Taking a Little Downtime

“There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen
and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.” James Carroll

I recently came across an article written for CFO’s that cited a study which “found that 65% of American adults” sleep with their cell phones. The article alluded to the increased pressure to work longer hours in the face of current economic pressures, something most of us probably feel to varying degrees every day. Not to mention the pressures of trying to balance all that with our desire to honor the creative self which brings with it it’s own unique pressures.

The article suggested that, given all the investments CFO’s make into their businesses, one of the most important might just be an investment in downtime. “Planned and mindful slacking off,” it suggested, “may help optimize talent performance.” And the same is true for the rest of us: investing in our own downtime may help optimize the rest of our lives (not just work-related activities, but regarding the time we spend with our families, our creative endeavors, other personal interactions, and our own mental and physical health).

“Plants grow most in the darkest hours preceding dawn; so do human souls.
Nature always pays for a brave fight. Sometimes she pays in strengthened moral muscle,
sometimes in deepened spiritual insight, sometimes in a broadening, mellowing,
sweetening of the fibres of character,—but she always pays.” – William George Jordan

Another article in the Harvard Business Review claims that “drawing brighter lines between work and time off — family, friends, outside activities, and old-fashioned daydreaming — has clear benefits for productivity, creativity, and wellness. There’s an upside to downtime.”

Take a Seat and Relax

There’s a reason the business world is noticing this essential fact. They’re designed to explore the best ways to maximize performance and to reduce costs and they’re seeing the humans who work for them in that light. But how often do we examine our own lives that way?

It’s not all about dollars and cents though, but about common sense. After all, relaxation affects the body, the mind, and the emotions. Relaxation can improve things like blood pressure and other heart-related problems associated with stress, maintaining the immune system, memory and the clarity of thought, and so on. Physiological and psychological benefits to every aspect of our lives, perhaps most especially to the parts associated more with our interaction with families and our interaction with ourselves than with our jobs.

Though daydreaming can certainly get you off task at times, some studies suggest that a certain element of daydreaming labeled “mind wandering,” may also be helpful for problem solving, creativity, and keeping “you on course for long-term goals.”

“There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world
and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten.
Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm
for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best,
in our pursuit of some phantom.” – William George Jordan

Taking time to relax, to slow down and be mindful of the moment, to do activities like yoga or meditation, enjoy a massage, or go for a walk can recharge your energy and your spirit, but it can also provide an assortment of other benefits. We hope you take some time this week (even if that is merely for fifteen minutes a few days) to just be, to relax, to breathe, to find your “tonic strength.” This can add to your well being as well as to your creativity. Namaste!

Photo Credit Yoga by MeditationMusic

March 4, 2013 By Dave 2 Comments Filed Under: Deep Listening & Re-connecting, Inspiration, Imagination, Innovation Tagged With: blood pressure, creativity, daydreaming, downtime, massage, meditation, relaxation, stress, well being, wind wandering, yoga

It’s About Time

How much of your day is influenced by time?

It’s somewhat ironic that the one thing our lives are inseparably tangled in (and with) is the very thing we tend to feel a dearth of – TIME. There just isn’t enough of it! Though chances are, as with most things, if we had more of it, we’d probably just find more ways to give it away and, in the end, we’d still feel like we were always running short.

Do you have the luxury of waking up simply when your body is ready to wake up on its own? Or do you “have to get up” at a certain time to officially begin your day? Do you have specific duties that have to be done at (or by) certain times? Getting the kids to school, for example, which might mean getting them up, preparing breakfast, lunches, making sure they’re wearing clothing (and that it’s not yours), driving them or making sure they make it to the bus “on time.” What then? How about afternoons? Evenings? Are weekends different? Does time unravel just a bit at the end of the week, does it loosen up a little, or do you have even more to get done then?

Over the next week (that’s seven days starting from the moment you read this), I’m going to ask you to give one person a gift. If I asked you to choose someone you know who needs to catch his/her breath, you might think of your spouse, your parents, your boss, your employee, your friend, your neighbor, and so on. Just deciding who to pick might take time you don’t really have. So I’ve picked for you. Just this once.

The person I’m asking you to give the gift to is YOU!

Making Resolutions – A Resolve to Let Go

What is Resolution?

In fiction, a Resolution is the event in the story that solves (or resolves) the conflict. While in photography, the term has to do with the sharpness of the image, with clarity in the sense that the lower the resolution the more pixelated or blurry the image. When I thought about these two things, I saw the act of making a Resolution in a different way. As an attempt to solve a main conflict. As an act needed to create an image that most clearly represents the original, the authentic thing. With these ideas in mind, I see a resolution as a positive thing, as a way of ending some sort of misalignment of your values and your actions, and also as a way of being clear about who you truly are. But that has not always been the case.

Finding Balance

Happiness & Balance

Happiness is not one of those things that just happens to you. Yet it is one of those values we do, at times, seem to treat as a tangible thing floating around out there in the air somewhere just waiting for us to come along and scoop it up into our hands.

“I’m killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”
- Calvin & Hobbes

Rather than share any so-called secrets to happiness (which would require me to pretend to know them in the first place), I’d really just like to draw your attention to one. One single word to be precise.

BALANCE.

In yoga we seek “equanimity” or a balance between mind, body and spirit. We talk about the importance of having our values and our actions in alignment. Peace of mind. Feeling fulfilled. Happiness. It’s all about balance, really, isn’t it?

When we (The Best Me) help people re-connect with their true selves, re-imagine the possibilities in their lives, and re-write their stories, we also help them examine the essential elements that make up their lives.

We help them align their values with their thoughts and their actions. To find a sense of balance.

Making Life a Little Simpler

The trees aren’t the only things changing, the leaves aren’t the only things that fall this time of year . . .

What if you didn’t have to make that New Year’s resolution to lose weight or to get in shape or to eat healthier? What if you were able to get to 2013 without the guilt or the disappointment or the frustration that tends to greet so many of us with the coming of each new year?

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius

When I was just a boy my dad told me something that stuck with me and that has certainly shaped me (in more ways than one). He said, “it’s a lot easier to stay in shape than it is to get in shape. So the more you maintain your fitness now, the easier it will be to maintain it as you get older.” I may have very well rolled my eyes when I first heard that (the way teens tend to do these days when someone older shares insight), but my ears were obviously tuned in on his words. I’ve experienced the difference between staying in shape and getting back in shape. One is easier. The other makes things a bit more complicated.

This is the time of year when moods shift and spirits fall like the leaves, as if some sort of emotional gravity begins tugging at our minds and our hearts more and more as we amble through what remains of autumn and trudge into winter.

Part of that is due to shorter, darker, colder days. We are solar powered, after all. But it’s also the result of our living even more indoor lives after spending a summer reconnecting with the outdoors.

It’s this time of year, right now, when many of us start to disconnect again from the outside world. As a result, we also start to disconnect from ourselves. And, in some ways, that plays a part in our need to make those resolutions with the coming of the new year.

The Truth of Who You Are Is Right Where You Are

How Do You See Yourself?

Since the beginning of September I’ve been leading my daughter’s freshman volleyball team through a twice weekly yoga class. The intention was to work on improving flexibility and core strength.

Many of the girls enjoy the practice and they smile when I arrive. A couple have said that they’re practicing at home, that they’re noticing changes. Of course there are also several girls who look annoyed when I enter the gym. A couple of them have such tight hamstrings, hips, and lower backs that it would be easier to bend a spoon with their minds than to reach their fingers to their toes.

We’re also learning how to focus our attention and that we don’t need to look outside of ourselves for the truth. We’re learning that we live in a body that deserves our attention, love, and compassion, and there are a couple of girls who will not tolerate any of it. They’re tired. They don’t care about compassion. They want to hit the ball, and they don’t want to tune into the sensations of their body. They can’t seem to tolerate being in their own skin. If you were to give them a choice between spending half an hour slowing down, breathing deeply, and tuning in or spending 2 hours being pummeled by an opposing team, they’d choose the latter.

Mind/body practices like yoga open the channels of communication between outer and inner. It forces you into meeting yourself, you get glimpses of the entire history or herstory of the human body that is stored in your very cells. It asks you to listen to the body- to the great storyteller that expresses itself through movement, that speaks through its sensations, rhythms, temperature, aches, scars, wrinkles, colors, stature, imperfections, and more.

Yoga is challenging in unexpected ways, even for tough athletes, especially for teenage girls, for anyone in a time of transition, searching for an identity. In too many ways our consumer society tells our girls that an identity will be given to them depending on what they can afford. Yoga tells them that they will find it by turning inward, that the truth of who they are is right where they are.

Despite yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar’s admonition that “the asana will not come by making faces,” I find it fascinating to watch the expressions on the girls faces when they are holding a standing or balancing posture, when I ask them to make subtle changes to their alignment, to tune into the sensations that arise as they continue to hold a posture. There’s something about the way they crinkle up their foreheads and roll their eyes up and sometimes bite their bottom lip – such strange, new territory.

There’s something hopeful about a group of teenage girls twice a week being asked to NOT compare themselves to anyone else, no matter what, for the next hour, and to trust what they’re feeling. I wish I had heard this message weekly at the same age. It’s okay that one of the girls spends most of the class scowling. It doesn’t matter that some cannot help laughing, their entire body shaking, whenever they get into child’s pose and press their foreheads into their mats. It doesn’t really matter that a couple of them whine more than they breathe. And it’s okay that some of the girls don’t want to close their eyes in savasana while some of them fall instantly asleep, their feet or hands occasionally twitching. For an hour or so every week they’re strangers in a strange land. They’re taking the road less traveled. How else should they behave?

There’s something endearing about sitting for Namaste before these girls. I ask them to close their eyes. They do. I tell them they are beautiful. Just as they are. And a few will open one eye and look at me as if checking to see if I mean it. I mean it.

October 5, 2012 By Cathy Leave a Comment Filed Under: Deep Listening & Re-connecting, Inspiration, Imagination, Innovation, Personal Writing & Anecdotes Tagged With: identity, Iyengar, self-perception, Teenage Girls, The Road Less Traveled, transition, turning inward, yoga

Mind the Gap

Early Autumn Cattails

Since the last week in August, I’ve been nudging myself into, and really enjoying, a routine that includes an almost-daily early morning run.

A few years ago, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, in the midst of many life-changes, I turned away from my at-times-overly-intense weight-lifting and running routine. A regular yoga practice took it’s place and it began to put me in touch with parts of my internal self I didn’t know were there.

The old exercise routines I used to follow had me very in-tune with my external self. I knew my strength in terms of how much weight I could lift and how many miles I could run, AND by (and I really did see this as a strength) how small a size of jeans I could squeeze into.

When I let go of the wonder-woman workouts, I gained some weight, some cushion and curves that I often found myself feeling very self-conscious about, but something deep within me felt that I had no choice. It may sound weird, but the uncomfortable feelings about how I looked (and I still have them sometimes) served as a constant reminder that I had a lot of internal work to do. The negative self-talk I listened to every time I looked in a mirror served as a reminder to again turn inward.

Be Here Now: An Interview With Anthony Heald

Anthony Heald as Shylock Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Anthony Heald as Shylock at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

This week, we have the privilege and the pleasure of interviewing actor Anthony Heald (though, if you meet him, he’ll tell you to call him Tony).

Tony’s an acclaimed and respected actor (appreciated by his peers for his talent, his professionalism, but also for the consideration he shows them, and for his ability to make them better through the choices he makes). For the past 35 years he’s been involved in entertaining in just about every medium – from theatre, to film, to episodic television shows, to audio books. As a matter of fact, he’s recorded over 60 audio-books and is considered by some to be “the voice of Star Wars.”

His comments, though especially relevant to thespians, are every bit as relevant to anyone who wants to be authentic (you know, the “you deep at the center of your being” to whom Confucius alluded, the “you” many of us never quite get around to being).

When Invisible Obstacles Get In The Way

Catness

A cat sits on the window sill, nose centimeters from the glass, trying to find a way past a barrier that’s all the more perplexing in its near-invisibility.

The cat’s drawn to what’s beyond the window – the blue sky, the leaves rustling in the breeze, the birds that dart about the feeder, the unsuspecting chipmunk scampering a few feet below its own mortality – but what’s also compelling it to be out there is something inside the cat, some part of its true nature.

After all, the essence of being a cat has nothing to do with living an indoor life.

It’s not that different for any of us who have an ache inside to do a thing (even if we aren’t exactly sure what that thing is just yet), but we feel there’s some, perhaps, unseen obstacle preventing us from actually taking the first step.

Unlike the cat, though, as humans we don’t just perceive that there’s an obstacle, that something’s preventing us from doing what we want or what we feel compelled to do, we also tend to judge ourselves for not doing it. We begin to define ourselves in terms of our momentary inability rather than (for a writer, for example,) on the basis of our imagination and talent. And that judgment can often be one more thing that gets in the way (sort of like adding another layer to the glass). Of course, if we’re unable to break through that barrier, it very well may define us in the end.

“The Past is a Foreign Country”

Remnants of the Past

“The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
~ L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

A young boy stirs in the backseat, as the car transports him and his family across town, but in his mind he’s already there, sitting on his grandfather’s lap as the older man tells stories of his younger days. To the boy, the tales seem almost fantastical – to picture his grandfather as anything other than that stretches the boy’s imagination.

This seems a familiar thread, common across generations and cultures, and not simply a contemporary phenomenon. Other common threads include the adolescent who is almost (if not completely) disengaged from those same stories – some he may have heard (though not “a million times” as he tends to claim with a roll of his eyes, between quick glances at the clock, or out the window, or anywhere else where he might be missing out on life happening) and some are stories which may have remained untold until then – and later, as a young man, when it’s too late to learn first-hand, he may overhear stories second-hand and realize he knew very little about his grandfather (or about whomever those stories were told). At least that’s been my experience.

In the last couple posts we’ve alluded to the value of slowing down and being present in the moment. And if these posts merely convey one morsel of information that might help someone live a richer and more fulfilling life, that could arguably be the most useful morsel of all. In part, because a lot of other benefits arise from it, like the opportunity to re-connect with what matters, to re-imagine the possibilities available to us, and to re-write the story of our lives . . . from this point on.

It all begins, I believe, with mindfulness, with being present in the moment.

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July 8, 2012 By Dave Leave a Comment Filed Under: Deep Listening & Re-connecting, Personal Writing & Anecdotes Tagged With: family, history, mindfulness, reconnecting, slowing down, stories, the past