Speed Bumps
Imagine you can breathe out and let go of anything from the day you are holding on to, worries, concerns, challenges, deadlines, KPI’s and targets. These are what I call Speed Bumps!
They’ll come again tomorrow, the next day and next month. In case you didn’t know speed bumps never go away. There is no nirvana or perfect dream life or perfect day.
These speed bumps cause stress in our lives. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal states Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. If you can change your mind about stress you can change your bodies response to stress.
So, if stress is always going to be there then how do we cope with it.
We need to change our relationship with stress.
This is a learned behaviour. We can teach ourselves to practice things during the day to bring us to a calm and happy place so we can deal with the stress and respond to it not react to it. Reacting to stress only makes it worse and makes you feel more stressed.
Try this little exercise…
Close your eyes, visualize me sitting in front of you in your living room talking you through this.
Take 3 BIG deep breaths – count in to the count of 6 and out to the count of 6. Most of us can only get to 3-4 but with practice it is ideal to get to 6. Experienced yoga and mediators make it to 10, with time and practice you will to.
Just for this moment I want you to try not think about the speed bumps in your life like they are not there at all. Breathe out and let them go with a BIG sigh, as your thoughts come back in let them go again. As you breathe in now visualise a perfect place, stream, beach, waterfall, mountains whatever you love that makes you feel peaceful and contentment. I call this your ‘happy place’.
Set that picture in your mind and if the speed bump thoughts come back, just kindly let them go as they do and come back to your peaceful vision. This will happen a lot in the beginning of trying to do this exercise and with practice you will become more skillful at letting them go and the spaces in which they come gets longer
Now open your eyes.. I’ve just shown you how to visualize and meditate for 5 minutes.
If we can do just 5 minutes every morning before our feet hit the ground and every night when we lie down to sleep, you wouldn’t believe the impact this would have on your stress and the benefits to your health, both mental and physical.
Start your day like this and you can handle anything during the day in a calm state instead of reactive.
You can’t always control what happens in your day but you can control how you deal with it.
When you drive over a speed bump you have two choices, slow down and take it easy so it doesn’t ruin the car or speed over them fast and ruin the car…it’s the same thing in life. Slow down and handle the speed bumps by caring for yourself and take the time to breathe when you need to.
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