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Hi, my name is Kim, and I’m a specialized Chinese Medical provider and Taoist practitioner. This channel is all about you and sharing solutions and information from the Chinese Medicine cabinet of healing remedies, helping you figure out how to use Chinese Medicine in your everyday life.
I want to share with you a simple meditation technique that I’ve been using to get myself focused again. Sometimes there is so much going on in your life that it is difficult to quiet your mind. That can become a problem when you’re trying to sleep. Have you fallen asleep only to wake up a couple of hours later and be unable to go back to sleep? Your mind churns away, and the clock keeps ticking away, and you start stressing out because you have to get up in a few hours, and you’re going to be exhausted.
Well, the last two weeks in the office has seen a lot of stress. People are overwhelmed. Everyone is coming in with neck pain, shoulder pain, or some other pain related to stress. And it’s excruciating. Everyone is complaining about sharp, stabbing pain that is almost unbearable.
I’ve been putting videos out here to give you a bunch of tools to help you unwind.
Now I use this technique to help quiet my mind. A couple of years ago, when I started meditating again, this was how I started. And I started with this because it uses simple instructions.
Now, I was pretty far gone when I finally could start meditating. The stress had become overwhelming, and I couldn’t focus or stay grounded. When you’re that noisy, you may need help calming and quieting yourself enough to meditate.
What can you do then? Especially when you can’t sit in a room and stop thinking. There are two simple solutions. Meditating with others can be beneficial. If they are focused and grounded, you will find it easier to focus and ground yourself. The second option is out in nature, and this can be as simple as your backyard. I grew up in rural America and naturally gravitated to nature.
Chinese Medicine incorporates nature into Medicine. At the turn of the century, nature was considered the best doctor, and today we are beginning to hear these comments again.
And there is more to nature than just going out to nature. You’re going to gravitate to different landscapes based on what you are going through. Great grief likes the openness of the sky. It gives grief the ability to open and release into the vastness of space. It allows grief to lift up and out of the body in a healthy way. For me, right now, I’ve been gravitating to the depths of the forests. To learn more about how nature helps balance your emotions, I have a book by me on Amazon: Caregivers Survival Guide. I’ll put a link in the vid description below.
Maybe I can practice with Buddha, but I will get to sit under the magnificent Doug Fir tree instead of the Bodda tree.
So, find your place to sit. I’ve been focusing on sitting instead of lying down or some other method because it keeps me focused. It offers just enough muscle tension.
The first thing to focus on is the breath. What I like about my Youtube channel is I finally have enough content that I can refer you to different videos to get in-depth background on a particular topic. To get more information on why meditation focuses on the breath check on my video on breath
It will go through this exercise specifically and why I use it.
While you’re sitting, breathe in for 4 seconds, then breathe out for 4 seconds. You want to breathe in through your diaphragm, down into your stomach. You want to feel your diaphragm pull down and open up, allowing your belly to expand.
This is step one, and depending on your stress levels, it can take many days to get to the point where you are just thinking about your breath and sinking into the movement of your breath.
For me, when I get to the point that I’m focused on my breathing, I feel different. I spend my conscious time or waking time thinking. In me, the energetics of that feels very superficial, light, and agitated. When I’m thinking, I’m always trying to find more or problem-solve or worry. There is an underlying call to action with thinking that creates a subtle internal agitation. It feels very superficial, light, and very active like a one of these little pine siskins flying around seeking seeds and interacting with each other.
When I finally get to focus on my breath, I feel grounded. It’s like I found a place to rest, like sitting under a giant doug fir tree. There is comfort and calm. There is no longer that light, airy distracting sensation that comes with thinking. I like to think of it as a vacation for my mind.
This breathing exercise is a mind training exercise. It is about training and focusing your mind. You’ll learn the theory on why it is a mind training exercise when you check out the Breathing video link below. When you have done this exercise long enough, it will be automatic, and you will not have to think about it.
When I first practiced this exercise, I think it took me six months. After that, it was easy to get back into the swing. Until this last time. You can see from the breathing video that I hooked you up with; there were more things I had to do even with my physical body to get back to being able to practice this breath.
Now, before I go on to the next step, I may practice breathing for days or weeks to get to a point where I’m comfortable with my focus. I do that because this next step is focused on mindfulness exercises and is very much about bringing you to the right here – the here and now. It brings the external world and thinking back into the picture. The thinking part can go against what you are doing in the first part unless you are feeling solid with the breathing.
My next step is to start listening to sounds around me and accept them. You are still maintaining your breathing and breathing while listening and focusing on different sounds. You can listen to the sounds one at a time or all at once. When I finally get to be present, I don’t get distracted in thought, and suddenly, I hear everything at once. I’m not selectively cutting out different sounds. I hear things that I didn’t even know were making noise. It’s very gratifying and relaxing. It brings an overall calmness to me.
Both of these tools are patient. And that’s a little bit about retraining yourself and maybe learning to be less fearful and accepting of your own space. Perhaps less obsessive or focused on poor outcomes or insurmontable obstacles. That is the truly miraculous thing about meditation, it reparents you.
O.k., so there you have it. Two simple and amazing tools including the theory and reasoning behind why you use them. So, you can better understand how they are helping you. When you’re stressed, it’s everything that I talk about on this channel. These are additional amazing tools to help get you back to your nirvana. There gentle, and they deliver wins every time you meditate. There patient and accepting of your own space and time.
O.k. until next time, I’ll catch you on the other side!