This is the third post in a series on finding balance in your life; today, we are looking at how meditation and Feng Shui can affect your overall feeling of balance and harmony. In past posts, we have discussed how our busy, modern lives affect our health and how we can take steps to find balance again. To read the previous post on balance through nutrition and exercise, click HERE. For the post about finding personal balance and how acupuncture can help restore balance, click HERE.
Meditation
Most people I know are inundated with emails, texts, social media posts, calls and other forms of access on a constant basis. How can we continue living with these interruptions and stay balanced? Learning to turn off the technology and to protect a slice of time for you is important for overall balance and mental health.
A daily meditation practice can offer a respite from these distractions and demands. Meditation can take many forms but the essence is to unplug from the noise and interruptions in order to find your own stillness.
Styles of Meditation. There are many types of meditation: guided, mindfulness, chanting or prayer. It is important to pick a style that resonates with you. The many health benefits of meditation have been well documented. For instance, this recent article from The Washington Post reaffirms that meditation can reduce stress, anxiety, pain and even insomnia. The researcher also found that the volume of gray matter in your head actually increases in the areas of your senses, memory and cognitive function after meditating regularly for only 8 weeks! This form of mental exercise contributes to your overall health but can provide our overworked minds with a bit of peace which they need to work their best. To read the entire article, click HERE.
Meditation Resources. When beginning a practice, it may be helpful to find a teacher or resource that can help you understand this simple, yet complex, process to gain the most benefit. There are endless resources available online. I personally enjoy the guided meditations offered by Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey through the Chopra Center Meditation. The website Sounds True offers a variety of meditation options and programs to purchase. YouTube is another good resource for guided meditations.
It is important to remember that like anything else, building a healthy meditation practice takes time and repetition. Like other forms of exercise, aim to meditate at least a few times a week for 20 minutes at a time. However, if you are able to find just 5 minutes to meditate during a busy day, do it. Studies have shown that just a few minutes a day can help you make better decisions, be more empathetic, calmer and happier.
Feng Shui
Do you feel harmony and balance in your home or office space? Or do you struggle with order, clutter and tidiness? If you answered YES to that last question, you have lots of company! Feng Shui is the practice of bringing balance and harmony to a person’s physical environment. While a professional may help to fully understand and realize harmony in your space, there are some basic elements that can help you start to bring good energy and balance back to your home and office.
Clutter – One of the things we all know is a space free of clutter is good for us. Clutter can distract us from the feeling of peace we may want to cultivate at home or from reaching our highest creativity and productivity at work. Many of us automatically feel our energy sink if we walk into a cluttered home or see a desk piled high with papers, books and unfinished business. Some have an easier time creating and maintaining an organized space, while the rest of us need guidance and strategies to help us along on the path. A book I recently read and recommend is: The Joy of Decluttering by Mari Kondo. It offers lots of tips on how to create order in the home and inspired me to get to work on my own trouble areas.
Organization – Decluttering and organizing usually go hand in hand. As we declutter, we like to organize our space. Ms. Kondo’s book offers lots of tips for organizing; like how to fold and store clothing, how to keep paper sorted and how to decide which belongings are important enough to keep.
A great way to shift our mindsets from being overwhelmed by our stuff is to look at our belongings with gratitude. A key concept that Ms. Kondo explains in detail in her book. Often, we hold onto things because of an emotional attachment; whether it is a memory of an event or a loved one gifted us something we don’t use. As you sift through your things, think about each item and what feelings you get from it. If we don’t use it or feel anything other than joy when we hold an item then it’s time to donate it.
Having a sense of gratitude toward your home and your belongings will help to bring your space a sense of peace and order. If it feels overwhelming to organize your whole house all at once, start small. Tackle one drawer at a time and feel the accomplishment of bringing order to where there was once chaos.
By freeing your home and office of needless clutter you can allow those spaces to become a haven rather than a burden. When we don’t have a mess in front of us, our minds are able to focus on relaxing at home or productively finding solutions at the office. It stands to reason, that our overall healthy and well-being will improve as a side-effect.
Creating personal balance every day can be challenging with all of the demands on our time and energy. However, making small changes and allowing them to become part of our routine can have a lasting and positive impact on our overall health. Do you already have a good grasp of balance in your own life? Are there any books, tips or tricks you use to maintain harmony? Please share them in the comments below.