Summary: STAYING ALIVE: PART TWO – GOOD TIMING. There are two aspects to good timing. There’s slowing down, and there’s developing your instinct for seizing the moment, appropriately, decisively and fast. Each aspect reinforces and supports the other. Life coaching tools and resources from Five Changes http://www.fivechanges.com/audio/good-timing-two-podcast.mp3 For many years we taught traditional silent meditation retreats in addition to our work with NLP and hypnosis. Although we shifted our main focus, I still find myself teaching meditation to clients – both traditional sitting meditations, as well as other, less-familiar forms. The other day I taught a client about eating meditation. When people learn eating meditation for the first time, they often say things like: “I have been in Overeaters Anonymous for years, and I’ve done countless diets and programs. Eating meditation has finally allowed me to have a relationship with food that’s not dysfunctional. I’ve stopped using food like a drug.” .. or, “I knew the kind of foods I should be eating, and I wanted to eat them, but somehow it was hard to change my old habits .. until now!” I remember someone saying, “I never knew how awful fast-food tasted until I slowed down enough to really taste it.” How to do Eating Meditation If you have never done eating meditation before, simply slow down, focus on your food, taste it, take your time. Get rid of distractions like reading, watching TV, or talking, and spend the meal in silence. Eat one meal a day as a meditation for a couple of weeks. You’ll probably change some of the food you eat; and you’ll also tune in to what your body needs – for most of us that means eating less. If this works for you, continue with eating meditation for one meal every day until it becomes a habit. Walking Meditation as a Practice and a Metaphor We also teach our clients to do walking meditation. When you first learned to walk you had to learn about good timing. Otherwise you could never have learned to balance on one foot while moving the other one forward. You would have kept on falling down just like you did in the beginning. When you learn slow walking meditation for the first time, it may feel like learning to walk all over again. You may be a little wobbly. You have to find your balance again. You’ve learned to relying on speed to keep your equilibrium. Something powerful happens when you learn how to maintain your balance and equilibrium at any speed. There’s something else that walking meditation teaches you. No matter how fast or slow you go, you’re always right here, wherever that may be. That may sound obvious; but how much time do we spend not accepting where we are, denying it, defying it, and trying to be somewhere else? Learning to be right here and now has enormous benefit – for healing, changing, learning, being receptive, and being fully alive! Good Timing Good timing is not just about learning to balance and slow down. It also teaches you that you will get there (at your destination) when you get there. But this doesn’t meant we’re suggesting you remain stuck in an eternal here and now. Good timing is also about your intuitive ability to know when you should seize the moment and move, appropriately, decisively, and fast. This is connected to the first of the Five Qualities that bring out and nourish the spirit of being fully, absolutely and unashamedly alive – Congruity. When you’re in essential agreement with yourself; when the inner and the outer, your conscious and you unconscious mind, are working together, you have natural good-timing. Procrastination Lots of people have a problem with procrastination? There are many possible reasons for it .. fear of failure, fear of success, resignation to your limiting beliefs, unresolved anger, or grief .. the list goes on. One of the big problems with procrastination, aside fro[...]
