A Simple Beginner Yoga Sequence
For this simple beginner yoga sequence, begin by resting in this position for 5 minutes.
Lie down on your back with knees bent, feet close to your buttocks.
How to feel more confident and powerful – more you!
Today we will talk about how to feel more confident, more powerful, centred and whole.
In the last two meditation classes, we have been exploring the concept of “magnetising yourself”. It helped us focus on how to make life more fun and manageable.
We leave parts of ourselves in the activities and emotions of our day. So, by the end of the day, we are often quite frazzled or tired. We can restore our calm by gathering back those pieces of ourselves that we’ve left dotted about the day (week, month, year, years). This is quite simple to do on a daily basis.
Here’s how.
Take a few minutes now to sit quietly. Feel into the solidity of your body. The pressure of your body on the floor. Your back on the floor or up against the wall or chair-back behind you. Give yourself time to arrive in your body, so that you begin to feel a pleasant weightiness. Maybe give yourself five minutes just to do that. Feel your body present here.
Now, see that awareness or presence as a magnet to help you gather back the pieces of yourself from your day. Begin to run your day again in your head, like images on a movie screen but without going into the emotion of the events too much. Just remind yourself of what your day contained. Begin to draw the pieces of yourself you left in those activities back to you now.
Keep going until you’ve completed the day and you’re back – awareness and body in the same place at the same time – and notice how you feel.
When I do this, I find everything feels brighter, colours are clearer, the edges are crisp, and I feel mentally awake. And above all, I feel more powerful and able to cope with my life.
Now, I’ve given you a practice to use as a daily clear up. We can use similar practices to heal far older wounds, and you may find it helpful once you are familiar with the daily practice to begin going back further in time. But, my recommendation is that if you want to gather back parts of yourself from traumatic experiences in the past that you do so with the help of a qualified practitioner. By all means, get in touch and I will connect you with someone if I cannot help you myself.
Meditation
Meditation is a simple and powerful way to relax, quiet your busy mind, and connect with your deeper self. Meditation teachers variously describe the practice as going within, stilling the mind, finding inner peace, and experiencing being rather than doing.
Joanne’s Online Meditation Classes teach you to switch off deliberately so that your body moves from fight and flight to rest, digest and repair; they will also help you feel confident and content, and bring a sense of clarity to your life.
Private appointments are held at Vita Skin Spa in Winchester, though please ensure you check the location of any classes and private appointments.
The power of a 90 day plan to help you reach your business goals
You will never reach your business goals if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks. Winston Churchill.
Welcome to a new year! I hope last year was excellent for you, but even if it wasn’t we get to use the new year as an opportunity to start over and my job is to help you master your 2018 ninety days at a time. So if there are any lingering gripes and niggles from last year, let them go completely once and for all, and let’s start the new one with a fresh slate!
My goal in this blog is to encourage you to change the way you plan your business if you are not already a 90-day planner.
If you are, there may be some suggestions that allow you to tweak and improve your existing process.
Why 90 days? Because we have a tendency to overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in three or five.
Rockefeller worked on the basis that you plan your 3 – 5-year strategy and then you plan your operations in quarters (Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish). The 3 – 5-year strategy keeps your goal in mind and can be quite a high level. I have a 20-year goal to make my retirement from poetry and art; a 10-year goal to have established a community for spiritually driven health and wellbeing practitioners; a 5-year goal to be running a yoga and coaching franchise. The goals are high level and can be achieved in a whole variety of ways, but I know what I’m aiming at and I can take action towards them without shutting off other opportunities. For example, I know that I need to hone my skill as a writer and an artist now. It may take 20 years to get the skill to be really good.
Once you have that overall destination in mind, you can break it down into what needs to be achieved this year, and then that is broken down into quarters.
What specifically needs to be done this quarter to take me towards that one year, 3 years, 5-year goal? 90 days is long enough for you to get things done, but not so long that you kid yourself you have time to play with. [Who doesn’t sometimes think oh, I’ve got all year to do that, and then get to September with a huge list of things they committed to but haven’t done yet? And isn’t it the case for everyone that there are surprise events, challenges and opportunities that if you are running a longer planning year knock you off track purely because you get distracted in dealing with them?]
So quarterly chunks are manageable, measurable, accountable amounts of time, that require you to FOCUS on what’s important at that moment, and if you stack them together they will add up to real change and forward momentum.
90-day planning:
- Assumes you have a 3-5 year goal which guides all your business planning
- Requires you to focus down on what’s important in your business right now: my preference is just 3 goals so that I’m forced to prioritise ruthlessly
- Is memorable. You only have to remember what you’re working on for these 3 months. You only have 3 goals that are relevant right now.
- Makes decision making easy. Does this fit within my 90-day plan or not? If not, don’t do it or delegate it.
- Stops you wasting time. If it isn’t on purpose for your 90 days, don’t do it or delegate it. If you chase two rabbits, both will escape!
So… who is struggling with a bundle of resistance? What’s that resistance about?
Focus gives you a feeling of being control
…of running your business the way you want rather than it running you, it improves confidence and clarity, and frankly, it makes a far better impression and so improves your customer and client attraction. It combats overwhelm (if I only have to remember 3 goals, not 27, that helps), and it provides a clear decision-making structure. And …
above all, it builds self-esteem.
Why? Because you will begin to prove to yourself just how much you can do when you focus, instead of either feeling like a headless chicken or a hamster in a wheel – completely on track but going nowhere because the track has no end.
So let’s take a piece of paper and divide it into quarters. Label the quarters 1/2/3/4 for the four quarters of the year. Think about the 3-year plan, and what needs to be done THIS year towards that plan. Then think about what has to be done first. Write the 3 most important things in q1.
Now go back over it and check if you’ve written things down that you would truly LOVE to achieve, not just what feels logical. You’re more likely to achieve across the board with items in your plan that are purely for the joy and satisfaction of achieving them.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing that you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.” Steve Jobs
Coaching can help you get your focus back.
Whether the hurdles are in your personal or your professional life, coaching can help you realise your life goals. For further information on individual coaching appointments, contact Joanne. Appointments may be in person, generally at Vita Skin Spa in Winchester, Hampshire, or by Zoom.
Emotional resilience and self containment
In our yoga classes this week we’ve been discussing the idea of emotional resilience and self-containment.
What it means to be able to contain our energy, our thoughts, our emotions, our actions. So, we can look after ourselves and we look after the people around us.
What does it mean to contain oneself? Colloquially we use the term to mean to be able to hold our feelings or behaviour within bounds.
To literally contain them from spilling over (and by inference, affecting other people). We might say it positively – “I’m trying to contain my excitement” – or more pejoratively “For goodness sake, contain yourself”.
In class, I wanted to explore what the concept of containment had to offer our emotional resilience and health.
When I consider what containing myself means to me, I am struck by the way I use it to mean self-care. It means being able to hold my own feelings – tenderly, with consideration for myself – without splurging them out on anyone who will listen. It feels like self-respect. I acknowledge these feelings, and I hold them as precious. It means I will share them as necessary for my greater insight and wellbeing with people who’ve earned the right and will show me and them the respect they deserve.
There is strength in containing myself, until the appropriate moment when I may unburden myself to someone who can hold me and those feelings with care. And there is also respect for others.
Perhaps it’s a hazard of the job that I sometimes find myself pigeonholed by people who just want to let go, to let rip, to make their problem someone else’s, anyone else’s… but when it happens it feels like being hijacked. I’m sure you’ve experienced it too, especially if you are a good listener.
Of course, over the years I’ve got better at handling the situation and compassionately putting boundaries back in place. Yet still –
there is an energetic invasion when you splurge on someone whether they are interested or not, and we should take responsibility for that.
I’ve certainly done it, and later acknowledged it and thanked the person for their forbearance in dealing with it.
So – containing myself means treating myself and others with respect. It entails strength and compassion. It also assumes in practice that I will disclose and unburden myself appropriately because that too is part of containing oneself. If I am completely overwhelmed by my feelings they will either overflow or have to be suppressed. Neither of those, in the long run, is helpful to our health and wellbeing.
Continually overflowing feelings can leave people paralysed and unable to take action; continually suppressed feelings can leave people able to act but not to enjoy their life.
So we have a sense of measured unburdening, forbearance, and personal responsibility to add to self-respect. That sounds like a powerful cocktail for emotional intelligence to me. What does it require?
It requires us to know what we are capable of containing. So, we put in place support measures to help.
Over the years I’ve used psychotherapy, holistic therapies, retreats, personal study, yoga, friends and colleagues to help me process the emotional experience of life and keep me as available and centred as possible. This is the way I choose to live my life. In fact, that process has undoubtedly inspired the creation of classes and retreats as a place for people to do the same.
Do let me know what you do? Or if I can help by providing a safe place and careful listening while you take inventory of your own emotional holding, it would be my privilege.
Meditation classes provide a space to develop resilience
Meditation practice is a simple and powerful way to relax, quiet your busy mind, and connect with your deeper self. Mindfulness and meditation teachers variously describe the practice as going within, stilling the mind, finding inner peace, and experiencing being rather than doing.
For me, meditation is all these things, and a healer of body, mind and spirit. It will help you:
- improve your cardiac health
- strengthen your immune system
- switch from fight and flight to rest, digest and repair
- calm your emotions
- bring clarity
- help you feel content and confident of your purpose in life
- know who you are
- release stress and anxiety in your everyday life.
Joanne Sumner runs meditation classes in West London. She also runs regular retreats.
2019: The zen of January. The New Year resolution solution
It’s that time of year when everyone is making their new year resolutions, or proclaiming how they won’t be or don’t believe in making new year resolutions – and it can get a bit sanctimonious on both sides! So how about this?
Your resolutions, or lack thereof, are none of my business, and you cordially care less about mine too.
Could that be the zen of January? A simple, gentle, inclusive, live and let live. It works for me.
Money mindset: what if abundance comes first?
A couple of years ago, I spent some time reading A Source of Miracles, by Kathleen McGowan, and I found her take on abundance very interesting. The part of her question that arrested my attention was
“what if abundance came first and deserving second?”
Read more
Being resourceful, creative and whole: what if we are all naturally like that?
When I was training as a coach, we were invited to see our clients as naturally being resourceful, creative and whole.
Whatever the client might feel, whatever evidence of stuckness, we were to regard the person as a whole; as capable of finding their own solution; as endlessly creative and able to generate new possibilities and thinking. Read more
How to turn a pessimist into an optimist
It’s a golden oldie in the positive psychology world, but I still swear by Dr Martin Seligman’s process on how to turn a pessimist into an optimist (check out his book Learned Optimism).
Dr. Martin Seligman’s “Learned Optimism” teaches us how to turn a pessimist into an optimist
The founding idea is that pessimism is escapable if you know how.
Dr Seligman points out a simple causal relationship between what we think and what we feel.
Our thoughts dictate how we feel. Our feelings influence how we act. Our actions have consequences. Those consequences create a new set of thoughts. The thoughts we have again and again over time become the beliefs or the mindset that create the lives we lead.
The good, in fact, the absolutely great news, is that we can learn how to turn a pessimist into an optimist.
By doing so we can improve a whole range of life, health and success outcomes!
How?
- Think of a situation that is current but not drastic. Describe it in a few sentences.
- Is your description factually accurate? Re-write it until you have the most neutral possible description.
- Write a list of all the thoughts you have about this situation and yourself in this situation.
- Go through and highlight the most powerful negative thoughts. Making a list of evidence for and against these beliefs.
Ask yourself:
- What is the effect of the negative beliefs in terms of how I feel, what I say and what I do?
- What would happen if I changed them to something more empowering? [You may also like to note the effects of positive beliefs you’ve identified in terms of what you feel, say and do.]
Check in with how you feel in your body, mind and spirit after this disputation.
Repeat this process with any subject matter where you want to change your mindset.
Notice when you’re making sweeping negative statements. In fact, that’s a hallmark of pessimistic thinking and won’t serve you.
Read more: What is a mindset?
What is a mindset?
Mindset is one of those terms that people bandy about but actually, what is a mindset and why should we care?
A mindset is an established set of attitudes. Or: A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretations of situations. Read more
