will build.
More and more heartbeats will fully register in your entire being.

Welcome home.

Second, your conscious awareness of the wholeness that you are will deepen, become more and more subtle, more and more profound, more and more simple and whole.

Staying Through the Discomfort

Even if you don’t do Gazing, the practice of staying through the discomfort has served me immensely these past weeks. On some level, this has become my constant daily practice, my mantra of sorts, “Can I stay (fully present) through this discomfort?”

This offers it’s own soft wholeness. Not nearly as confronting. Gently allowing.

My suggestion, should you like to do it, is to practice staying lovingly present through discomfort, accepting whatever arrises within you as a welcome expression of who you are in the moment. If nothing else, you’re more present to who you are right now, and that is a beautiful place to be. It is where most healing starts, with the wholeness that we already are.

May that be Helpful,
Elena

Retreat to the Heart

Dear BeLoveds,

I don’t know what your life is like at the moment, and if it’s anything like mine, you might need a bit of a retreat at the moment… a moment of calm to help reset, restore, and respond to whatever your heart wants to say to you.

I’m deep in the second week of an impromptu personal retreat. Impromptu? I guess I could have seen it coming… If nothing else, this year has been an amazing opportunity for letting go. This time, no loved ones passing (fingers crossed), but my lack of clarity over who I am best to serve right now has caused a stagnation so big, that it was either keep pouring love and passion into murky waters… or pause.
Retreat. Ground into the heart. Sit and listen.

One fun thing to report, I decided to go digital-free, and the first day I watched my mind reorient back to a non-digital-partnered mind. That was wacky. I hadn’t realized how different my thought patterns are when I’m connected to the internet vs when I’m not. It’s like fasting and noticing how much I think about food, except that this is deeper in that not only do I think about it, but the pattern and rhythm of my thoughts actually change. Crazy.

The rest of the time has been a lot of depth work.
Along with my normal daily trail runs, I’ve quite a bit of meditating and healing.
And oddly, a lot of napping.
Lots and lots of napping. That’s gotten fun… for about 24 hours, my system even went into a pattern of 4-hour sleep cycles… 4 hours asleep, 4 hours awake, 4 hours asleep, 4 hours awake. Amazing. It created so much time disorientation, that afterwards I couldn’t remember when I’d done things. Did I do that yesterday morning? Or at night? All of the usual internal time markers were gone.

I’m sharing my retreat adventures with you in part to say that change is afoot. I’m really not sure what direction my work is going to go as a result of all of this healing.
I absolutely love working with the clients that I have.
What’s not clear yet is who the next ones are going to be. I have to get more clear (inside) before I can invite them in.
And while these periods of big transition are not all rainbows and unicorns (heh), I always come out the other side so much better that I’ve learned to love them.

I can imagine that you do, too.

If you’re feeling the call to do some deep listening of your own, I hope that you give yourself some time to do just that.
And as you know, the best retreat, practice, fitness routine, health plan, insert-healthy-thing-here, is the one you’ll actually do.

And sometimes 5 minutes is all it takes.

Please Hug Your Heart Hello For Me,
Elena

Stopping Unconscious Behaviors in Their Tracks

Last month, a week after my partner left for the States, I was standing at the kitchen counter making lunch when my fingers landed on something sticky. “Gross!” Disgusted, my thoughts ran down their habitual rails, “Damn it, Benoit! Why don’t you ever clean the counter?! You don’t care about keeping the kitchen clean!” As I unstuck my fingers, a mortifying realization dawned, “Oh no! He’s been gone a week! This mess is mine!”

Cue guilt, shame… “God, why do I always blame him? He’s not even here! I can’t believe I’m so mean to him! I’m so unconscious! There must be a million things I’m not taking responsibility for! How am I ever going to fix this?!”

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Why Manifesting Also Attracts It’s Opposite

Hello Beautiful Souls,

We’re moving this weekend, and, as usual, I’ve taken the opportunity to manifest an even more beautiful home. Yay!

Somehow, magically, this always works.

I’ve moved a lot, and I know that if I’m patient, stay in the orbit of grateful and allow myself to expand, I will find an even more amazing home than the one before.

By now, I mostly trust the process, but it can be hard to orbit grateful and allow expansion – because life always throws spanners in the works.

Sometimes big ones.
The question seems to be, how big do I want to get?

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Should I Have A Morning Practice (or Any Practice)?

Hello Beautiful Souls,

Having a morning practice has become a bit of a thing, and you might be wondering if you should have one, or you might be wanting some motivation to keep one going…

For those of us that have a hard time being consistent, this gets especially sticky… should I start yet another thing that I’m just going to quit later?
Argh.

But ‘everyone’ says they’re so good for me!
Ok, ok.

I started up a morning practice recently, and it has been AMAZING!
I even stumbled upon a podcast discussing ‘the science’ behind what makes them so great… (Having a BS, that usually makes my eyes roll. We can back up anything with science. We just need to find a study with the results we want and voila, it’s backed.)
All of this made me wonder, if my morning practice is actually this magic why don’t I want sing from the roof tops the all it’s many accolades?

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Balancing Shadow Work with Light Work

Hello Beautiful Souls,

I hope you’ve enjoyed the sweet song of summer and are welcoming the fragrant winds of fall.

As we cross the threshold from one season to the next, I’ve relearned the utility of balance, that while digging down into the depths it is also important to nourish the seeds of what I want to harvest. Balancing the dark with the light, the pain with the pleasure, the challenge with the gift. One without the other is either too dark and depressing or too shallow and ungrounded.

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Assertiveness Tips for Building Beautiful Boundaries

Hello Beautiful Souls,

Ok, it’s happening.
Someone is doing or saying something you don’t like or asking for something you don’t want to give and alarm bells are going off in your head and heart.
You feel really uncomfortable, maybe even angry, and you want to address it.
A boundary needs to be set…

Here we go with Assertiveness 101.
I’ve just created this new crib sheet for us to play with.
You’re welcome to test it out with me. Below is a video for those who prefer to watch, and a more comprehensive text for those who prefer to read. They’re a bit different, so if you really resonate with this topic, consider both.

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Building Beautiful Boundaries by Developing Assertiveness

Hello Beautiful Souls,

It’s safe to say that assertiveness is challenging for most of us, largely because we’re asking ourselves to be respectful (or at least civil) when a boundary has been crossed. I’m feeling bad, and now I need to tell you about it. Challenging.

Before we start with how to be assertive, let’s look at some things to do to before we get there… some foundational preparation that makes healthy boundary setting possible.

I’ve listed things that I find critical to my process, including two key points that I haven’t seen any where else. Look for KEY POINT belowor jump down to the video that covers just those two.

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