How are you practicing peace in one minute an hour and beyond, improving your focus and health, so you can be at and give your best? “If you practice it ten times a day it will change your life,” Doug Silsbee said. Are you ready for life changing results?! That is about once a waking hour. Let me know your results after you have you tried it out! I am sharing with you a practice I learned from Doug’s Presence Based Coaching and have been practicing multiple times of day myself for years.
I use this with clients. My fast paced leadership and team clients including those in United Nations hotspots especially appreciate it, as they experience letting go for a minute of the weight of lives resting on their shoulders. Healthcare workers can benefit for the same reason. I also use it pre-meetings and whenever I’m feeling stressed or like I’m reaching the end of my limits. At the time of this video I was dealing with some website challenges in the middle of a launch of our mentor coaching program. I practiced it extra frequently at the airport and flying home from being with my brother whose health is declining, when I felt like crying. You also may need or want to do some extra centering at times. Doctors and the Institute for Stress Management recommend that you take a minute an hour to de-stress, as well as an hour a day. Don’t tell me you don’t have a minute an hour!
If you sit at the computer a lot like I tend to, doctors recommend we get up, stretch, move around and let your eyes focus on something else.
But sometimes we are in the middle of that row of airline seats or in a meeting and we can not get up and stretch and move around or in some other circumstances yet we still need to become fully present to be able to better access our mind and our heart. That is the purpose of this one minute exercise which is scalable; you can make it longer. Some people already practice an early morning 20 minute mindfulness such as meditation or contemplative prayer sit, yet they do not think about stopping during the day and practicing peace in one minute.
You can do this without anyone noticing, just do not close your eyes while driving! Practicing peace in one minute through centering will actually change the blood flow in your brain from that state of being flooded with the 11 million bits of information coming in per moment. We can only process 40 bits of information at a time. This exercise helps us move from that flooded unconscious state that we are in 98+ percent of the time where bias, reactivity and just not our best thinking occurs into a present, conscious, clear thinking and decision making state.
So here we go. Are you ready to practice peace in one minute and beyond?
I invite you to either stand or sit. I like to stand when I do this normally because I sit so much.
And to close your eyes and to experience that deep diaphragmatic breathing.
So you have your feet firmly planted, your eyes are closed and you are taking those deep diaphragmatic breaths. And I invite you to continue to do that during this very brief exercise. Just experience standing there with your feet firmly planted on the ground and if you are sitting, your bottom also firmly planted in the seat.
And now shift your body slightly to the left, experience that space, come back to center. Shift your body slightly to the right, experience that space come back to center. Shift your body slightly forward, experience that space, come back to center.
And as you shift your body slightly back and experience that space, I invite you to imagine a great big fat dinosaur tail extending from the back of your body, the tail in firm contact with the ground.
And within that tail is a representation of all of your gifts, experiences and strengths that have brought you this far and will be with you as you move forward. Experience that space, come back to center. Open your eyes. Sit back down if you want to.
If you forget this you can refer to it at any time on my YouTube page and on the resource page of my website along with podcasts and articles. Practicing peace in one minute and beyond is going to put you in a place of better accessing your brain and your heart. I find when I take those silent moments and remember who I am and what I am here for, then I am better able to follow my heart and spirit and get back in touch with that energizing vision and do the work that I am called to do.
Thank you and I look forward to seeing you next week.
To unlocking your and all full potential, prosperity and peace,
Marilyn O’Hearne, MSW, MCC, LLC; CQ MCC https://marilynoh.com/
