PEACE

Peace

Happy Sunday - Here’s a brief guided meditation on Inner Peace for you!!

When we cultivate inner Peace with compassion, love, and patience for ourselves we project Peace for others. Take a moment now to sit comfortably, close your eyes, draw your attention to your breath. Take a few deep and slow breaths. Now draw your attention to your heart centre, place your hands on the area of your heart, continue breathing deeply, feel the warmth grow in this area, experience this as an unconditional nurturing embrace, continue to feel the warmth of your nurturing grow and expand to the areas of your body that need unconditional nurturing and acceptance, continue to feel this feeling of love for where you are in this moment in your body. As you exhale, let go of anything that isn’t serving you, any judgements, sadness, harsh words - exhale those thoughts and feelings out for as many times as you need to until you feel a lightness in your heart space, feel that lightness spread to the rest of your body, Bask in that light feeling for about five breath cycles, when you are ready, open your eyes with the knowledge that you possess the ability to nurture yourself and to find a place of lightness in your body at any time. Take the memory of this lightness with you through the day and your environment will respond in kind.

Setting aside time for ourself to do this kind of nurturing can be the most difficult thing to do. We all have a brain with a negativity bias. We are all here because of this bias. There is a part of the brain (the amygdala) that continuously seeks to find threats in order to avoid these threats. This is good when we are actually under threat and need to be protected from physical or emotional harm. But when that bias takes over what we choose to read, see and how we interpret our immediate surroundings then we rob ourselves of the peace within. 

Know that the design of this part of the brain can conclude threats even when they don’t exist - either way you receive a lovely hit of dopamine every time you make a conclusion - whether it is accurate or not. That is also part and parcel of the design of our brain. 

When we let this part of our brain make our decisions and conclusions then we hand over the keys to feeling unrest, fear, threat and can trigger our innate reaction of fight, flight or shut down and dissociation (freeze).

When you take time to nurture yourself, to breathe deeply and slowly (and a longer exhale than inhale) then we self regulate and now can use our higher functions that include hope, compassion and love. When we set aside time to do this, we build our capacity to then give healthier attention to those around us who may be hurting. 

What are you going to do to show yourself compassion, love and acceptance?