Meditation Practices

Gazing: 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.

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Power of the Pause, Useful Pattern Interrupts

Iceberg from above and below the water

As adults, one of our biggest challenges, are the painful unconscious patterns that we run. On a daily basis, we can find ourselves in the middle of doing things that we really wish we weren’t. One handy thing to do is to pause and interrupt them right there in the middle.

Here are 2 simple ones I played with yesterday.

Pause When Waking Up

In the morning, when you’re waking up and your consciousness is dropping back into your body, what’s the first thing your mind does? If you’re like me, your mind leaps straight into planning what you’re going to do today.

Great.
Seems useful.

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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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Your Quiet Depth Under Your Distractions

If you’re in the mood to connect with yourself,
take a few quiet breaths, and let’s dive in…


I think about containers a lot, and while one of my ultimate explorations is, ‘what (kind of a container) am I?,’ I’ve just been sitting in the quiet noticing the impact of what I’m choosing to contain… what I’m inviting in, what I’m entertaining…
and how that distracts me from my ability to notice my deeper self, to notice what I am underneath all of that.

Simply, I’m sitting here noticing my daily thoughts…
and how they are a lot of static,
a lot of interference,
ultimately, just a lot of noise.

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When Pushing Through Isn’t The Answer

I was home recently, and a family friend and I started discussing how she gets tired quickly in situations that are stressful. She starts to get overwhelmed and then very, very sleepy.

While we’re both introverts in the sense that we need time alone to feel whole and resourced, her tiredness is beyond that. It’s very linked to stress, and it comes fast. It’s a trauma response, in that her existing emotional overwhelm is being triggered by the stressful situation. This pattern is very uncomfortable for her, and sometimes she gets so uncomfortable that it affects the entire group of people around her.

We were sitting in the living room, reflecting on it. “When you notice it’s happening and you feel the fear,” I said. She sighed, chiming in, completing my sentence with the obvious cultural trope, “…do it anyway.”

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Getting Comfortable with Our Emotions by Moving Our Bodies

Hello Beautiful Souls,

There are several steps to becoming comfortable with our uncomfortable emotions – and many ways to go about it!

First, we need to feel safe enough to even start. If we’re feeling really threatened, it’s hard to want to do anything other than defend or protect. So it you’re interested in this topic, congratulations, you’re already in a good place – you feel safe enough to even consider this! Bravo!

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Rock Your Body: 5min Guided Meditation

(5min47sec) This simple movement practice can be done standing or sitting. Once you learn the basic meditation, you can practice it for as long or short a time as you like. This is the same concept as Where’s My Center, only simpler, and they can be used interchangeably as basic movement practices.

Note that you are welcome to download and share this audio file as many times as you like, provided you do so in it’s entirety, and it is used for personal or educational uses only (no commercial uses).

Practice Giving and Receiving

Guided Meditation Recording (8m10s)

As social animals, giving and receiving are a daily part of life. We need each other for mental, emotional and physical support – on a daily basis, and those needs can sometimes be challenging to have and support. Often times we develop habits where one is easier than the other. Many of us are better at giving and others are better at receiving. It’s not so often that we feel equally comfortable with both. And that can change depending on the people we’re with and situations we’re in. Sometimes it just feels easier to do one and not the other.

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