In her bestselling book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron encourages the act of “unconscious writing.” She suggests putting pen to paper and writing, ceaselessly and without pause for thought, until you’ve filled up three pages. This way you’re taking your editing eye, your desire to be “correct,” out of it and just letting your unconscious be your guide. She calls them “morning pages” and suggests you do your writing first thing in the morning—in order to get all the blather out of your head and onto the page before you start your day.
In her wonderful book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg suggests a similar kind of automatic writing. She suggests you set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes and then start writing and keep your pen moving till the timer goes off. Don’t stop to correct spelling mistakes or punctuation. Just write. And if you run out of things to write, write that. So it might look something like this: I don’t want to go to work today, my boss is mad at her boss and I don’t like her boss either and I think that guy who sits across from me in that cubicle is really cute and I don’t know what to wear also I’m scared of terrorists and I don’t know what to write, I’m out of things. Can’t think of anything else oh yeah, my dad is driving me craaaazy with his craziness. I’m worried he might die soon. It doesn’t have to track. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you. It doesn’t even have to make sense to you. The pen just has to keep moving.
You can do it in the morning like Julia Cameron suggests or you can do it at night—which can be a great way to improve your night’s sleep. Get all the blather from the day out of your head and onto the page—putting it to rest so that you can put yourself to rest! Either way, put pen to paper and let your hand go. Let it be nonsensical. Let it be emotional. Let it be annoying or crazy. Let it be whatever it wants to be. Just write. Try it right now! Fill up these blank lines and see if you don’t just feel a little better! (And if you do, commit to it for the next twenty-eight days!)
Meditation
The game got me to meditate. For real. Every day. A simple thing, right? Not for me. Even though meditation shifts my entire day, makes me feel better, helps keep me calm and centered and focused, I was never willing to do it on a regular basis—until I made it my good habit in the game. Then I had to do it—or risk letting down my team. And once I got in the habit, it stuck with me. I’ve meditated (almost) every day, ever since—even when I’m not playing the game. That may not sound like a big deal, but if you were my yoga teacher you’d understand how freaking amazing that is.
—Peter, 39
For me, personally, nothing is harder than forcing myself to sit down and meditate. Sitting still is excruciating for me. Watching my thoughts skitter through my chaotic mind is excruciating for me. Letting those thoughts go—without judgment—is next to impossible for me. But the best advice I ever got on this came from my yoga teacher Jessica Jennings when I said, “I hate meditating. All I do is sit around and think about how mad I am at my husband and how worried I am about what’s going on at work.” And she said, “Yeah, but after meditating, at least you know that. At least you noticed. If you hadn’t meditated, you might just sit around eating mindlessly or feeling anxious all day and have no idea why.” Hmmmm…interesting.
But I still hate it. So why, when I actually do it, even for 5 minutes, do I feel so damn good after? I am here to attest that despite my every instinct screaming at me not to bother, when I do bother, I always find meditation calming at a level I find difficult to describe. (But I’ll try.) When I was a kid, my mom would take me to visit my godmother, Berta, who married a Navajo medicine man and lived on the Navajo reservation. When we would stay with Berta, and I would be scared to fall asleep because maybe I’d just seen a weird-looking lizard or snake skittering around outside, Berta would lie down beside me and rub my temples, really gently and lovingly, until I would fall asleep. It’s like the feel of her fingers calmed all of my nerves and soothed all of my fears, made me feel safe, made me feel protected, helped me know I wasn’t alone.
Meditation, as hard as it can be, ultimately feels like that, like a loving godmother’s fingers on the temples of a frightened child. So that’s my pitch.
If you’re in, or think you might be in, here are some instructions just for us by meditation teacher Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center and author of Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul’s Potential.
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Meditation for Beginners
There are many motivations for meditating. Some individuals have read the results of the many medical studies that report the health benefits of meditation, such as slowing down one’s heart rate and reducing stress levels. Others may become interested for psychological purposes including self-observation, insights into habitual patterns, and so on. Then there are spiritual motives such as deepening one’s intuition, mindfulness, or enlightenment, which is spiritual liberation.
In the meditation classes and retreats I conduct, I invite individuals to first understand their motive for embarking on a meditative journey. Your motive may include a combination of purposes just described, or something entirely different. The good news is that once you begin to taste the sweet fruits of meditating, you will realize that there is no aspect of your life that is not affected.
You may begin by selecting a space conducive to gathering your energies and centering yourself. You needn’t devote an entire room or construct an elaborate shrine or altar, but assigning a specific location will have an accumulative affect and “build” the energy of meditation. Then, on days when sitting is challenging, the energy of your meditation spot will assist you.
Plan to allow for about 10 to 20 minutes if you are a beginning practitioner. And don’t be surprised if it feels just short of eternity! At first it is startling to observe the contents of your mind—the speediness, busyness, and restlessness, especially if you have never witnessed your thought processes. There is a natural urge to find justifiable reasons for leaping from your cushion or chair. This is where a sense of humor enters in. There is no thought—whether it’s about work, sex, food, your mother-in-law—that is unacceptable. These are just the things that roll through. Observe them just as you do a cloud that is passing through the sky.
Sit on a firm chair with a straight back. Sit away from the back of the chair with your feet flat on the floor and your palms resting on your thighs in the downward or upward position. You may either close your eyes or, leaving them open, gently cast your glance downward about six feet in front of you. If you are sitting on a floor cushion, whether you sit cross-legged or not, use a second pillow so that your hips are higher than your knees so that your back is properly supported. If you feel guided to begin with a prayer or affirmative statement, do so.
Slowly begin to center yourself by becoming aware of your inhalations and exhalations, without regulating your breath. Just breathe naturally. At first you may become self-conscious of your breath, causing you to attempt to control it, but in time this will stop. Begin to contemplate your oneness with life’s Source, or with all Existence, whatever that may mean to you. Consider that you are not alone as you meditate, that you are being held, uplifted, and supported by all the other individuals who are in the meditative field of awareness.
Once you are centered, with each exhalation notice that there is an accompanying gap, where only your breath is taking place. If your mind has wandered, simply bring yourself back to center by saying, “thinking.” Don’t be frustrated by the discursiveness of your thoughts, which are common to all meditators no matter how much mileage they have! Consider your thoughts like a cloud in the sky, just floating by, which is what will help you not to get hooked and carried away with them.
At the end of your meditation period, you may close with a prayer or affirmative thought and set an intention to be mindful throughout your day. Little by little, you will become aware of so many things to be grateful for, like the beauty of nature and your growing sense of interconnectedness to others
and all life.
As you deepen your interiority through meditation, you will become acquainted with yourself and your Authentic Self in a magnificent way. Do not underestimate the simplicity of this Vipassana technique. The results at first are subtle, but will become profoundly influential in your life. You may supplement your meditation by exploring the writings of meditation teachers or spiritual organizations that conduct meditation sessions in your town.
Michael Berrard Beckwith, founder of the Agape
International Spiritual Center, author
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Meditation may seem a little woo woo to you at first, or really difficult or scary or nonsensical. But keep this in mind: In a recent study, Dr. Inga Treitler, Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist, studied a group of people who successfully lost a lot of weight and kept it off and she found that they all had one thing in common:
“All the subjects had incorporated some meditative element into their lives,” Treitler says. “It might have been walking or yoga, but it was self time, a white space where they could disengage from the old, obsessive behavior.”
So try it. Sit down. Sit still. Breathe. You might hate it. Or it might completely transform your life.
Decluttering Your Life
The healthy habit I took on was to organize and clear clutter for half an hour each day. It improved my life because my house looks pretty and my husband isn’t irritated by all the clutter! I also put away my clothes every day—no piles on the hamper—and I’ve managed to keep that going—not perfectly, but better than before.
—Kate, 37
You know that movie The Secret? How you can manifest a new reality by, like, thinking about it? My including this section in this book is maybe my first attempt at manifesting some decluttering in my life. I have, at this moment, 15,324 e-mails in my in-box. Of those, 634 are unread. They date back to 1999. I shit you not. And this? This is indicative of how I function in every other aspect of my life. I have paperwork everywhere that I don’t need. Books piled everywhere that I’ve never read. If I didn’t have an assistant who has made it her personal daily goal to file every piece of paper I scatter…? Her name is Star, by the way, and I’m convinced that’s because she was literally dropped from the starry heavens into my life because I cannot survive without her. Seriously, you’d find me dead, buried under a pile of scripts, take-out containers, and empty coffee cups. Point is that I do not have the foggiest idea how one would begin to declutter—but I have tracked down someone who does: Fay Wolf, organizing expert. Let’s all listen, shall we?
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Getting Organized
Use it, love it, or leave it. That’s the first thing you need to know about clearing your space and mind. Burn that mantra into your noggin and you are halfway there. The second golden nugget? Small steps. Got 30 minutes or less per day? Perfect. Just because something might take longer than 30 minutes to finish doesn’t mean you can’t work on it for 30 minutes and then stop. Some done is better than none done. And indeed, many organizing tasks take only 30 minutes or less, from start to finish. Try these small steps to keep clutter at bay.
Mail: Personally, I’ve always loved getting the mail. Most folks, on the other hand, dread the continuous flow of what is, these days, mostly junk. But snuck in between all the stuff we never asked for is the stuff we actually need to deal with. (And sometimes? Money. As a professional organizer, I have found a total of more than $15,000 in undeposited checks in clients’ homes!) As soon as the mail comes in the door, open it, unfold it, recycle the envelopes and the filler that comes with bills, and place the keepers in a specified in-box (one area designated for incoming paper). You don’t have to take action on your mail every day. You just have to open it. It’ll take 5 to 10 minutes per day, tops.
Piles of paper: Take a stack of paper from your in-box (or from one of those many piles that litter the once-gorgeous home you pay all that money to live in), and take thirty minutes to sort. Most paper falls into one of three categories: TO DO, TO FILE, TOSS. Don’t worry about actually doing or filing anything…yet. Break it down. Sort it out. Move on. (The final steps with paper will be making appointments with yourself to take action and file those papers. Keep those appointments.)
Get rid of it: Create a donation area near the entryway. Perhaps a basket that stays there year-round. There is ALWAYS stuff to purge. Life changes, needs change, fashions change. Ask yourself: Can I live happily without this item? Nine times out of ten, the answer is YES. Even 15 minutes in your clothes closet could yield a few garbage bags’ worth of stuff that you forgot you had, no longer fits, has holes or stains, or belonged to an ex who’s long gone. When the donation area is full, fill up some bags to go to charity. And then bring it there. (Or, in most states, you can call the Salvation Army or Vietnam Veterans of America and they will come pick it up!)
Make a deal—and stick to it: Bargain with yourself. You’ll spend 20 to 30 minutes on a quick organizing task, and THEN you get to watch Grey’s Anatomy. Parent yourself a little bit. And also reward yourself. Living a life of clarity takes a little work. But man, oh, man, is it worth it. Happy organizing!
—Fay Wolf, organizing expert and owner of
NEW ORDER Professional Organizing, www.neworderorganizing.com
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Learn or Practice a Musical Instrument
The game inspired me to finally learn to play the piano in my living room. I sounded like a kid at the keys in the beginning, driving my wife and neighbors crazy with the scales. But for some reason, the whole thing just filled me with glee. I can now play the theme to Indiana Jones—with both hands! Awesome.
—Kevin, 42
I am a music junkie. I love to sing and I love to write songs. I spent my late teens and early twenties dating men who played the guitar, and writing songs with them. Then when we would break up, they always got custody of the songs because I couldn’t play the guitar. So one of my first conscious acts of feminism was to put an end to that. I spent one diligent summer learning to play. Now, no one would call me a guitar player. I do not play artfully. I do not play well. But I play well enough to write songs (which really requires only about three chords).
When I play and sing, it fills my soul up and takes away my worries and is its own kind of meditation for me—but when my life gets busy, the first thing that falls away is the guitar. So in my very first game, the healthy habit I took on was to practice my guitar 20 minutes a day. I was amazed what I could accomplish in only 20 minutes! And it’s not just me, and it’s not because I already could play a little. My friend Mandy has a job, twin three-year-old boys, and a four-month-old daughter, and she just challenged herself to learn to play guitar. I promise you she’s lucky if she finds anywhere near 20 minutes a day—and yet, after only about a month, she has learned several chords and a tricky little scale that I can’t even do!
Here’s what else: Researchers have found that music-making is not only fun, it not only decreases stress, it not only provides a boost in self-esteem, it also improves the mind, increases mental clarity, and may help to ward off Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. One study found that people who took keyboard lessons showed decreases in anxiety, depression, and loneliness, and significantly increased levels of human growth hormone.
Another found that patients with Alzheimer’s disease who underwent four weeks of structured music therapy showed significant increases in their level of melatonin, a neurohormone linked with sleep regulation and believed to influence the immune system. So how much do you have to practice to get all these benefits? Not that much at all.
If you can afford to, buy an instrument. Buy the one you really want to play. Buy it used, buy it at a thrift store, buy the cheapest one you can find. And if you can’t afford to buy, you can rent one really inexpensively. Consider how much money you’ve spent on things like a visit to the doctor to deal with depression or sleeplessness, and the cost actually feels quite low! Then, either hire a teacher and take a class once a we
ek, buy a lesson on DVD, or download free lessons/instructions from the Internet. Come on. You know you’ve always wanted to learn. And no one’s gonna do it for you. The time is now! Take it on and then let’s have a sing-along! (And now, a word from an actual music teacher.)
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Music for Beginners
Often, we try to take on too much, get frustrated with the lack of progress, and quit before we feel our success. The key is to create little bite-size successes.
Here are some pointers to get started with learning music and make it fun!
Listen:
Music is in all of us, and half of learning music is in the listening. So start with 20 minutes of focused listening every day. Find some of your favorite songs, sit back, close your eyes, and listen. Listen in a way that you have never listened before. In your mind, start separating the various parts that make up the song. Piano, guitar, rhythm, vocals, etc.
Stick with the basics:
Everything is made up of small components, just like atoms make up matter. Start recognizing the basic roots of music: notes and chords. Take guitar for example. Start by learning one basic chord, and slowly become comfortable playing it. Do this by yourself using online tools or with a teacher. Have fun! There is nothing to lose! Now, try learning a second chord. Slowly practice going back and forth between the two chords. It will seem impossible…until it becomes easy…and then it becomes second nature.
Songs:
Think of one of your favorite songs, and find the chords online. (Find one that has only a few, relatively easy chords.) Then learn those chords and practice the song for 20 minutes a day. This is the process of little bite-size successes, because now you are playing something that you love, and that is the most important thing!
The Game On! Diet Page 17