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from Holiday time to New Year  Photo of a squirrel eating a potato chip from Amandeep Chaudhary on Unsplash Hi good folks, I’m currently doing less work than usual (yes, part of my own reset) so I offer you two things I created in December of 2016! These will serve you well through the rest of the Holidays and into a conscious New Year. 6 tips for CONSCIOUS EATING
The full post with conscious-eating points has only a bit more than the above. Find it here. 11 ways to HIT THE RESET BUTTON during the Holidays Invitation not to let bad sensations accrue, not to allow untended thoughts to take you down the rabbit hole! Prioritize feeling good: this will connect you to your guidance system and let in the inspiration of the moment to keep moving toward love. 1. Take a breath. Take several conscious breaths. Watch the breath go in and out. Get absorbed by the breath. 2. Go outside and breathe there. Look into the sky. Experience what's out there with all the senses you can engage. 3. Exercise. Stretch. Run up & down the stairs. Go around the block. Do anything to move your body and focus your attention off the mind and onto your marvelous capacity to feel, move, inhabit a human body. Find someone on YouTube to guide you through some qigong or yoga or whatever. (Here's my favorite simple qigong sequence with Mimi Kuo-Deemer.) 4. Stay away from work, even mentally. Leave it alone and see what seeds sprout later. You've already given it great attention. Celebrate that. Let it go. 5. Feasting for the holidays? Chew more, taste more, give yourself full permission to eat whatever you choose to eat. Take long breaks between times of food intake—not to be righteous, but to enjoy the contrast and to be hungry again when you eat more. (Hydrate between meals!) 6. Do the unexpected, have an adventure, go somewhere you've never been, do something appealing that scares you or goes against how you see yourself. 7. Meditate, even for 5 minutes. You could even exit (physically or mentally) during a conversation you don't want to take part in and just watch your breath go all the way in, watch it go all the way out. Until you decide you’re done, keep coming back to the breath when you stray from that focus. 8. Call someone you almost never talk to, or haven't talked to in a while, or even the one you've believed is too far from the last contact to justify any lasting connection: you connect if you're drawn to. (Follow the inspired impulse, not the thoughts about it.) 9. Feeling challenged? Tell yourself or another or write down all the reasons why this hard thing you're going through is perfect, the best training ground for what you know you need to develop in yourself. This is a moment to keep applying your own belief system and to take further whatever you've been experimenting with to live more consciously and be healthier and truer to yourself. 10. Unplug for a day (or days) from any computer activity, phone apps, social media. Include news in the exclusion. Walk away from political conversations if that feels better. 11. Sleep. Nap (30 minutes or less to stay out of deep sleep, 90 minutes for a whole sleep cycle). For naps and nighttime rest, be sure you go to sleep with a consciousness of RESET, of all things new/all things possible when you wake up. (The writeup of 11 resets above comprises the whole post, and here’s the link to see it on my website if you like.) Love & blessings, Jaya
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 Image of tightrope walker holding a long stick for balance This post is a redo of a writing from 2017 that never made its way to this blog. I was inspired to bring it back because I needed an alignment meditation, then a client needed one, then ... THEY'RE BACK. Alignment meditations reset us when we lose alignment with someone we love or something we believe. Out of the blue, I'm into Alignment Meditations. They take less than 5 minutes—because it's not that hard to align. In fact, alignment is all about ease—the antithesis of straining, striving, forcing, contorting--so it can only be easy to get into alignment. Sound too easy? The caveat is: you have to let go. Let go of all you want to control that isn't actually in your realm of control. The meditation eases you into the water, then your job is to give yourself to the flow, let it take you downstream. If you're in resistance, you'll paddle against the current shouting, No, that way, that way, my way! (You'll make an awful internal ruckus—your inner seagullwill be shrieking Mine! Mine! Mine!) (My first Finding Nemo reference ever.) You know when you're out of aligment. If you're out of whack with a person, everything between you gets needlessly complicated. Out of whack with a place—just feels wrong to be there. Out of whack with a role you play--you feel miscast, even fraudulent. You can be out of alignment with your own body, ay, and that's hard to reconcile—like the discord originates with you while it's also externally imposed. In any case, you know you're out when you're out. The misalignment may not be your doing, so doing isn't likely to make it right. (Kind of radical, really.) You can't require another person to show up the way you want them to (to see you the way you want them to, to treat you ...). You cannot force your way into some society or require it (with its many faces) to look upon you with unconditional welcome. You can't bend time or sway the timing of other minds or machines or the healing mechanisms of the body. You can't require what hasn't yet arrived to come forth NOW. So how do you align with a lot of moving parts that you (rightfully, appropriately, even mercifully) cannot control? You stop trying to control anything external AND you align internally (thoughts, feelings, the vision you keep in view) with what you want. This is why a meditation is a great way to quit pounding on the door that won't yield to you: meditations aren't about DOING. Meditation allows you to slip into where you want to be--but you slip in the back way, with slow, steady breathing to support you. Alignment requires nonresistance. Start there. Nonresistance is simply letting it all be exactly as it is, like it or not. (But only for now—it can and will all change!) Alignment goes well with surrender—the good kind. Let go. Let go of outcome. Let go of what the other person does or doesn't do, what others think, what they think of you. Let go of the future; definitely let go of predicting the future. Let go of how you thought it should go, what you thought you should feel, what level of evolution you thought you should have attained here. Whatever's happening is fine—really. The meditation: alignment first happens internally, energetically, as a powerful precursor to external change. Here comes the white-ligh part. Stay with me? To meditate into alignment, sit in a column of light, aligned with that light. Watch your breathing as you sit there. Now imagine that the situation (person, group) you seek to align with is equally aligned with this column. This light represents and holds the alignment. It's a beam of light—the most effortless, uncrowded thing you might imagine. Now find where you're already aligned. Find your essential oneness with the other or the situation. Don't think it, but feel into it. Find the essential love that unites you. Open to shared philosophies, mission, history. (Invite the mind to play movies of such things.) Focus on the passion for a topic, ethic, or aesthetic that all those involved connect to, even where details of your visions don't match. You may see lots of overlap and feel instant relief—and instant movement toward alignment. You may need to drop down to the lowest common denominator: we're both/all children of the universe, inherently worthy. Or get scientific, if you will: we're made of the same stuff, exchanging the same oxygen and carbon dioxide. Anything that's real to you works. My simple meditation invites you to cast a beam of alignment and sit in it. Feel and breathe into what connects you with the thing, situation, concept, person, or group you're out of alignment with, and let go of where you're stymied by differences, disconnections, disillusionment. Sit in the truth of essential oneness. We're never separate, even when we feel separation. Oneness or unity is truly the way of it, so sit in that, the essential truth of that—never mind where anything in real life makes it hard to feel. Find the easy way to feel it in this meditation. Alignment may require ongoing tweaks and adjustments. The tightrope walker steadies themself with the pole, weaving in and out of balance. Still, they walk the line, however tricky or dangerous it looks. Don't expect yourself to meditate into alignment then hold the alignment. Sit imagining and feeling into alignment for the love of alignment, not to indulge some magical thinking that you get to have your way if you use a spiritual tactic to have it. Align without expecting anything else to happen on the physical plane, in actuality. (This doesn't mean it can't or won't.) Align mentally just to have a private experience of alignment, whether you get it publicly or not, whether you get to share it with another or not. With a touchstone of internal alignment now available, you can keep coming back to alignment as you take action and as events unfold without your orchestration. Keep coming back to alignment, just because alignment feels better. While this doesn't guarantee any certain outcome, it does make feeling better super likely; it makes course-correcting toward alignment much easier; it makes the actions and tasks you step into from that alignment much more effortless. It opens you to guidance for unexpected solutions, inspired actions. If you experiment with this at all, you simply cannot simultaneously white-knuckle it the whole way. Just play with it as you might try a yoga pose, testing the wobbly line between pushing and releasing. Endless applications. I've sat with a teacher, realigning her with the students she's not certain she's serving; a post-grad student, aligning her with a professor she thinks is disappointed in her; an artist, aligning him with the unknown galleries that want to represent him. You can align with the employer who will hire you, the lover you haven't met, the baby on the way. You can align with the maddening political scene, the uncertain marketing thrust, the slippery social event. I do this often for myself, always briefly, always lighter and easier in the aftermath. It's a great thing to do at bedtime: fall asleep from a place of alignment. You just might wake up feeling aligned. Try your own meditation. There's really no formula. Even the column of white light is dispensable if it bothers you. Just sit with your breath, intending alignment with a task, concept, person, group. Sit breathing into the possibility of alignment; open to where it already exists. Let go of striving and experiment with believing that the way is clearer, simpler, more accessible than you currently believe. It's easy to align. Love & blessings, Jaya AND IN ALL OF LIFE AND WHY ALL YOU NEED TO MIND IS HOW YOU FEEL  Photo from Jaya looking out over the sea dotted with gray clouds & a rainbow descends through the sky In the sky & sea pics that follow, check out the variety of colors. So many. Fewer than in real life (!), but still plenty captured by my phone camera. It started with noticing one rainbow. We were walking along the shoreline, my long-haired son & I, in that marvelous pre-sunset hour. The winds were whipping up waves and hair, the usual dogs recognized us and bounded over for cuddles & scratches, and LOOK (he said)—a rainbow! In the weirdly busy hour that followed, we saw more rainbows and bits of rainbows in clouds and sky. We actually weren’t doing much. We just walked the strip of sand that got us to the lounge chairs we could rent for the price of one fizzy drink full of lime wedges, floaty mint leaves, and small ice cubes. Then everything got still for the next 40 minutes. Except nothing was still. The winds kept whipping, the rainbows & dogs came and went, and the colors in the sky never quit changing. We got up once to take a picture when the array of colors was beyond insane, and by the time we found our desired places and the camera was ready (not even a full minute), our background wasn’t the same.  Photo from Jaya of the sea & a pier with luminous clouds Everything changes. Always. Constantly. Always. Constantly. That’s why it’s a waste of precious time to fixate on what’s not to your liking in the present moment. That’s why it serves nothing to say you’re stuck. You really can’t be. (It’s okay if you feel stuck and notice you feel stuck. It’s great if you hear yourself think or say that you’re stuck. Just use that to come to and remember again--no wait! I really can’t be.)  Photo from Jaya of a dim sky above the sea with smooth, dense, dark clouds with light glowing through Abraham-Hicks tells us again and again, Don’t fixate on current conditions. They’re not reality. (Not a fixed reality. Not the whole reality.) They’re not going to be here in one more moment. Fixate on how you want to feel, and you’re good. Then you’re completely in charge (AGENCY!) and at nothing and no one’s mercy. Let conditions come & go. Some will be to your liking, some not. Some you will think are really wrong. Some will be fucking amazing. Keep the focus on how you feel. Check in with it. Notice it. And reach for what feels better if anything doesn’t feel good at all (subtly or hugely or in any way).  Photo from Jaya of her leg & foot, with her favorite beach pup looking up at her What thought would feel better right now? What connection to body & breath would feel better right now? What can you do to soothe your feeling state right now and simply make yourself feel better? Are you fixating on what feels bad? Sinking into it? Dissecting it? Discussing it? Revving it up? That’s an option. (And you’re not a bad person if you’re there! Just a person.) What else is possible, though? You could take charge of the one thing you can control as conditions keep changing. Mind how you feel. Reach for what feels better right now. Love & blessings, Jaya I've written another blog post since this one on the power of stepping outside as an alignment process in itself. More about skies there! Let guidance, not guilt, determine when you reach out or respond  Photo of a person from the shoulders down, holding a phone & messaging from Chad Madden on Unsplash Let’s clear up the heaviness, distress, guilt, obligation, anxiety, energy leaks, bad feelings & bad vibes, self-loathing—whatever way you feel rotten about texts, WhatsApp messages, Instagram (or any social-media) messages, emails, cards & letters, little notes left, messages in bottles, WHATEVER WHATEVER WHATEVER. We have so many ingenious ways to be in touch, create connection, and send love. You can use these to make you feel GOOD or you can use these to make you feel all manner of BAD. Please use communication tools consciously. Use them ONLY to support you to feel how you want to feel. (Use NOTHING in your life to foster feeling how you don’t want to feel!) (Use NOTHING in your life to foster feeling how you don’t want to feel!) (Use NOTHING in your life to foster feeling how you don’t want to feel!) You do not owe anybody messages. Unless you’ve made some clear, contractual agreement with someone, YOU DO NOT OWE THEM
(Hey, integrity side note: it really helps NOT to tell people you’ll get back to them at any certain time because then you’ve said that so, sure, you’ll feel guilty & bad if you don’t do what you said you’d do. Just DO get back to them when it’s right, and leave out the promises. Or keep track of and follow through with what you say you’ll do.) You are not a bad person if you have unanswered messages from others sitting anywhere in your world. These others wrote you because they wanted to, when they wanted to. They were following their timing, not yours. You do not owe them lining up with that. They wrote you when they felt like it for their reasons and with their thoughts & feelings going. Some of those thoughts & feelings are ego-based—that is, related to their personality structure and what they have & haven’t worked out yet, and what they want from you, and what their beliefs are about what’s what and what they owe others and what others owe them. Please know (um, KNOW that you know) that all of the above varies tremendously from one person to the next. There’s no standard, no one-size-fits-all. It is not your job to track all of those things for others. It is not your job to work yourself around other people’s stuff. In fact, if you make it your job, you will fail. You will also feel all manner of BAD: obligation & guilt & sadness for disappointing them [and whatever else or other you go to]. And if you don’t get right back to them, you will feel things like this:
(I recently wrote about how resentment can be a very useful messenger. Check that out if and only if you feel drawn to do so. You also don’t owe anyone clicking on the links they send you.) You might consider disconnecting any false equal sign you’ve got going between someone messaging you and you owing them anything. They messaged me = I owe them a certain response in a certain timing Set yourself free. Then you can just give everyone on the planet permission to reach out to you when it’s right for them, for their reasons, and you can give yourself permission to reach out to them when it’s right for you, for your reasons. Let’s talk about leading with apologies when you get around to reaching out to someone. Don’t. Seriously, stop it. No love agenda is served by beginning a communication with how sorry you are that you haven’t been in touch or you didn’t respond sooner. You have & had reasons for your timing. (You’ll have fewer & simpler reasons when you don’t carry around a bunch of baggage related to messaging.)  Photo of a message in a dirty clear bottle, washed up on a beach, from Scott Van Hoy on Unsplash It actually gets worse if you’re telling all your reasons for why you are & aren’t communicating at what frequency or in what timing. (When you relax around this whole topic you won’t feel the need, or you’ll simply see a reason to tell if that’s kind & appropriate—and it likely won’t be apologetic.) If someone has a problem with how you’re communicating, it’s their problem. Let them bring it up with you if they want to, then you can listen to them lovingly (or however you want to) and just tell them the truth about how you prefer to manage communication, which may not coincide with how they manage it. If someone wants to make you wrong for how, when, and how often you communicate, let them. Leave them to it. But don’t join them in making yourself wrong. Don’t give a false apology. In other words: do not join someone in agreeing that you’re wrong or bad because of how you communicate following your actual life, timing, work load, emotional reality, chosen focus, preferences, and so on. If someone lets you know that you’re bothering them by the way you communicate and their feelings are hurt and it means this or that to them and they want X or Y from you—you can take that in kindly. But that doesn’t then mean you owe them any of it, or that it would serve either of you for you to deliver that. (If you’re someone who needs the reminder to check in with yourself about your own actual current capacity: please check in with yourself OFTEN about your own actual current capacity.) CRAY-CRAY ALERT: It serves nothing and no one for you to keep communicating at your pace & frequency while simultaneously continuing to feel bad & guilty & wrong because of what that means to someone else. How about making a clear change instead? Um, this means that if you just keep feeling all manner of BAD about messaging, and aren’t changing anything (perhaps because you don’t really want to or at capacity or aren’t wired that way or …), you will be stuck feeling bad. You’re doing that to yourself. It’s not someone else or their expectations or desires doing that to you. DO NOT DO THAT TO YOURSELF. Set yourself free of what it means to them, and just communicate how you want to. And, META-BONUS: communicate clearly, when it comes up, about your communication. If you find you have reasons or feel guided to communicate differently with someone in a way that would feel better for all concerned, by all means, do that. (Or experiment with it for a bit and course-correct as you get new data.) Changing how you communicate with someone would ideally be based on your intentions for the relationship and your sense of what would feel better TO YOU. (If you’re basing it on guilt & obligation, or placating & people-pleasing, it won’t feel any better.) I wish you freedom to be your most authentic self, unburdened by what others are up to. You get to be you. The more self-permission you have to live (and communicate) authentically, the more you’ll just follow your beautiful guidance system to be in touch with others in right timing. It can be simple & easeful. It can feel good. It can be a simple matter of following the impulses as they arise. Love & blessings, Jaya |
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