August 10, 2009 – 7:28 am
When you’re a top executive in a Fortune 500 company, the last thing you have on your mind during working hours is a retreat. It’s even likely that you haven’t the faintest idea what a retreat might look like, since all you know is consistent hard work. Finding time to look out the window for a minute to break away from the daily barrage of meetings and phone or conference calls might be like a retreat to you.
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.
Take a Stroll
Boredom is a state of mind that sets in when you’ve forgotten simple pleasures or when you allow a sense of emptiness to dwell in your heart. It’s not something you can just ignore, considering how it can affect a person’s work, relationships and perception of life in general.
It seems ironic but you can learn a simple ‘cure’ to it by observing a child, who looks at ordinary things in amazement, laughs at funny gestures and enjoys ordinary treats. Perhaps it’s time to rediscover the child in you.
Finding Serenity
City Life can be tormenting in so many ways. It could be the loud music from your the next-door neighbor or the general din of the busy streets. It could be the motorists that cut you in traffic or people who shove you in the subway station at rush hour.
The blurry pace of urban life and work-related anxiety can strain relationships, affecting your marriage, family life, circle of friends. Stress seems magnified in your jungle of glass, steel and concrete, and there’s hardly any time for letting your soul breathe.
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.
