In the current economic and business environment, many people throughout the world are finding their lives making unexpected turns.  Some people have been confronted by the need to make so many major changes in their lives that they say they feel like a rudderless boat tossed by high seas.

Sometimes life does present us with challenges that cause us to re-think our basic priorities and values.  I don’t want for a moment to undermine the struggles many are experiencing in these days.  But there really are silver linings in many dark clouds. The challenge is to rein in the panic, stop to take a deep breath, and take a fresh look at the situation.  We often find new directions, revised values and renewed hope if we can center into ourselves long enough to take a fresh look at life.

Here is a way to re-think your situation:

• Stop, sit, breathe, and calm yourself
• Ask yourself what it is that you fear most? What is the worst that could happen?
• Think about how it would change your life it the worst did happen.
• Now spend some time (several days) thinking about how you could turn that bad situation into a source of hope or excitement.

Include some of the above suggestions in your daily plan and let me know how it works for you by sharing in the comment box.

Creative Hands

‘To be born every day’ means to be constantly amazed by the things life has to offer, to not tire of watching the sunset, the moon peeking from the fleeting clouds, the crowd of stars on a clear cool night, the sunlight on the breakfast table.

Even the unpleasant twists and turns, the bad news and disappointments can become stimuli for better things, the way art also portrays the dark areas of the human psyche. Indeed, creativity’s best tool is its transformative quality.

True, life is uncertain. We can’t expect everything to run smoothly according to our wishes and aspirations. No matter how well we plan our course, sometimes things don’t turn out the way we want them. Problems do arise, and we can’t stop them from coming. But creativity – the mother of resilience – helps us get by. It’s what allows us to turn lemons into, well, a lemon meringue pie.

We don’t need to search for creativity. It’s not something we can only learn after a trip to Tibet or an apprenticeship with an acclaimed author. Human beings are born with creative qualities which just need to be nurtured.

So how do you develop your creativity? Meditation, first of all, can help you discover your creative potential. You don’t need to sign up at any center that might give you a whole new vocabulary of philosophical and mystical ideas. The purpose of meditation is to keep things simple so you’ll see what’s important, to see through the blur and marvel at the fine picture hidden by your worries and excesses.

As the actor Alan Alda puts it, ‘The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.’ Fromm calls it discovering a “sense of self.”

You can find several venues for your creativity. You can try writing, painting, drawing, sculpting, graphic design, and the like. It doesn’t have to be art-related. You can also use your creativity in improving your finances through entrepreneurial pursuits or technological creations. It may not even be that ambitious. Homemaking, gardening, cooking, parenting or engaging in a hobby all require creativity, too.

ll you need are some time to relax and to put things in order, some privacy to think things over, and the optimism and patience to carry on. You have to know, too, that you can’t reach your potential in a snap. But you have to pursue your creativity. Being creative means finding your true worth.

A Note From Doctor Cynthia

Hope you have been enjoying these one minute retreats.

If you feeling stressed out, overwhelmed and out of steam running through life at breakneck speed, unable to even take a breath? Consider my upcoming three day retreat to rediscover, rejuvenate, recharge Your Life

This retreat is the perfect opportunity to remove yourself from the stresses of life, to renew energy and gain clarity about the things you really want.
During the course of this one day retreat, you will learn how to:

Sign up here http://www.freestyleretreats.com/retreat-rejuvenate-getaway.html

For every new day, nutritionists and exercise gurus can suggest several things for your health: eating a hearty, balanced breakfast and doing stretches, cardio exercises and strengthening routines. But what about your soul?

Early morning must be a treat not only to the person’s ‘corpus’ but also to his ‘anima’ (call it inner self or soul). The Chinese usually go to the park or in their gardens to do tai-chi, which relaxes both body and mind. But you can do something simpler than that right inside your own home.

While it’s fine to meditate during your leisure time, it’s even better to start your day meditating. Having a fresh mind for another day of work and keeping yourself attuned to life’s essentials will keep the negativity at bay. Thus, you are better able to handle stress after several hours at work or school.

You may meditate right before, during, or after you take your shower. Nature and mankind are generally still, restful and peaceful at daybreak. Your mind is freshest at this moment, like a new canvas or a blank piece of paper waiting for the day’s masterpiece.

Before your daily grind begins, think clearly about the things that matter and immunize your thoughts and feelings from the excesses of your desires. Take a warm shower. Let the soothing heat and calming flow of water ease your mind. Let your worries come later; for a couple of minutes, free yourself from them.

Hindus call the hour before sunrise ‘Brahma muhurta’ (hour of ‘god’). Even devout Muslims, Christians and followers of other religions find morning prayers indispensable to their faith. Whatever your beliefs, the important thing is that you give yourself enough time to think positively about life before you step into life’s realities.

Morning shower meditation may sound odd if you consider what meditation usually requires: peace, concentration and calming environment to help you go smoothly through the process. How could you ever meditate when you are ‘disturbed’ by the water?

The proponents of this type of meditation believe that all of the worries, tensions, problems and any sort of bad thoughts retained in the mind can be washed away figuratively and even mystically by the flowing water. Such a notion somehow creates a great relevance of the natural healing and calming effects of water. Indeed, water’s characteristic as a ‘universal solvent’ extends beyond the laws of physics.

A Note From Doctor Cynthia

Hope you have been enjoying these one minute retreats.

If you feeling stressed out, overwhelmed and out of steam running through life at breakneck speed, unable to even take a breath? Consider my upcoming three day retreat to rediscover, rejuvenate, recharge Your Life

This retreat is the perfect opportunity to remove yourself from the stresses of life, to renew energy and gain clarity about the things you really want.
During the course of this one day retreat, you will learn how to:

Sign up here http://www.freestyleretreats.com/retreat-rejuvenate-getaway.html

‘Everything is extraordinarily clear. I see the whole landscape before me, I see my hands, my feet, my toes, and I smell the rich river mud. I feel a sense of tremendous strangeness and wonder at being alive.’ – Gautama Buddha

If ordinarily mortals like us saw life the way the Enlightened One did, there’d be no cause for suffering — for the negativity that consumes most of our passions. Perhaps heaven is not a place after all but a way of seeing things.

No matter how abundant their lives seem, some people tend to crave more or better things. Like a painting collector who’s always looking for the next Picasso or Rembrandt on auction, like a tycoon who can’t have enough business acquisitions.

It’s not unusual for humans to desire things, but becoming a slave to one’s desire is another thing. For some people satisfying a desire means replacing it with a higher one. They keep raising the ante and ultimately get frustrated.

It pays to keep things simple. We tend to dislike life because of unrealized goals, but we forget to be grateful for the little things that bring us happiness. The little conversations we have with our kids, the way your dog looks at you and wiggles its tail, or how your cat purrs and rubs against your legs. These little things can be uplifting.

You may be surrounded by beauty, but just keep looking past it. So the next time, look at the moonlight on your window pane, the gauzy curtain blown in by the breeze from an open window, the sun shining on a neighborhood covered by last night’s snow, someone gracefully walking, taking her time in a busy throng.

Sit back and enjoy the little things around you. You can appreciate your loved ones better that way. The way your life partner touches your shoulder after he or she gives you a mug of coffee should be the source of a little pleasure. The way he or she smiles when you say your goodbye, heading for work. Little things like these should all add up at the end of the day, so you’ll have something to feel grateful about and so you’ll welcome the next day more enthusiastically.

At one point in your busy day, you should spend one minute to think about the pleasant, little things that have happened. Life often gives its gift of pleasure to us in little installments. All you have to do is count them, think how they’ll positively affect your life in the long run, and they will.

A Note From Doctor Cynthia

Hope you have been enjoying these one minute retreats.

If you feeling stressed out, overwhelmed and out of steam running through life at breakneck speed, unable to even take a breath? Consider my upcoming three day retreat to rediscover, rejuvenate, recharge Your Life

This retreat is the perfect opportunity to remove yourself from the stresses of life, to renew energy and gain clarity about the things you really want.

During the course of this one day retreat, you will learn how to:

Sign up here http://www.freestyleretreats.com/retreat-rejuvenate-getaway.html

Nature offers a perfect setting for recreation and more. Instead of just unwinding and detoxifying your mind from your numbing routine, you can also get to know yourself better. This is what meditation is all about.

You don’t have to subscribe to any particular belief system to be able to meditate. You don’t have to memorize prayers or repeatedly utter ‘the spoken essence of the universe’ (the Hindu and Buddhist ‘om’). It’s a simple means of self-rediscovery without the complicated philosophies, theologies and myths.

Just sit comfortably and think about what you did wrong and what you did right. Think about how to make things better, about what makes you deeply happy. The last part may seem tricky, as we tend to accumulate layers of wants that we often mistake for goals that lead to happiness.

Perhaps it’s best to think back well into your past. What things made you happy as a child? If you can remember them, you might find your prized acquisitions and honorifics dispensable.

Think of your beginnings. And what better way to ‘live the metaphor’ than to meditate among nature’s offerings during the season of beginnings – spring.

Meditating on a cool spring day perhaps sounds like something you haven’t done before. Do it this time.

Gaze at budding flowers and the leaves of grass turning green; at the drops of dew on the tree leaves; at the birds coming home to fill the air with their lively twittering; at the puddles of water after a short fine rain; and take in the fresh smell of everything coming back to life.

Steal away from the city. Ignore the malls. Find a safe place in the woods, a spot on a secluded beach, a scenic perch up a mountain, a good hideaway near a babbling brook or a singing waterfall, or anywhere that doesn’t remind you of work.

Each day in spring should be lived with what the season represents – hope. Hope for happiness. Hope that the best is yet to come. Hope for nature.

So skip the busy life as often as you can and be a naturalist. Don’t just read about Henry David Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond. Live bits and slices of it, too. Bring a camera or a sketch pad or just commit to memory the beauty you see.

Spring is only the beginning, really. You can enjoy nature well into summer, which may turn the jungle of concrete, steel and glass too hot for comfort. And would you want to miss the harvest and the colorful ‘adieu’ of tree leaves in autumn?

The thing is: you need to commune with nature every chance you get, because nature detoxifies. Nature brings us closer to our true selves.

A Note From Doctor Cynthia

Hope you have been enjoying these one minute retreats.

If you feeling stressed out, overwhelmed and out of steam running through life at breakneck speed, unable to even take a breath? Consider my upcoming three day retreat to rediscover, rejuvenate, recharge Your Life

This retreat is the perfect opportunity to remove yourself from the stresses of life, to renew energy and gain clarity about the things you really want.
During the course of this one day retreat, you will learn how to:

Sign up here http://www.freestyleretreats.com/retreat-rejuvenate-getaway.html

Our mind can hold a lot of different thoughts in a day. In fact, these ‘noisy thoughts’ are what keep us busy day in and day out. We are driven by our thoughts and often they seem too big, too heavy for comfort.

Whatever we have today, pleasant or not, is the end result of previous actions triggered by the thoughts we entertain in our mind. Often, our thoughts even color certain circumstances. A bad fix gets even worse if we think quite negatively about it. So when we think of our lives being messy, if we focus on that, it’ll probably get messier.

It’s all in the mind, they say. But it’s not just a test of your outlook on life: of the bottle being half empty or half full. Whether you like it or not, your thoughts, including your insecurities and fears, attract more of the same, until they rule your life.

And let’s face it: we can’t keep happy thoughts for long. It’s a rare gift to be able keep thinking pleasant thoughts for long in this harried world, with mass media bombarding us with unpleasant images and texts. Indeed, if we were gifted enough to exclusively think happy thoughts despite the negativity, we’d all be flying to Never Land, wouldn’t we?

Thus, in this day and age, quietude has become a personal treasure we should nurture. Quiet thoughts – neither happy nor sad – in this noisy world may seem like a ripple-less area in the middle of a choppy sea, but they’re not impossible to achieve.

Let’s do this: lie comfortably in a quiet place for one minute. Let’s not think about work or family; about what we have or have not; about what should have, could have and would have; not even about the best days of our lives because they’ll just make us feel sad that they’re difficult to have again.

If nature provides the best cures for physical ailments, it works even better at clearing up our cluttered thoughts. Think of a rainbow trout in a clear stream, a golden field of barley combed by the breeze, a butterfly on a dewy bloom, the Sun mellowed by light clouds, white sand and turquoise shallows in the tropics.

Let your mind find a good retreat from the busy world. Nature offers countless quiet images to unburden the mind. They’re beautiful, unobtrusive, and demand nothing from us, except that we let them be.

The closest thing to any thought about nature that works just as well, is perhaps the image of a calm face in a busy crowd. Let that be your face, even just for a minute.

One Minute Retreat

You may not know it but it even adds up to that tummy bulge we often call “middle aged spread.” Blame it on leptin, the protein that’s depleted when you’re always beating deadlines and chasing after the subway train every day but, it’s the same protein that knocks off your appetite control, causing you to eat when you really didin’t want to or don’t need to.

Stress can lead to so many conditions and illnesses which is the reason it’s important to fight it off, and it doesn’t necessarily have to with long sessions in the gym or a two week vacation, though these things really do help! The problem is though, when you’re stressed, trying to add an exercise routine of 3 times per week or taking a vacation can actually induce more stress particularly when you’re struggling to find the time to fit these things in.

What I have discovered however is that taking short and consistent “time-out” sessions add up and really are great ways to refire your energy, clear your mind and prepare you for the task, or day ahead.

Just taking a short break to have a cup of cappuccino or treating yourself to a bouquet of white roses from the nearby flower shop can be enough to put your mind at ease and create a positive distraction from your current activities to enjoy some “me-time” or give you enough time to stop blowing off steam.

There are a number of little activities you can embark on when it comes to busting stress and, these are the things that you can do whether you’re sat on your sofa or at your hard mahogany office table. You’d be amazed at how relaxing it is just tapping your fingers on your desk while looking away at the office window and watching the world go by.

Maybe there are activities going on outside your office window that you’ve been too busy to notice before like, the new business complex they’re building across the highway and suddenly, it becomes interesting watching the heavy machinery transport large volumes of dirt from one side of the complex to the other or, watching with fascination, how they lower that steel girder that will support part of the new building.

This may sound a little too simple but taken into a psychological context, stress is caused by doing much more than what one can normally handle, whether emotionally, psychologically, or physically. Breaking away from the situation that is causing the stress is the best way to avoid getting more stressed.

So, if you’re reading this from your office, take look out the window and in less than a minute you will find something that diverts your attention. It could be a funny-looking outfit worn by an office executive or a poodle who tiptoes beside his owner wearing a polka-dot dress.

If you have the chance, what would be even more beneficial would be for you to open your office window, and feel the fresh breeze on your face. This has superb cooling effect, especially if you just came out from a boiler-room meeting!

Try doing this as you tap your fingers on your desk. It could be a good way of rechanneling your energy, positive or otherwise into an inanimate object. You’ll find yourself drowned out by the tapping sound, making your mind wander to far-flung places and happy thoughts.

So whatever it may be that bothers you, tap your fingers, look out the window, and enjoy it!

Dr Cynthia