Learning to access our personal space of “inner-ease” can be done with minimum practice and in just a little time. When operating in an ease-mode, it’s easier to choose less stressful perceptions and attitudes and re-create “flow” in our daily routines.
Renewing Heart Qualities By Doc Childre
See a snapshot of your current level of well-being
Spring is a time of regeneration and renewal. One of the most regenerating actions we can do is to renew or increase our practice of heart qualities, such as genuine kindness, gratitude, sincere listening, forgiveness, compassion, and more. Many of us agree that these heart qualities are important, yet our mind often jumps ahead of our heart and dictates our behaviors at important choice points. This has caused most of us significant stress, downtime, and sometimes health related problems. It’s important to realize that research is showing that it’s a lack of genuine heart connection that underlies a significant amount of stress we experience personally and within teams and groups.
Most of us have had times when we felt hurt from being unfairly represented, and then spent much of the day upset, while creating an unintentional yet serious stress deficit. Now more people are becoming aware that we can reduce these predictable stress deficits, because we have the choice to say, “No, not this time.” We can manage and change our predictable reactions with some practice — and by putting our heart into it.
So much of our stress can be replaced with balance and happier moments by allowing our heart energy to flow through our day to day interactions and responses. True connection at the heart level organically creates a pathway to coherent cooperation and more effective outcomes. Intentionally practicing increased care for each other raises our vibration to the higher-dignity level of who we truly are. This increases our sense of self-security, creates clearer choices, and gives easier access to our heart’s intuitive guidance, along with lifting the spirit of others and the environment.
Heart qualities of care, respect, kindness and compassion are among our most honored values. Most people feel they are a higher expression of one’s deeper self and humanity. Free inspiration comes as we start to remember that most of our mistakes came from the lack of pausing and taking a deeper assessment, which can come from our heart. It’s easy yet it brings remarkable results.
Ask yourself, what heart qualities could you practice more that would lead to less stress for you and others? (Examples: love, kindness, compassion, patience, genuine connection, latitude, cooperation, gratitude, deeper listening without judgments, and many more.) Suggestion: Write them down to help you remember.
Practice tip:
Choose one heart quality at a time to focus on for a few days in a row. As you breathe, imagine that you are breathing this feeling into your being. This helps set an internal environment for staying emotionally poised. Look for ways you can bring that heart quality into your communications, your interactions, your projects, etc.
During this period of societal turmoil, each of us can benefit from increasing our practice of proceeding with more care, kindness, compassion and less judgment. As we increase our care for each other – along with unbiased consideration of what is really best for the wholeness – this will draw much needed solutions for navigating through these unpredictable times. However, this type of transformation has to start with the individual – it’s an inside job that starts with opening our heart more to deal with whatever comes up. Deeper care is the new hope.
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The Power of Trauma - Book excerpt
Recovering from PTSD can be likened to how a tree heals after a storm. This analogy became very vivid to me as I looked back over where I had been. I felt that my roots were not just damaged by my storm—they were ripped right out of the ground. I later found out that my roots had also been wounded by previous traumas.
Mindfulness and Kindness - Inner Sources of Freedom and Happiness
Qigong and Tai Chi Chuan
How to build Inner Strength
Why Do Yoga?
Recent studies show that approximately 20 million North Americans practice yoga. Why? If you’re amongst this group, you will know that put simply, yoga makes you feel better. This ancient practice that has migrated from India seems to be exactly the remedy for our times. If practiced regularly, yoga increases our physical health, emotional well-being, mental clarity and spiritual connection.
Healing Life's Traumas
For Sara—who asked that her real name not be used—being grounded literally means feeling her feet on the floor; being present means knowing where she is and what's going on around her. These are things she can't feel when she's suddenly jerked into the past, reliving episodes of her ex-husband's violence, like the night he chased her through the house and pushed through every door she hid behind.
Trauma and The Spiritual Path
When I first became interested in the connection between spirituality and trauma recovery, I found that many people in mainstream health and healing programs felt that spirituality was a bit too much for someone “just trying to get by.” In other cases, there was an assumption that spirituality and religion are the same, and that religion was really not a necessary element of treatment. These were encounters of a healing model that placed spirituality at the end of the line, and certainly not at the beginning.