changing your life in 4 days
This week I heard that if I take 4 consecutive days, just 10 minutes a day to do this, it can literally start to change the make up of my genes.
Grab your coffee, and sit with me for just a minute…..
I have recently been on a kick of learning ways to manage my stress/mental health. The practice of quieting the mind, centering in, emptying the mental weight, to navigate life a little lighter, a little more free. All roads have been pointing to one thing : Meditation.
Through years of training, researching, yoga teacher training, trying all the apps, from headspace to insight timer and several others, finding my groove in this realm has not come naturally. It’s always been the game setting up my surroundings, making sure it felt picturesque, setting still, and having to listen to something guide me. In my gut, I want it, I need it. I know it’ll help me tremendously as my brain never quite stops doing it’s thing. But its never happened in a way that created an experience I replicated for longer than two days. It’s almost like I lose the intention and get annoyed at telling myself I HAVE to do it.
Last summer, I had crashed and burned out of no where. It had turned out that my “I work best under stress” mentality had turned me into a ticking time bomb, ready to self combust at any moment. I woke up one day, completely burned out; I had stressed myself into Adrenal Fatigue. So physically exhausted, I couldn’t even get out of bed, let alone do normal human things like work a job, properly feed myself, etc. My life, my schedule had come to a screeching halt. All because of the one thing I thought to be my greatest companion— Stress. I had become so obsessed and operated by the pressure of the things that needed accomplished that I lost sight of taking care. Not just needing a day to sleep in and recover, but months of laying on the couch when I didn’t need to be any certain place just to rest. Since last summer, I am happy to say that lots of work with my natural path, a slight change in diet, and scaling back on teaching, I finally eventually found the up swing and managed to come to a place where I was better, my energy returned, and I felt like I was walking on eggshells for a season. Not wanting to overdo, but wanting to get back to my routine.
Shortly after finding this new rhythm, my husband and I found out we were pregnant (thank you new found energy! lol). Knowing how I typically navigate, but having someone rely on me solely now, her feeling what I feel, my stress, emotions, all the things, I have never felt the need to take better care not just physically, but mentally. My plan of attack, or maintenance rather, has become more important than ever to me.
I recently listened to an incredibly POWERFUL podcast on Goop with Joe Dispenza, DC. The podcast is called How to Become Your Future Self and its all about the science behind meditation. How to let go of the ego + emotions to use meditation to free yourself from mental weight, which usually is an accumulation of emotion attachments we have to people and places. And because it’s emotional— it’s personal to us, it’s harder to process and let go. Therefore, we hold it in our bodies, in our minds, and we allow it to hold weight and space, using valuable energy thinking about the past, not allowing the full potential of energy we could have to create the future.
Through meditation, we learn how to rewire new hardware that eventually, with practice and discipline, becomes the new software we live our lives from. Dispenza talked about how where you place your intention is where you place your energy. And it’s time to wake up and take back our energy so our bodies can be free, and we can start to focus on what we want to see rather than where we have been. If we are using all our energy recreating the past, we have no energy left to create something new with. We are so willing to sacrifice the present moment for the past without even consciously doing it.
One of the most powerful things Dispenza talked about was how we are ADDICTED to our emotion. “The person you resent… you are using them to reaffirm your addiction to your emotion.” We hold the person or the place as a placeholder for the reason we are addicted to what it emotes within us. When we lower the volume to the emotion, we begin to recondition the response by staying grounded in who WE (you!) are. And you keep coming back to that space. You. The stronger the emotion you have to the people and places in your life, the more you pay attention to them. And as mentioned before, what you pay attention to, is where your energy lives.
It just takes a conscious decision. To separate.
Dispenza talks about how when we get to a place where we are no longer our job, or our culture, or our identity, even our experiences +interactions, we can have a clean slate to work from, to be freed from mentally. Dispenza mentions that it literally begins within 4 days.
The final missing piece : Gratitude.
Finding space to disassociate, to release, to process, and then—
G R A D I T U D E.
Just 10 minutes a day of closing the eyes, emptying, and returning to the things that you are grateful for. The good. The difficult. Based in gratitude, we find surrender to the present. We are brought back into our bodies.
I was reminded while listening of a season of life when I was just 16 years old. It was November 2010 and I found myself in a really low place. Fighting depression, a disconnect with life. With it being November, the month that brings us back to Thanksgiving, I had challenged myself to spend a few moments a day to write out a list of what I was grateful for that day, and then I wrote one person a day a love letter explaining why I was grateful for them in my life. Within weeks of doing this, I could feel the veil lift, the heaviness of the season I was in shifting, and I began finding a new connection to LIFE. I began to feel what it felt like to participate in my life again, simplifying, and everything became beautiful again.
Can I change my life in just 10 minutes of gratitude meditation in just 4 days?
Can I rewire my hard drive to stop holding the weight of what has come and gone, and focus on this moment right here? Emptying of the old, and envisioning the new. In seeking sustainability for my mind + body, and to take the best care of Baby M, I am ready to at least give it a try.
10 minutes a day, getting still, examining what I am holding and what I am processing that is from the past. I am committing to a full week, 7 days to test this process. Lowering the volume of the emotions attached to the stress, the people, the work, the places.
And I challenge you to join me. Let’s find some space for us to redefine what this whole meditation thing looks like. Dispenza says so many people are scared of meditation, or don’t think they know how so they don’t do it. Or another common excuse, “I DON’T HAVE TIME”.
You have 10 minutes. I promise.
Find it with me,
lets cleanse this Spring,
lets step forward out of what was,
and into new light.
Because we can.
You don’t have to be an expert,
you just have to show up.
Intention over perfection.
What does it look like? Its right where you’re at in your day, closing your eyes, finding your breath, starting your process. It doesn’t require incense, or a meditation pillow, or a matcha sitting next to you. This practice can happen anytime you can close your eyes for 10 minutes.
