To watch the 30 minute video class for free, click here.
Introduction
Do you ache to relax? Do you find when you do make time for renewal you instead start looking around for ways to fill that time? Are you having troubling connecting to friends and to yourself? Do you sometimes feel like a walk-in in your own life? You aren’t alone.
From Arianna Huffington to Mika Brzezinski to Alanis Morrisette, meditation, de-stressing, taking a technology break in order to thrive is on the top of their agendas. What’s key to thriving? Learning how to renew.
In our increasingly hectic world, where all the chaos-management apps and gadgets often make us feel more disorganized, stressed, and fragmented, learning how to renew is more than a luxury. It’s an essential art and practice of an integrated and purposeful life.
These ten big ideas on renewal are deceptively simple. You can engage with them just enough to tip out of your rat’s nest of stress. Or you can engage with them in pursuit of the depth of illumination that lured spiritual mystics throughout the ages.
The Top 10 Big Ideas
Start your free trial to join Amy Edelstein going into detail on the 10 Big Ideas for this class PLUS get access to hundreds of other classes (by hundreds of other extraordinary teachers) to help you optimize every aspect of your life!
-
Move Inward
Settle into yourself. Take a deep breath and let the surface issues roll off your back. Sink back. Really. Stop skimming this blog and for a few seconds, let yourself hover over the abyss to your inner self. Hold yourself gently, like a hummingbird balanced between blossoms. Pause, suspended between your thoughts and your feelings. Between your ideas and your fears. Between your worries and your dreams. Move inward.
-
Let Go of the Surface
When we let go, in a small way we die to the known. Even if it’s only for a micro-fraction of a second, we train ourselves to be at ease with endings. Endings enable new beginnings. Little deaths enable new births. In our culture we try to live forever, not recognizing that growth requires endings. Learning how to let go, we let things be, we create space. Space for pausing, space for being.
“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions,”proclaimed Ralph Waldo Emerson 150 years ago. See what you discover in this space.
-
Journey to the Source
We can’t possibly renew ourselves by filling our right hand with what’s in our left. We need to find access to a source whose nature is inherently refreshing. Through suspending our attachment to our ideas and becoming aware of the space that opens up in between our thoughts and feelings, we can dive straight into the pause between each in-breath and out-breath. That pause is like swimming into a sea cavern that takes us into the heart of the universe. As we journey into our own interiors, we journey into the interior of the universe. How? Consciousness is singular. Access from any point connects us with the depth of All that is.
-
Support Your Self
“How can I support myself?” you might ask. “I’m the one who needs to besupported,” we may be found muttering to ourselves. Step to the side just an inch, and see if you can’t take a fresh look. Supporting and renewing ourselves occurs when we extend honor, respect, and wonder at the nature of the Self. We may think we’re not familiar with this deeper dimension of ourselves, yet if it is indeed ourselves, it has been with us—and us with it—ever since we came into this world. How could it be otherwise? This isn’t just nondual jargon. Look deeply into your own experience, from the perspective of renewal and see what you find. Extending our care towards Self, we renew at the core of our being. Putting attention on the sacred center of ourselves, we create some pliability in our brittle frontal selves. Give, notrigidity, supports us especially in our most contracted times.
-
Open Your Inner Ear
Renewal involves listening. We can—almost literally—open up our inner ears. We are usually so attuned to our thoughts, to messages from the outside pushing our attention here and there, distracting us from a softer call within. Renewal comes not from doing, but from listening, from opening the pores of our souls so that we can hear the whisper of grace flowing through us. Turn your ear inside. Hold your attention loose and at ease. See what you discover. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the insightful contemporary psychologist and specialist on flow states instructed, “It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.”
To watch the 30 minute video class for free, click here.