Tag: inner peace

Feel Your Feelings

Just a little reminder! Not every feeling or thought is desirable or welcome, but the more you try to push a feeling down or reject it, the more it will stick around! What we resist, persists.

Try instead to be curious about your feelings, like they’re guests arriving for tea. Invite them in, sit down, and explore! If you’re feeling envious (such an uncomfortable feeling!) don’t shame yourself! Sit down with your envy and figure out what’s at the root of it. Are you feeling “less than”? Did you get stuck in the comparing and contrasting trap? Are you shoulding on yourself? Where is the envy showing up in your body? How is it affecting your breathing or the way you’re holding yourself? What’s the quality of your inner dialogue around the feeling? Are you berating yourself or practicing compassion? That’s just one example!

All our feelings are an invitation to get to know ourselves more deeply and to cultivate friendliness toward our very human ups and downs. Feelings pass, after all. This is one way to develop more compassion for ourselves and others.

Next time you have an uncomfortable thought or feeling, pause, breathe, and have some tea with it! Chances are, once that feeling has been acknowledged and understood, it will move on and get carried away by the wind!

Sending love and hugs to all,

Ally Hamilton Hewitt

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here and my yoga classes and courses here!

3 Ways to Forgive Yourself and Stop Dwelling on the Past

glassofregretIf you’re human, (and I assume there are no zebras reading this post), then you can probably look in your rearview mirror and spot some choices you wish you could make over again, and differently. The truth is, most of us do the best we can as we go along, and that means most of us will probably fall short from time to time. Life does not unfold in a linear fashion, we do not get to hit the “pause button” until we’re ready, sometimes we think we’re ready for something only to find out we are wildly unprepared or had an unrealistic idea of what we were getting into in the first place. Also, sometimes we’re coming out of abuse or neglect, a dysfunctional family system, a crazy culture that expects us to edit out our difficult feelings, or we’ve developed coping mechanisms along the way that don’t serve our highest good at all. We may have stories we tell ourselves that are not true, ideas about other people that are based on our own misperceptions or lessons we learned that we have to unlearn, or a whole host of other difficulties that come along with being human. It’s an interesting and incredible gig, but no one would argue that it’s easy! You can lose a lot of time dwelling on the past, obsessing over decisions you cannot unmake, or feeling regret that won’t serve you or anyone else.

Here are three things you can do to lift the weight of regret from your shoulders, stop dwelling on the past, and free yourself of the burden of shame.

1. Embrace your fallibility and join the human race.

Welcome to the party, sport. We have all screwed up, some of us in big ways, some of us in smaller ways, but there is not a person on this planet over thirty who doesn’t have some questionable choices in his or her past. We learn as we go, and sometimes we hurt people because we are too young to know what we want, or too confused, or we wanted it then, but five years later we felt the soul being crushed out of us. If you feel badly about some of your past actions, please recognize this is because you have a kind, gentle heart. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t even be thinking about this stuff. If you have a warm and gentle heart, you are not an a$$hole, and that is fabulous. Please take a moment right now, place your hand over your heart, close your eyes, take a deep breath and say out loud in a firm voice, “I forgive myself for being human.”

TIP: If you’re at work, say it in a firm voice inside your head, but say it enough times that you feel it. If you exhale out some tears or other emotions, that’s great.

2. You are not Atlas.

Your work here does not involve carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. If other people won’t or can’t forgive you, that is on them, that’s a weight they’re choosing to carry, and an obstacle to their own freedom; at a certain point, you have to forgive yourself. Having said that, it never hurts to communicate clearly. If there’s something you feel you need to say to someone to make things right, go ahead and say it. Think carefully about your motivation, and how this might be for the other party. If you think you might disrupt someone’s life, or his or her tenuous grip on being okay, if you think the other person might still be healing from heartbreak, then it might be best to write a letter you never send.

TIP: It’s incredibly powerful to get things down on paper and out of your head, so don’t hesitate to put your thoughts in black and white. When you’re done, you can determine whether this is a missive that was just for you, or for you and them.

3. Be present.

It’s good and important work to know yourself, and that means it makes sense to examine the choices, decisions and behavior you regret, but you serve no one by marinating in that sad sauce. Once you’ve looked at your part in any story, owned what you can of it, apologized when necessary or appropriate, then there comes a time when you need to close the book on that story. Your life is not happening behind you, any more than it’s happening in front of you. The mind loves to hurtle back into the past, or careen forward into the future, but all that does is rob us of the present. Of course your memories and experiences are part of the fabric that makes you, you, and of course that makes them part of the tapestry that is your present, but how can you do a journey with your back to the road? That’s not a great way to navigate, or open to things as they are now, but it’s an excellent way to crash into feelings, things or people who are trying to get your attention in this moment.

Everything is in a constant state of flux, and if you keep looking back over your shoulder, you are trying to stop time and stop the current. Maybe your mistakes will help you travel through your present-day waters with more ease, strength and insight. Perhaps recognizing the bumps in the road will help you avoid repeating mistakes, so you can, at the very least, make better mistakes as you go. Your breath is an excellent anchor-point. When you become aware of your inhales and exhales, you’re directing your mind to focus on something that’s happening right here, right now. This is an excellent way to catch yourself when the mind wants to head in a downward spiral, when you notice obsessive thinking, or when you recognize you’ve already examined a situation to the degree that it’s productive.

“Svadhyaya” means “self-study”, and it’s one of the Niyamas. We want to understand ourselves and know what’s motivating our choices and actions, but we also want to embrace the reality that we’re continually evolving. Don’t allow yourself to continue to set your compass toward something behind you, because you’re failing to integrate your own metamorphosis. That’s not something you want to miss!

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

intro-seated-meditation

How to Live in the Present and Ditch Your Stress

Left to its own devices, the mind loves to time travel. It will pull you into the past, often with regret or longing and frequently resulting in feelings of depression, or into your future, inventing situations that may never come to pass, and leading to feelings of fear and anxiety. Ever geared yourself up for a problem that never arose, or spent time rewriting a conversation that already took place? Me, too! That’s time we can never have back.

A lot of people swing from one state to another, though–dwelling on the past and feeling depressed, or careening into the future and feeling anxious. Not a very davidmbaderfun ride! The ticket off that ride is free, simple, and available to you at all times, and it is called your breath.

How Does Breathing Help You Be Present?

When you become aware of your inhales and exhales, you’re also training your mind to focus on something that is happening right here, right now, in your present. Any sensation you become aware of is happening right now, which is why the yoga practice, including seated meditation, is so powerful. The trick is to catch yourself when the mind starts spinning, and to do it quickly; essentially, you want to stop the tape before it gets going.

Ending Prolonged Stress

There’s something called “negativity bias”, and it’s part of our wiring. Back when we had to worry about things like sabertooth tigers eating us for lunch, or whether there’d be enough food to eat for the next few days, or if a storm was coming, this made sense for our survival. Biologically, we’re wired to worry, but most of us don’t have to worry about being eaten by tigers or whether we have shelter for the night. We are also not built for prolonged stress–ten minutes while we’re running from said tiger? That we can do. Ten months when we’re obsessing over relationship or financial stress? Not so much. Rewiring the mind takes desire, effort and determination, but like anything, it gets easier over time, and with practice. Instead of allowing yourself to be wired for worry, you can decide you’d rather be wired for gratitude, and focused on all the things that could go right.

Start the Process with Seated Meditation

When you first start to sit and meditate, it’s likely the mind will continue its habitual pattern of heading into the past and future. You may tell yourself to focus on your breath, and find after three seconds that you’re having a sexual fantasy, or thinking about dinner. That is okay! Over time, the space between your thoughts will increase. You just pick the mind up, and come back to your next inhale. You, “begin again”. When you keep working on one-pointed focus, you are also working on the same skill you’ll use eventually to choose one thought over another. Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen, so why feed your worries? You can make a conscious decision to feed your peace instead. Ready to give it a shot? Let’s practice together.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

intro-seated-meditation

Work That Doesn’t Belong to Us

There-are-things-that-we (1)Much of our pain in life comes from our inability to let go and trust. Often, we’re so attached to that picture in our heads of “how things should be”, we contract against things as they are. You may have noticed, life doesn’t feel great when we’re hunched in a little ball with our eyes squeezed shut, and our hands over our ears.

Sometimes we’re trying to do work that doesn’t belong to us. Maybe we’re attempting to save people, which is different than loving them. We might think we know what’s best for the people closest to us, and we might even be right, but everyone has to do his or her own journey. You cannot keep someone else’s side of the street clean. I mean, you can cross the street and sweep all you want, but if a person is committed to making a mess, the minute you walk away the debris will start flying again. You have to open your mind to the idea that sometimes a person has to make a mess in order to learn something essential. We’ve all experienced that.

Also, the truth is we never know what is right for other people. What seems obvious to us might not be obvious to someone else. There isn’t one path to happiness, there are about seven billion. People are complicated and messy and we all have our histories, stories we tell ourselves, ideas about things that we’ve learned from our experiences, and tendencies that help or hinder us. Most people reach a point when they have to reckon with their pain, anguish, heartache and disappointment; this is part of knowing ourselves. Some people are terrified of that work, or committed to finding ways around it, like numbing out, denying or repressing. Those are not solutions that lead to happiness, but you can’t force a person to come out of hiding. People do that if and when they’re ready, and not a moment sooner.

You might create a lot of fear, anxiety and suffering for yourself by thinking it is your job to manage the path of your children. When they’re little, of course you want to create stability, a nurturing and loving home, a solid base from which they can grow and flourish. If you start to “future-trip”, however, and think that your current choices can somehow protect them from future heartbreak, I think you’re fooling yourself. I don’t know too many people who get through life without some heartbreak along the way. Of course we want the path for our children to be full of sunshine and flowers, joy and love, and a profound sense of belonging in the world, and hopefully we give them the tools to set them up for their adventures in the best ways possible. It’s not always in your control to make everything perfect, though. Some people stay in abusive marriages thinking it’s best for the kids, but is it? Is it good for our sons and daughters to model their relationships after the one they’re seeing day in and day out, if it’s full of pain and violence?

The more you can release your grip on the story, the more life flows. It’s not just your story, you are not the only writer. You don’t get to edit out the parts you don’t like, or force the other characters to do, say, or feel what you want. This isn’t a piece of fiction, this is life, and the other characters get to forge their own stories and do things that might surprise, infuriate, delight, scare, enrage or depress you. You don’t have to allow other people’s desires to affect you at all, but if you’re close to people and you’re human, they probably will. Nonetheless, it’s wonderful and mysterious and interesting to be human, and who’s to say what the right way is to go about this thing? Obviously, we don’t want to move through life intentionally hurting other people, that would be a really crappy way to go. Short of that, following your heart seems the clear choice. We’re here for such a burst of time. There’s never been another you, or me, there’s never been another any of us, nor will there ever be. The more space we can give each other to be who we are, the more the artwork of life shines through. We all have a particular color to splash all over the canvas. Trust in yours, and celebrate the splashing of those around you. We can figure out who was “right” after we die 😉 Sending you a ton of love, Ally Hamilton