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Tag Archives: take time out

In January there is so much to do.

snow_shovelThere are always so many things to do. There is work, kids, spouse, grandchildren, friends, housework, and yard work. In January there are winter challenges and tasks – shoveling snow, scraping ice, bringing in firewood, building fires and more.
 
January is also when we start thinking about taxes and about planning for the New Year and honoring resolutions.  If the planning was already done, it is time to begin to put the plans into action.
 
In January there is so much to do. It is so very easy to become overwhelmed by all the things before us. It is also very easy to become so busy doing things that we forget to simply enjoy living.
 
Give yourself time to live, time to laugh, time to play and time to work. Try to keep it all in balance. If balance becomes elusive, give me a call – I can help you put it all back into perspective (203-855-9714).
 
“Prepare to live by all means, but for heaven’s sake do not forget to live. You will never have a better chance than you have at present. You may think you will have, but you are mistaken.”      — Arnold Bennett

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Take 1 Minute Meditations for Life

daydreaming-womanWhen 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.

The good news is that you don’t have to take three days out of your busy schedule to get some “me time” and, you don’t even need to think of going to the gym or cafeteria if you just want a peaceful 5 minutes away from the daily routine and clutter.

Just by closing your eyes and sitting down in your office, you can meditate for one minute to regain calm, peace of mind, and self-control. During this minute, try being like a child … swivel that chair! You’ll be amazed that what you intended just to be one minute will become five and your mind will ready to take on the next task of the day, stress free.

If you’re not sure what to mediate on, you could simply think about some of the happy times you’ve had, remember the things you’ve enjoyed doing the most – especially hobbies. If you’re a parent, one of the best ways to clear the clutter from your mind is to think about the joy your children give you. In fact, why not keep a photograph of your child on your desk (especially as a toddler) and just reminisce about some of the things the child has done to make you laugh, the funny things they’ve said, or the times they’ve said something so sweet it brought tears to your eyes.

Remember a retreat isn’t just all about clearing the mind of clutter. It’s also about filling the mind with those things that bring joy to your heart.

A minute of meditation can be done any time you want and although today it’s in your office, tomorrow it could be when you arrive home — the house is empty and you just sit on the sofa and close your eyes for a few minutes.

It may seem as thought it’s just a few minutes of stress release, but the benefits outlast the focused time and brings with it many health benefits. Take note the next time you stop to meditate, how much more productive you become afterwards and just how much more relaxed you feel. It will encourage you to take more time out during the day for that one minute of meditation.

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:

  • Relax
  • Put yourself first
  • Do what matters most to you
  • Make self-care your top priority
  • Sign up here http://www.freestyleretreats.com/retreat-rejuvenate-getaway.html

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    Find Wonder in Little Things

    wonder-in-small-things1‘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:

  • Relax
  • Put yourself first
  • Do what matters most to you
  • Make self-care your top priority
  • Sign up here http://www.freestyleretreats.com/retreat-rejuvenate-getaway.html

    Bookmark and Share

    A Quiet Mind in a Busy World

    quiet-mindOur 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.

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    Remembering To Take Time

    Enjoy a Break

    Enjoy a Break

    We’ve gotten so used to the rat race that we think stopping awhile means losing opportunities. Everyone is rushing without letup, aiming for one thing and then the next, setting no ceiling for contentment.

    Time passes by so quickly, as though digital timekeeping has sped up the Earth’s rotation. Our routine is set at exact times. Things get done like clockwork. And we are slaves to our routine, from the moment we wake up to the time we close our eyes.

    There’s nothing natural about our daily grind. It’s a monotony that’s quite out of sync with the beauty that surrounds us but which we ignore. We’re simply doing things for reasons that appeal to the vanity of our species. Maybe it’s time to reconnect with the childhood joys you’ve forgotten.

    You don’t have to leave everything behind, of course. Take it easy and gradually reinvent your way of seeing things. You need to focus on the little details that bring out the whole picture, like examining each amazing fractal in the Julia Set, each constellation in the night sky, or, closer to home, each dear photograph in the album you’ve kept.

    Focus is what we all need, but it doesn’t always have to do with work. Giving yourself a little time in the middle of a busy day won’t hurt. It revitalizes your senses, in fact. A one-minute introspective focus on the beauty of your surrounding at lunch break may change the way you appreciate life in the long run.

    It can be your one minute of simplification, of self-discovery through the appreciation of little things around you: the way the flowers are arranged, the combination of their colors; how light is reflected by the leaves of grass and trees and the river; the flutter of pigeons at the park; someone whistling a happy tune; an old couple holding hands.

    Let it be an unhurried, un-harried, unspoiled one-minute habit of seeing things in a blissful light. It’s a treat not just for your senses but the soul as well. And through it you may understand yourself better.

    It’s a good start to realize that life can be even more beautiful if we could spend some time to enjoy it. Not the high life but a simple one, which carries no price tag, as the best things in life, a poet declared, can’t be had with a swipe of your plastic.

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    Stop And Smell The Roses

    Smell The Roses For 1 Minute

    Smell The Roses For 1 Minute

    The demands of life are getting more complicated. We talk of advancement in the way things are done, but what it really means is that the pace of everything keeps getting faster. We do things quickly so we can do more things.

    It’s not really society that progresses but technology. We are now more concerned about getting things done for our jobs or careers and there are high-tech tools to do the task well. We think little of what nurtures humanity, of the simple pleasures life used to afford us.

    We rush daily, from the simple household chores to our tasks in the workplace. It’s good to make use of time for productivity’s sake, but when it means your personal failure in the end, that’s another story.

    Everything goes by in a blur if you rush and that’s tragic if you consider life, as philosophers do, as a journey from cradle to grave. You need to relax and let your mind see things clearly.

    We all love to know the purpose of our existence, but you don’t have to read tomes or follow mystics and gurus to think about yours. Simply identify important things or parts of your life that you can’t live without. And you can only do that if you slow down a little.

    What color are your neighbor’s eyes for instance. You might have noticed they’re blue, but how blue? Or do you still see amazing shapes of clouds in the sky the way you used to when you were a kid? Is the cottony elephant still up there?

    Important things are relevant, but not all relevant things can be a reason for happiness. Knowing the essence of our existence doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, it will take time before we could realize that our happiness is found among simple things around us.

    So take a minute off to stop and smell the roses. Life is essentially not about your paperwork; it’s about nature. Take time to smell the fragrance of nature and capture its magnificent beauty without worrying about the next step. Sneak into a garden and stay awhile. Or just feel the warmth of the sun on your face.

    To live a happy life, you have to zoom in and see, nay, feel the smaller, clearer picture. The grass that grows out of a crack on the pavement, the breeze that rustles the leaves of trees, the bird that blunders into your living room – they stand for all the simple things that make life more breathable.

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