Biohacking wellness makes it increasingly possible for one to take charge of their physical, mental, and emotional conditions. Today, individuals, companies, and the scientific and medical communities see the potential of working with our bodies in reshaping treatments and optimizing health. Many biohacks can relieve stress, boost your sex life, and even allow you to get comfortable on your period.
During my 35+ year professional career, I have worked in both large and small office settings, at home and on-the-road as a frequent business traveler. I’ve been fortunate that during this time I have also been an active meditator, and have seen firsthand how meditation can be employed during our workday to ease the stress and strain of our jobs, provide clarity and perspective, and altogether make our workplace safer and more comfortable.
As things begin to transition back to normalcy post-COVID, many of us will re-enter our more traditional workplace settings. This could mean anything from being back in crowded offices, to re-engaging in business travel, or even finding ourselves at business lunches, conferences, and work-related social events.
Mindfulness, although an old age concept, has quite become mainstream lately. The University of Massachusetts was the first to introduce a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), ever since mindfulness has been a point of interest for many researchers. Over the years, many pieces of research and anecdotal studies have documented the benefits of mindfulness on our physical and mental health.
While practicing mindfulness techniques is relatively straightforward, it may not be as easy to incorporate as they may seem. It requires you to maintain awareness of the internal and external environment by keeping your thoughts still. For beginners, it may be pretty overwhelming to preserve the stability of feelings and emotions. Hence an external aid like cannabis can be quite beneficial. If you wish to explore how cannabis can help with your mindfulness practice, here is a brief of everything it does for you.
“Did I miss something?” asked Martha, her hand raised in the Hollywood Squares of my Zoom mindfulness class.
“What do you mean?” I inquired.
“Well, we were having this relaxing and lovely meditation experience and now we are all of a sudden talking about death and dying, so I want to know… did I miss something?”
Wow. I looked at the faces of the human beings that have grown so close these last nine months as I listened to Martha’s question and imagined fear, maybe even anger arising in her. Although I had compassion for her discomfort, I had no problem answering her by saying, “Yes, actually. You missed loving connected presence. You missed the fact that we are here to support each other for whatever comes up.”
Your life is showing you where you are conscious, or it’s showing you where you are unconscious. It’s showing you where you are still in fear, and running programs and circuits that are fear-based, based in survival, or your life is showing you where you are in love and being able to meet life as presence.
Life is very binary. This whole life thing, in the experience of this whole life, isn’t really that complicated at all. The key is to recognize that life is showing you who you are and who you are not. The key is being willing to shine the light of your own awareness on yourself. When you turn the lens of your awareness on yourself, you are beginning your journey of empowerment. As long as you continue to blame people, places, situations, circumstances and things for your internal state of being, you are a victim.
Are you working toward overcoming an addiction? If so, congratulations on taking charge of your health and working toward improvement.
You probably know that you need every weapon in your arsenal to defeat the negative thoughts and beliefs that drive your negative behaviors. Have you tried yoga, meditation and mindfulness? All three techniques can aid in addiction recovery. Here’s how.
What makes you behave the way you do? What makes some people reach for the bottle at the first setback while others sail through life sober? While many factors play a role, in large part, your beliefs stem from self-defeating thought patterns — and guided meditation can help you defeat these and rewire your conditioned responses.
“To be in a state of peace we need to be in harmony with the energy frequency of peace.” ~Codebreaker
Peace is your natural state. However, we are all experiencing stress and frustration in these challenging times.
I want to teach you a simple 3-minute meditation that will help you quiet your mind and become more centered and present in the moment – no matter what is happening in the world around you.
Despite meditation being such a powerful and important success tool, a lot of people are wary about meditation. They’re either skeptical of the benefits or they worry that it might go against their own personal religious beliefs.
The reality is, anyone will benefit from meditation if practiced regularly—both in their mental and physical well-being.
Meditation, while it can be used with a spiritual intent, is simply a matter of learning how to quiet the constant “monkey-chatter” in your mind and allow you to consciously think better thoughts.
My friend Dina Proctor encourages people to try what she calls 3×3 meditation, which is doing a 3-minute meditation three times a day.
Most people, when they start to meditate have difficulty sitting for longer than three minutes at a time. When you begin the 3-minute meditation it can be hard to just meditate.
A 3×3 meditation is simply breathing and being with whatever thoughts you’re having for 3 minutes at a time, 3 times a day.
Mindfulness and meditation are both great tools that can help us cultivate calm amidst chaos. For those who are new to mindfulness practice, it is not uncommon to mistake mindfulness for a form of meditation. If fact, it is a different practice altogether. Mindfulness is the practice of honing your focused attention and choosing what you wish to focus attentively on. Meditation takes many forms, from movement meditations to seated or even laying down meditations using the anchor of attention on the breath, a word, a phrase or a visualization. Some formal meditations have no anchor of attention, inviting you to notice your thoughts, feelings, and emotions and then practice noticing what comes up without judgement, allowing yourself to let the thoughts drift past without attaching to any story lines. This form is called open awareness meditation.
Let’s take a few minutes and get mindful today. Mindfulness is the opposite of distraction. The more mindful you are, the more aware you’ll become of yourself, what’s going on inside of you, as well as what’s going on outside and beyond yourself. It’s a great exercise for your soul.
Find a comfortable place to sit. Keep your feet flat on the floor and your hands comfortably on your lap. Use your nose to inhale as well as exhale. Practice this breathing meditation for 20 minutes. Each step should take 5 minutes:
Meditation has the power to transform your life for the better and ignite your success. But how do you fit it into your busy life?
Fact: The actions we take in the morning set the tone for the entire day.
Most of us know this intuitively — that a strong start is critical to having a good day — yet how do we begin our days?
Too often, we start by reaching for our phones to read the latest influx of work emails, disaster-filled news headlines and an endless flow of celebrity gossip.
Then, we round out the morning by filling our bodies with sugary pastries and caffeine-laden drinks as we high-tail it to work, already overwhelmed by the problems the day will surely bring.
It’s no coincidence that we’re a nation of anxious, dissatisfied people who are constantly in search of something more substantial in our lives.
For me, that something turned out to be meditation for success.
“Honey, are you keeping up your meditation practice?” my husband gently inquired. “This is such a stressful time. I really think you should try to exercise and do some good meditations.”
“Yeah, well, I’m using Insight Timer and doing a meditation for going to sleep every night,” I replied.
“I don’t think that’s enough,” he lovingly suggested.
I’ve been sleeping on the couch at my Dad’s apartment, hanging out with my sisters as we watch and wait for this beloved, elegant, and generous man to transition from this world. Today I realized that I was out of contact lenses. I drove home (a blessed 10 minutes) to replenish my supply.
Once home, I wrestled with the choice to either burrow under my covers in my cozy bed or get my butt on the elliptical trainer machine. Go down, ahh… Go up, ugh… Hearing my husband’s whisper in my head, from miles away out at sea, I stepped up on the elliptical trainer, put Donna Summer radio on my Pandora App, and let my feet follow the beat. I am so fricking out of shape; I stayed between level one and level three, working up a sweat for 20 minutes. Then I walked on the treadmill for 10 minutes. After stretching and doing a little yoga, I chose a 20-minute guided meditation from Insight Timer called “Coping with Grief’s Difficult Emotions,” led by Heather Stang.
Seeing through the veil that our senses and our thinking minds make real, seeing behind the mask to true self, feels like the highest aspiration of humanity. Because, as we are able to do that, it’s as if we are able to find our rightful place in the order of things. We recognize a harmony that’s been waiting for us to feel.
Taking our place in the order of things is not only for the life hereafter or for some abstract reason. It majorly impacts the way we live our daily lives.
This awakening to our deepest self is not for later, it’s for now.
Lori Kaye, gunned down on Saturday morning, April 27, 2019, at the Chabad Synagogue in Poway, California was an acquaintance of mine. She was an observant Jew, so when I heard about the shooting I feared she might have been in her house of worship on the last day of Passover.
I texted her “sending love” and didn’t receive a reply. I thought she might not be responding because it was still Shabbat until sundown, and I didn’t know whether she followed the custom of not using her electronics on Shabbat. I called and texted Stacy (one of her best friends from childhood) and her husband Jon – our close friends – so they would know that a shooting occurred in case they wanted to reach out to Lori.
I’ll never forget Jon’s voice on the line, “I think Lori is dead, Stacy and Michelle are on their way up to the hospital.”
What unfolded is surreal, unthinkable, and unfortunately not unusual on this planet. Our town is still reeling; her funeral was an international event that was live streamed over the internet. Over four thousand people gathered on the sports field at the public high school in Poway for a unity rally against hate the night she was buried.
Enlightenment isn’t something you achieve or master. Enlightenment doesn’t signify an end point at all! In fact, living in a state of enlightenment is an ongoing process, and an ongoing practice. When you learn to live in an enlightened state, you are relying on your own knowledge and experience to garner the direction you take in life. You don’t rely on others to tell you your direction. You have confidence that what you choose to do, think, eat, have faith in…are all the right choices and decisions.
Living in enlightenment isn’t difficult, despite what you may have been told or may have learned in the past. Enlightenment feels liberating, free, open, and honest. With all that going for it, when you begin living in enlightenment, positive changes will happen in your life that you don’t expect, so it becomes very easy.
Here are four ways to live in enlightenment:
All the meditative traditions encourage us to be still and to drop our thoughts and feelings, so we can breathe our way below all trouble into the flow of life-force that carries us. This is wise counsel. It gives us perspective and sometimes peace. But being a poet, I enter that Universal space and just take notes. I lean into the stillness with an open heart and listen to everything, including my thoughts and feelings and the entanglements of life. For I believe the mutual goal of meditation and poetry is not to have us remove ourselves from our human journey, but to have us live our lives more completely in relationship to the flow of life-force that carries us.
The poems and all that I write are simply the trail and record of what I see and feel in the meditative space. All my writings arise from peering from the edge of our humanness into the bareness of being that permeates all life. I have intuitively worked this way, even as a boy, long before I knew about meditation or poetry. I believe that poetry itself resides at the holy juncture where our humanness touches the bareness of being that holds the Universe together. This is the only place I write from, whether I’m alone in the woods or being jostled on a crowded subway. It is the lens through which I meet life. It is the place I return to in order to renew this endless conversation. It is listening in this space that keeps me fresh and sane.
Without using the term, everyone has marked out a path in life--a path can be defined as a road map that guides you to a goal. Because every day presents some kind of goal, however small, being on a path is inevitable. It doesn't have to be a conscious choice. Yet at a certain point it dawns on most people that they have larger goals, even lifetime goals, that require long-term planning. At this point choosing a path does become a conscious decision.
On the surface, it would appear that life presents many paths, because so many goals present themselves: finding the right partner, raising a family, settling on a career, pursuing success, earning more money, saving a nest egg for retirement. These are socially shared goals, to which more can be added, such as finding God or writing a novel. But if you look deeper, everything on this list boils down to one path only.
This is the path of desire, which is the most natural path, since we all have desires. The impetus that keeps people on the path of desire is universal but also logical. If you want to eat breakfast, make friends, do something you enjoy, or have any other everyday desire, it's logical that expanding your desires and following a bigger dream should serve as a reliable path in life. In fact, because 99% of the human race follows the path of desire, this should prove how defective it is. The problems of poverty, crime, war, hunger, disease, and mental anguish haven't been solved around the world, and one or more of these problems reaches into everyone's life.
In recent years, scientists have proven what ancient wisdom has known: deep breathing can be one of nature’s most potent medicines.
A number of studies now show that deep breathing techniques can release stress and improve a person’s mood, making them feel calmer and trading in feelings of anxiety or fear for a more focused, relaxed state of mind.
Meanwhile, other studies have also explored the effect that breathing has on pain perception, concluding that deep breathing “decisively influences” the way pain is processed and perceived.
According to Daniel Stone, who has explored the art of breathing in depth, conscious breathing can help connect the three main aspects of our being: the body, the mind, and the soul.
Have you ever found yourself standing in line for a ticket, when someone pushes in front of you saying they’re going to miss their train if they don’t get their ticket quickly? You have two choices, either to be really annoyed and irritated or to show compassion and extend forgiveness. Of course, you don’t know whether they would miss their train or not, as you don’t know their situation … but to extend your forgiveness by trying to put yourself in their shoes, to appreciate their situation is much harder to do. For all you know, they might have young children in daycare or school, and if they miss their train, they won’t be back in time to pick them up.
I’m fascinated on a spiritual level that many of us don’t always see that compassion is all about that deep level of connectiveness between ourselves and others. Being able to demonstrate compassion proves that we can push the boundaries of our tolerance and understanding beyond what we believe. It’s worth the time and effort to explore how to push that boundary of understanding further, and with practice it’s possible to become even more compassionate.
