Meditation Blog

Insights, Reflections, & Guided Meditations.
Joyfully offered to inspire your path.

How Meditation Changed My Life

Meditation is my power tool for self transformation. It’s the thing that I do that makes all of the other self transformation tools actually work!

Before it, I couldn’t see myself as clearly, which made changing things difficult. With meditation, I can see my patterns, when and why I’m doing them, and that’s invaluable for evolving them.

Meditation isn’t self-transformation in itself. It is self-observation. Self-realization. Self-knowing. That’s invaluable.

If I can see myself, I can change myself. If I cannot see myself, it’s much harder to even know that there’s anything that needs changing!

I’ve practice meditation since 2004 and the changes that it’s helped me make are so compelling that I continue to practice to this day.

Tip for Calming Your Mind During Mindfulness

Thinking about something else during your practice? Maybe you were lost in thought the whole time until your timer went off and reminded you you were supposed to be practicing? That totally happens to me sometimes! Like this whole week! Yikes!

One way to deal with this is to give your mind something else to focus on. That will help keep it interested in the practice you’re doing.

Mindfulness Can Be Boring!

A big problem that most of us have is that our breath is totally boring! After a few seconds our mind goes, “Man! Where are problems to solve? The videos and movies to watch? What fun is this? I want something to do! I know! I’ll think about this…” and you’re off, lost in thought, totally oblivious to your breath. 

Most of the time, I just tell myself (and you) to return to your breath. To come back to noticing your breath whenever you notice that you’re lost in thought. For many of us that’s when we complete the thought, solve the problem or finish the story. At that moment you can rejoice that suddenly you’re aware of yourself (the point of practicing mindfulness! Yay!).

And what happens if you’re so lost in thought that you spend the entire practice thinking about something else?! This whole week, I’ve been coming to at the end of my practice and realizing that I’ve been lost the entire time! Yikes!

Giving Your Mind Something Else to Do

What’s a meditator to do? After a whole week of this, I realized that I needed to change something! So I remembered a trick I used to use when I first started meditating. This worked really well for me then and it’s working well now, too.

Here’s what I do: I slightly shift my focus to give my mind something slightly new to do. It’s like having a new problem to solve. It works especially well if there’s something to count or quantify. Here are some examples.

Practices To Play With

If you’re focusing on your breath, change from say noticing the qualities of your breath (depth, speed, sensation, etc) to counting your breath. My mind goes, “Oh! You want me to count! Ok! This is something to do! Great!” You can go the other way too. If counting is boring you, change to noticing the qualities. Notice things like how deep or shallow you’re breathing. Or how fast or slow. Or what sensations you can feel. Or the sounds of breathing. Here’s a free guided breathing practice for noticing general qualities (vs counting). 

Another example would be if you’re working with your eyes open, you can go from a specific focus, say on the candle in front of you, to soft eyes or noticing your whole field of vision (soften your gaze so that you’re not looking at anything in particular and notice everything in your peripheral vision). Or the other way round, going from soft to specific. You can follow a free guided meditation for having your eyes open here.

In the video I talk about changing up a sound practice if you’d like to try that (also free).

Contra Indications – Things to keep in mind.

Of course, you can also plow through, don’t change your practice at all and know that at some point you will be able to focus again. Someday your mind will settle down and you will be able to focus on your breath during your practice.

In general that’s good advice, especially since the object is to learn to focus and tricking yourself into focusing will only work for so long or so well…

Ultimately you can’t use your mind to meditate. You want to use that larger part of yourself, that part that you naturally access when you’re noticing yourself. This part, when you’re observing, witnessing or noticing yourself, is “larger” than your mind, and that’s really what you want to access. Changing up your practice to help your mind focus is really just a way to get your mind to calm down a bit so that you can notice yourself. 

Keeping the Ultimate Goal In Mind

If it helps you be less frustrated when you practice, then play with slightly changing your focus. Keep in mind that when you change your focus, you want to be aware of yourself focusing, à la, “I’m here counting my breath.” or “I’m here looking at this candle.” and you’ll be accessing that larger part of you. You’ll be observing or noticing yourself. Awesome. You’re mindful.

I hope that helps you! Now I just have to follow my own advice! It worked earlier this week, and then I just got excited about the problems I was solving and left my practice in the dust… Ah, the life of a meditator! Sometimes it’s easy and other times it’s fun to see what crazy things we get up to, hey?

Enjoy!

Why be mindful?

Excellent question! One I don’t talk about much, in part because it’s difficult to explain!

Mindfulness is an experience and experiences, by nature are easier to experience than explain. It’s a lot like describing the experience of what an apple tastes like to someone who’s never tasted an apple. I can describe my experience, and how much better it is to just hand you an apple!

Likewise, it’s much easier for me to share the experience with you and have you decide from your experience why to practice mindfulness – or not – than it is for me to describe my experience and have you decide.

So, in this case, I’m going to stop writing and say, watch the video! Have the experience and draw your own conclusions.
I will say, as I do in the video, that mindfulness make my life richer. I’m much more aware of what’s going on inside and outside of me. This awareness adds texture, sound, complexity and vividness that otherwise I would miss.

It also helps me notice my uncomfortable unconscious and/or habitual patterns… and as uncomfortable as that can be (!!!), that knowledge allows me to start changing them. Of course, I use all kinds of other tools to help me change any deep psychological-emotional patterns. Mindfulness (awareness of them) isn’t enough. What mindfulness does allow me to do is recognize that those patterns exist (recognition is an important step!) and notice when they’re happening so that I can apply the tools of change. Mindfulness is the meta-tool that allows all of the other tools to work. It’s a kind of superpower that supercharges everything else.

Test it out. You might like it. If not, there are lots of other ways to evolve!

Enjoy!

The Gift of Thinking During Mindfulness Practice

When you’re practicing mindfulness, inevitably you start thinking about something… that thing that happened yesterday, what you want to happen tomorrow, what you think about sitting here, etc.

This is actually a good thing… It means you’re alive and you’re not brain dead. (Congratulations!) Just like your heart beating, as long as you’re alive, your brain is going to be active and your mind is going to think. This is natural and normal and an important part of being alive: it’s how you’re able to understand yourself and your environment (on a mental level).

Distracted By Thoughts

The only issue is that it’s easy to get distracted by our thoughts to the point that we’re no longer noticing that we’re practicing. For example, if we’re sitting in our room, practicing being aware of our breath (which is a fancy way of saying that we’re noticing ourself inhale and exhale), it’s easy to get so caught up in our thoughts about that super annoying guy and that ridiculous thing he said at work yesterday, that we completely forget that we’re actually sitting here breathing. We lose touch with our physical bodies, and transport ourselves in time and space to work, yesterday! Mentally, we’re totally unaware of the room we’re sitting in – we’re at work!

We do this all of the time. We’re physically in one place and yet totally unaware of it, because mentally we’re thinking about being in another place. This is a classic example of being “lost in thought.” This doesn’t bother most people too much. You may only really notice it when you’re practicing. You complete your thought (“Next time he says that, I’m gonna say this!”), your mind returns to you sitting here, and “Oops! I’m thinking about something else and I’m supposed to be watching my breath!”

Immediately, you (likely) think that you’re not practicing well. You’ve been told to notice your breath, and you just caught yourself doing something else! Oops. Bad.

Aware of Thoughts

Well, actually, not bad. Good! Here’s a secret: if you’re practicing mindfulness because you want to be more aware of yourself, more present throughout your day, that means that you need to build the muscle of being aware of yourself even when you’re thinking. Functionally, that means that you stay aware of yourself sitting in the room while you’re thinking about work. Your thought process works something like this, “I’m sitting here watching my breath AND I notice that I’m also thinking about work.” In other words, you’re thinking about work while still aware that you’re sitting there.

You can do this now, by reading the next sentence while being aware that you’re sitting there reading it. Notice that your body is in whatever space you’re in (or how your feet feel on the floor) while you read this.

Even simpler, look around you right now and be aware of your body sitting here while you do it. Think/be aware that, “I’m sitting here in this place looking around.” Easy. (Please do it if you haven’t. Otherwise, you might have no idea what I’m talking about, and that experience is really important to understanding the next sentence.)

How does it work?

This is exactly what you do with awareness of thoughts. You just stay aware of yourself (your body if you like) while you’re thinking. Basically, “I’m (sitting) here, thinking this thought.” That’s exactly what you did above when you were aware of yourself while reading.

It’s pretty easy to be aware of ourselves while looking around (seeing what’s in front of us). It’s much harder to stay aware of ourselves while we’re thinking (for very long). This is because we’re so used to distracting ourselves (from where we are physically) with our thoughts. You start thinking about work, and you totally ignore where your body is. It’s habit. We’re incredibly good at distracting ourselves with our thoughts. Even if someone is talking directly to you, you can go off in your head, thinking about something else, and completely miss a whole paragraph of what the person is saying to you. Distraction is a strong muscle. We exercise it a lot.

And if there is any problem with thinking during practice, this is it. It’s that we get distracted from noticing (ourselves). We stop being aware and we start being distracted.

So how is thinking during practice good?

Well, that moment that you notice, “Hey, I’m supposed to be noticing my breath, but instead I’m thinking about something else,” is a moment of perfect awareness. You’ve just accomplished the difficult task of being aware of yourself while you’re thinking! Super!

The secret is that every time you do that, you’ve just exercised a new muscle. The muscle of awareness while thinking. And as you exercise this new muscle, the muscle of distraction will naturally get weaker.

Being aware of ourselves (sitting here) while we’re thinking, is really tough, so every time you get distracted and come back and notice that you’re thinking, you’ve just won the jackpot! Every time this happens you can celebrate! This is a challenging muscle to build, so every time you do it is a gift of pure gold…

So, next time you practice, if you get distracted a million times, realize that you’ve just given yourself a million times to experience mental awareness! Wow! Such riches!

Next time your mind is going crazy, be grateful. Every time you come back and realize that you’re thinking about something else, you’ve won the lottery. You’re giving yourself the gift of strengthening this new muscle of awareness.

You’re a powerhouse. Awesome.

Enjoy it.

How to Get Better at Mindfulness

If your goal for mindfulness practice is to be more mindful (present, aware, conscious), then the first thing to remember is that good or bad practice isn’t defined by how calm your mind or emotions are.

What?!

I know. Most of us fall into that trap of thinking a calm mind means we’re having a good practice and a busy mind means bad practice.

It’s tricky because there’s a lot of (mis)information out there that says the goal of mindfulness practice is to calm your mind. And, of course, then you naturally think that should be calming your mind when you practice. Calm mind = good practice. Busy mind = bad practice.

Frankly, it’d just not true. The goal is awareness. Not a calm mind.  (Realize: Your mind can be totally crazy and you can be aware of it.)

Then it get’s even trickier!:
One of the side effects of mindfulness practice is a calm mind. And the more we practice, the more it happens.

AND it’s so enjoyable when it happens that we can start to make it the goal.

The problem is that it’s an unreachable goal, so if you start to make it your goal you will fail. Why? Because it’s your mind creating this as a goal. Your mind thinks it wants to calm itself, and this is a thought. The mind cannot calm thoughts with more thoughts. It’s sort of like fire trying to put itself out with more fire. Yikes.

What does work is to notice your thoughts, notice “I’m thinking.” By noticing your thoughts, you stop adding to them, you stop fueling the fire and it naturally calms down. This is because the part of you that notices your thoughts is actually larger than, or outside of, your mind. By practicing observing your mind you learn to naturally step outside of it into this bigger part of you. When you step out, you stop adding fuel: you take your foot off of the gas. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, rest assured that you do this all of the time without realizing it. Stepping into observation or witness mode is natural, you just don’t realize that’s what you’re doing. That’s why we practice this on purpose when we meditate – so that become aware when we’re doing it. Easy.)

This is how you get better at mindfulness: Simply, practice noticing whatever is happening.

Noticing a crazy mind is just as good as noticing a calm mind. The point isn’t to attain calm. The point is to get better and better at noticing, to be more and more aware, more and more conscious of whatever is happening. If you notice that your mind gets calm while you do this, great. If you notice that it gets even more crazy, great. You’re noticing. That’s good practice.

So, notice your crazy thoughts and emotions. Practice being aware of them. Come back to that over and over.  You will get better just by doing it. That’s how you make your practice better. Notice.

You will improve. 100% guaranteed.

Is Your Happiness a Priority?

Are you noticing increased levels of anxiety and depression around you?

I’m sad to say I am. And since those are two common outcomes of modern stress, my first thought was, Oh my God, we’re getting more stressed. Really?!

But, actually I don’t think it’s that. I’m not even sure it’s possible for us to be more stressed, because that would require that we be even more busy, take on more, do more, etc. … and there’re only 24 hours in a day.

What makes more sense to me is that we’re seeing the cumulative effects of all of these years of stress we’ve been enduring. After 5, 10, 20 years of overtaxing our bodies, we’re seeing these results of constant biochemical overload: more anxiety and more depression.

So if that’s what’s happening, the question becomes, is it worth it? Is whatever you’re doing that’s creating this constant stress worth your health and happiness?

That’s a serious question to ask yourself. And it’s not so easy to answer with honesty. Most of us have too many conflicting desires that are as deep as power, control and survival. A few little things to deal with…

What if you do want to move in the direction of more health and happiness? Would it help to start small? What are the little, simple, easy things you can do right now? Today? What things are you willing to do every day? Can you take more breaks, or eat lunch everyday, or relax every day, or, or, or? Can you prioritize you?

It’s an important question to ask yourself. It’s even more important to realize that you make these decisions each day, everyday, all day. You’re constantly prioritizing your health and happiness. Or not. Anxiety and depression aside, stress isn’t a great companion if you want a long and healthy life. And happy? I’m sure happier when I can think straight versus running in circles with my stress reactions. Little steps, everyday help me a lot. Maybe they’ll help you, too.

Shoulder Love: Relaxing at Your Desk

So many of us sit at our computers with our shoulders hunched forward or up around our ears, and it hurts! It also weakens our muscles through overuse.

Keeping our muscles in any contracted position for a long time will cause pain as the muscles become fatigued. It also weakens the muscles because we’re asking them to work with out giving them any rest and little nourishment. Just like your body, which needs rest and food in order to rejuvenate and be strong, your muscles are the same.

Why? Take this simple example: Imagine if you worked for many days and nights without eating or sleeping. You’d eventually run out of energy and be very weak, because your body needs rest and nourishment in order to replenish the energy you’re using to do the work.

Your muscles are the same. They need periods of rest and plenty of nourishment in order to replenish the energy they’re using when they contract. Your muscles aren’t designed to contract and stay that way for long periods of time. They’re designed to contract for short periods and release, contract and release. If you’re holding your shoulders forward or up around your ears for hours at a time, the energy needed to hold this position will eventually run out and you’ll need to relax in order for them to rejuvenate. They will be weak for awhile (while they recover), and of course if you’re holding this posture a lot, you’re creating chronic weakness, stiffness and likely a pain in the neck. :)

The solution to this is to relax! Change your habit of holding your shoulders up or forward for letting them stay in a nice neutral position.

How? One way is to bring awareness to your habit. How are you holding your shoulders right now? How about when you’re typing? When you’re walking? Etc. As you begin to notice what you’re doing, you can choose to change. You can gently relax your shoulders each time you notice and overtime you’ll patiently change your habit from hunched to relaxed and resilient.

Enjoy!

Shoulder Love, 10min Yoga Practice

(video: 10:06; I’ve added subtitles to compensate for the microphone.)

Shoulders up around your ears more often than you’d like? Do you frequently find yourself hunched forward over your computer? Painful? Sore? Stiff?

These poor posture habits can be changed with a little awareness.
This 10-minute yoga practice will bring your attention to your shoulders, soften and gently stretch them. Feels great and the focus on your shoulders is an awareness you can bring into your day to help you change your habits!

You can do this practice at different times for different goals: in the morning to start you say with this awareness, or midday as a wonderful rejuvenating pause, or at the end to gently wind down and release tension.

However you use it, let it help you bring awareness to how you’re sitting at your desk, standing and moving through life. With this growing awareness, you can choose to relax and relieve your shoulder muscles. Overtime, your shoulders will be where they’re serving you best: in a neutral, relaxed position, ready to move in any direction with ease and power!

Enjoy!

Biggest Challenges for Mindfulness Practice?

Photo by AnitaKovacs.photographie@gmail.com

My friend, a PhD in psychology, is making a proposal for a clinical study with the elderly. She asked me what difficulties I observe with people learning and practicing mindfulness?

That’s an easy one. There are two big categories and one counter indication to watch out for. The two big categories are beliefs and behavioral change. The counter indication is unaddressed mental-emotional issues.

Beliefs

What’s the difficulty with beliefs? The main issue here is that there are a lot of miss-understandings that surround mindfulness. This is largely because of the difficulty of describing a state of being to someone who had never experienced it. The listener is required to interpret the meaning from their current experiences, which are inadequate for the situation. Add to this that some of the explanations derive from venerable traditions that are thousands of years old and you get both a bifurcation of meaning due to the time lapse, and a strong desire of listener to believe the wisdom even if they know they don’t completely understand it. Voila, lots of myths crop up and spread.

The most pernicious myth is that mindfulness is about clearing your mind of thoughts. That you’re doing “good practice” if you’ve stopped thinking. So many people suffer from this one, agonizing that they couldn’t practice at all today, that they couldn’t get their mind to stop thinking… Or worse that they can’t meditate. The good news here is that your mind won’t ever stop thinking. Like your heart, it will keep beating to it’s own drum until you don’t need it anymore. And this is a good thing. You don’t need to stop thinking in order to meditate or be mindful.

Another popular one is that to be present, you should not think about the past or the future. That being present, in the here and now, excludes and thoughts of past and future. This is simply not true. Being present means being aware of whatever is happening in the present, including that you’re here and now having thoughts about the past and future. This is also a good thing because this means we can be mindfully learning from past mistakes and creating the future.

And, perhaps my all time favorite, due to my own personal knowing about this myth, is that people that are present are very calm and peaceful (and don’t get angry, sad, etc.). Haha. As I like to say, being present doesn’t make me less of an a**hole, it just makes me more aware of when I’m being an a**hole. It’s not particularly fun. It does offer me a lot more flexibility in how I react in that state, which is an enormous boon.

All of these mythic misunderstandings can be dispelled with a basic experiential example that demonstrates your experience of presence right now (everyone can and does) as well as some basic understanding of how presence isn’t about denying thoughts or feelings, it’s about being aware that we’re thinking and feeling them in this moment.

Though, perhaps “dispelled” is too strong of a word. Addressed might be better. In my years of guiding people through this re-education, it takes a while for the new information to sink in and replace the older beliefs. I think that this is in part because often people come to meditation because they want relief from their thoughts and feelings. They so desperately want to stop being harassed by the difficulties in their heads and hearts, that the idea that meditation will take all of it away is incredibly appealing. The reality that it works in a much different way, that all of that nasty stuff will persist, is simply uninspiring. It’s bad enough that they have to practice for the rest of their lives, but that the magic off-button doesn’t exist is terrible news!

And why should they believe that? Everyone, including me, is telling them that their minds will be calm and clear. And they will. Just not by clearing their minds of thoughts, not by stopping thinking and feeling. It’s being present to those things that creates the calmness and the clarity. Understanding that difference is a bit challenging at first. Then as they start experiencing that, things get easier. The old beliefs can change as the new experience brings new information. Some people stop before they have experienced presence enough to understand the difference. This is one of the main reasons why beginners stop practicing… They don’t get the experiential understanding before they give up. They think that because they can’t stop their minds that they can’t meditate. This is unfortunate and more a matter of education and the willingness of the person to let go of what they thought were the reasons that brought them to the practice in the first place… This takes courage and a bit of resilience.

Behavioral Change

The next big category of difficulty for beginning mindfulness practitioners is creating the habit of daily practice. Like creating any new habit, it takes dedication and effort. It also requires experimentation and creativity as habit creation is a science and an art… everyone has a unique relationship to inspirations and challenges, carrots and sticks.

  • First, why practice daily? Because meditation is a kind of personal hygiene, like brushing your teeth, and it’s best done daily. Short periods of time are sufficient as regularity is more important than duration. In other words, 5 minutes a day is more useful than 1 hour once a week. Again, think brushing your teeth. It’s mental floss.
  • Next, it helps to understand that habit change means altering existing patterns to introduce new ones. It helps to recognize the usefulness of the existing patterns, and to find the open spaces within them, the breathing room, where we can alter them slightly to fit in this new one. That few minutes after brushing our teeth is a great place. Or just before bed. Or right when we wake up.
  • Another useful concept to come to terms with is consistency. Understanding what it is and what it isn’t… understanding that regularity doesn’t mean every day like clockwork, that you’re not a machine, that you’re not failing if you miss a day here and there, and how to flow with the irregularities of life.

Understanding that regularity does mean being as consistent as possible which includes incorporating things that encourage and support it like journaling, having visual or auditory reminders (post-it notes, alarms, apps, calendar reminders, etc), or adopting concepts like James Clear’s “never miss more than 1 day” and other things that work for you, etc.

It helps to know that everyone is different! No matter what a scientific study says about the group of people they studied, you are a unique individual and you will need to think and feel through this for yourself. Use the tools available and see what works best for you. This is part of the challenge and the fun.

Counter Indications

Ah the counter indication. I’ve read some really hairy articles about this. People having flash backs, intense anxiety attacks or going into severe depression – all attributed to practicing mindfulness or some other form of meditation. Mindfulness is like a mirror. If you hold it up, you will start to see things.

Photo by AnitaKovacs.photographie@gmail.com

The issue here is that most of us humans have some things in our lives that we’re in denial about. Things that we think or feel that we dislike so much that we actively or unconsciously ignore. Maybe we have an anger problem that we cover up by trying to be nice all of the time. Or we’re really sad about the direction of our lives, but we keep soldiering on because that’s what we’re supposed to do.

Then we start practicing mindfulness. And what mindfulness is designed to do is to help us see ourselves. A common response of my clients is something like, “I didn’t realize that I thought so much! And that so many of my thoughts are negative!” I remember one client who said, “I had no idea how mean I am to my daughter! No wonder our relationship is so bad. I thought it was just her!” Knowledge is power. Self-knowledge is super power.

But what if what you start to see and feel are things that you don’t want to be aware of? What if you simply aren’t ready or willing to face your shadows? What if you don’t want to know how sad, mean, angry, etc you are? This, of course is another BIG reason why people stop practicing. They are happier not knowing. They’re more comfortable in their denial. And I encourage these people to stop. This is not easy work. If you don’t want to see, better to close your eyes again. Really.

And of course, what if you start remembering trauma? Trauma by (my) definition is something that was too overwhelming for you to deal with all at once. In this case, you stored parts of the experience for processing later. Maybe you needed to deal with all of the paperwork before you could grieve the death of your parent. And what if you never gave yourself the time later? It’s possible that while practicing mindfulness you will start to feel that grief.

For some people that can be confusing or frightening. For these people, and also people who have debilitating mental-emotional issues, if they want to continue with mindfulness, I recommend the help of a therapist. Otherwise, I suggest that they stop practicing mindfulness, that they stop looking if they don’t want to see.

I’ve only had this issue arise with one client, and she was unstable before she came I realized later. Thanks to her, I am more diligent about watching for signs. For myself, my own repressed childhood traumas didn’t begin re-surfacing until 9 years into my mindfulness practice. I was ready, and I also got lots of help navigating.

Strong reactions are not something I worry about in the sense that I know that mindfulness will only show you what is already here. If you have pain and trauma, then when you start being more aware of yourself, you might become aware of it. Mindfulness does not create it. Like a mirror, it helps you see it.

Can You Do It?

Can you meet the challenges to practicing mindfulness?

Can you let go of your idea that you’ll never think or feel anything bad again, that you’ll never dwell on the past or be afraid of the future? Can you accept that the key is to be more aware of these things and that somehow – in some possibly unexplainable way to you at the moment – that being more conscious of the icky stuff will make it much, much easier to deal with? (And as a big bonus, you’ll get to be more conscious of the wonderful stuff, too!!)

Are you willing to put in the work to create a 5-minute per day practice?

Can you handle the fact that you will be more aware of how nasty and wonderful you are?! Can you commit to getting help (or stopping) if what you’re noticing is more than you can or want to handle on your own?

These are important questions to consider. You are important to consider. Mindfulness doesn’t automatically make you a better person. It does make you a much more informed person, which makes you incredibly powerful. You are more clear about what is going on in your life, inside and out and with this comes the ability to make better decisions.

The client with the daughter? They’re getting along better now.

Eléna started her mindfulness practice in 2004, during her 11 years in Thailand. She has coached mindfulness internationally off and on since 2010, and intensively her last 3 years in Hong Kong to lawyers, bankers, CEO’s and full time mothers. (She’s still not sure who was more stressed.) Contact her for private, online sessions  at Elena at ElenaFoucher.com.

I finally understand chanting! Yay!

(video 5:40)

I had an awesome “Ah-ha!” moment this week! I finally understand what people are talking about when they say that, “Chanting cleans the mind.”

I realized that I could replace the broken record of pain I was spinning and replace it with a song or chant of joy. Ah ha! That’s what they mean! Chanting gives us a chance to replace our unproductive thought loops with something productive! Got it!

You can choose any song or chant or phrase that you like. It doesn’t have to be spiritual or religious – though there are lots of those to choose from if you like! – it can be a pop song! I’ve been singing the line, “You are so beautiful to me.” in my head for years without realizing that I was doing something great for myself. Now I’ll do it on purpose when I want to change a loop.

Pick something that you like that has the feeling or the emotion that you want, and sing or chant it in your head. Don’t worry about how well you sing or how it sounds, because no one will hear it but you! And you’ll be much happier with your uplifting words than the painful ones that were looping around in there before.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

If you’re in Hong Kong, you can chant with Cristina Rodenbeck at her group sessions. Lucky you! You can find her at Manipura Wellness.

She suggested some great chants in English, which you can find on Spotify or Youtube. There are more spiritual and as we like to say are vibration lifting. :)
Here are two: Ancient Mother and Waves of the Sea both by Sacred Earth.