I have just completed a personal week-long meditation retreat … I do this a couple of times a year. A whole week of kriya, breath and meditation. Not teaching, just exploring who I am, what brings me joy, what behaviors I am wanting to outgrow and who I am expanding into. I pour all of myself into these retreats and recharge from the inside out.

This was particularly poignant given that these times can feel so stressful and isolating.

My inner focus was how to stop energy from being hijacked by fear and polarization and instead invest it in the solution: to walk through life with my eyes and heart open! Cultivating the capacity to see clearly and respond to life with connection and love.

I learned long ago that when you take time for inner practice, insight and joy arise, the source of who you are gets time to express itself, unencumbered by personality, by the pain you have experienced, or the masks you wear.

Essential ingredients are: a practice of self reflection and self correction. Energy and mind based practices like KRIYA, BREATH, & MEDITATION to help us drop the masks and expand beyond our limitations to a clear and present state.

Below I share strategies I use myself. They are based in neuroscience and yoga.  They work! What is required is consistency!

STEP 1:  Identify what it is you want to change.

Look at where you are caught in limiting beliefs, addictive, or unconscious patterns, stuck in suffering or stress, feeling overwhelmed, or caught in negative thinking.

STEP 2: Create a vision of your future.

WHO DO I WANT TO BE?
How do I walk through life as the greatest version of me?

Start to create the FEELING of what it would be like to be beyond the limiting belief or circumstances that are challenging. Learn to fill yourself with the feelings of gratitude, appreciation, and love so that your body starts to memorize a new state of being.

Identify the moments in life that you allow to define you? Will you be a victim or a creator?

Understand that your brain is like a computer. How you think and feel defines you.
Thoughts create neural pathways or grooves – we call them samskaras in yoga.
Feelings create a magnetic frequency – this is your broadcast signal – what you are choosing to broadcast to the world.
As a victim you fall prey to thinking that people, places, things, or circumstances define who you are. As a creator you recognize that you have the capacity to change from the inside out. So, where in your life are you playing a victim, where are you blaming others or circumstances for your life?

Getting clear on this will help you to outgrow it. What you recognize you can transcend.

To show up as your best self, to be a LIVING LIGHT for your family and community, you must do the work of shedding the old, learned behaviors that keep you in limiting beliefs …

WHO COULD YOU BE IF YOU COULD TRANSCEND YOUR OLD STORY? What would if FEEL like to be that person? Once you have this down, you know what you are shooting for, you can quickly begin to see the habits that are not serving you and choose differently.

Look at which experiences you need to stay away from and situations that particularly trigger you. Recognize the emotions you are affected by the most that cause you to lower your energy.

This IS WHERE WALKING THROUGH LIFE WITH THE HEART OPEN BECOMES IMPORTANT this is your counter to the lower energy, the emotion you want to transcend.

So how we open the heart and recalibrate ourselves is what I will cover next

A SIMPLE way developed by the heart math institute is to STOP. PAUSE. RELAX. FOCUS at your heart center with long deep breath and begin to focus on gratitude and appreciation. Whatever makes you feel grateful. To be grateful is to place yourself in an energetic state to receive more energy. Do this for 3 minutes. You are changing the way your brain fires and wires. You are changing your energy, so that your signal is reflecting a higher frequency. You are opening yourself up to new possibilities.

STOP. PAUSE. RELAX and focus on your heart.

This WILL change how you are perceiving things. You allow your inner conscience to speak to you, rather than your reactive learned behavior.