By Michele Combs
Peace is important in your life and the lives of others. It affects health, wellness, relationships and prosperity for you and everyone around you.
The lack of peace also creates anxiety in those you deal with even in a business setting because they can sense it too. (In sales this can be devastating.)
Don’t think that you have to have a constant euphoric feeling in order to experience peace. No, peace is a general lightness in your life. A sense that everything will take care of itself in time and that it’s out of your hands. Thankfully, it can be achieved much sooner than you may realize.
Here are five tips to help you find some peace right now:
- Breathe deeply. Deep breaths that fill you upper lungs — slow and methodical – can be very calming. Try to clear your thoughts as you breath, or if you must think, think “in with the good, out with the bad”. Advanced: If you want to increase the effectiveness of this technique, put your palms together in a prayerlike position in front of you. Even more advanced, move your palms (still in the prayerlike position) up and down from your heart to the top of your temple in tempo with your breath.
- Hum a single note. Our bodies react to and are stimulated by musical tones. Don’t think, just hum the first note that comes to your mind. As you hum that single note, let your breathing relax. You’ll start feeling peace pour in right away.Advanced: Concentrate on removing any vibrato in your humming and strive toward getting to where you can hear your heart beat in the note. As you hum, you should also try to get it to resonate in your ears. You can do this by keeping the hum toward the back of your throat and in your chest. You’ll feel the vibration in your jaw when you’ve achieved it — it’s definitely more challenging. While you are humming make every effort to clear all thoughts — even the thought of clearing your thoughts. It doesn’t matter when or where you practice humming. You might even try it during your commute home every day to help you unwind and ease into family and private time. It can be your little oasis.
- Listen to music. There is no advanced technique to this one. Again, music stimulates the body so concentrate on uplifting or peaceful music. Avoid overly complicated music like scream-o, it’s better to listen for the peace factor and stick to those in times like these. it will help you take the deep breaths in item one of this list.Advanced: Classical music has been proven to stimulate the brain, helping to calm breathing and in turn bring more oxygen to the brain. If you want to improve the effects of music on peace in your life, put on a soothing classical favorite, and keep the classics going all day long.
- Smile. It’s been proven that smiling and particularly laughing release endorphins in your brain that trigger a peaceful feeling and bring more satisfaction into your life. But, have you ever thought about how much you do or don’t smile? When you’re sitting in front of your computer, when you’re driving, when you’re on the phone, when you’re concentrating – those are times you most likely don’t have a happy-go-lucky smile on your face. So the question is, how much of your day is like that? Probably most of it, and in those times you’re not getting the smile-benefit, in fact, you’re probably attracting more of the negative in those moments.Make it a point to smile while you’re working and driving. Now don’t scare everyone with a crazy-eyed, ear-to-ear grin, just simply focus on a casual closed lip smile. Suddenly you’ll start feeling a lightness. Even when you’re bursting with frustration, or not in the mood to smile, smiling in this way has benefits, it’s kind of like the “fake it ’til you make” it concept. Advanced: Okay, you’re really going to look like a weirdo with this one, but it has huge health and wellness benefits so bear with me. Break out into random bursts of laughter. Seriously, during your day, make time to just suddenly break into a full laugh, even if there’s nothing to laugh at. That will help keep your frame of mind clear and your constitution light.
- Thankfulness. Gratitude and thankfulness are really synonymous. It’s about you looking around you and appreciating the wonderful things that surround you and those you love. It’s a critical piece to feeling connected with the world and accepting that greater things are at work around you. You don’t have to feel that great sense of tear-jerking gratitude to get the benefits of thankfulness, it’s simply the acknowledgement of things around you. And in that acknowledgement you are appreciating the usefulness or goodness or beauty of that thing.You might look around and be thankful for a fork, because without it, it would be more difficult to eat. You might be thankful for the color red, because it’s interesting to look at. Perhaps you are thankful for your job so you can earn money. And, hopefully, you are also thankful for your loved ones.Use thankfulness to help take the focus off of you and your experiences or troubles or expectations. Simply be thankful what what you have — it’s all around you. Start by just naming things as they come to mind, just a simple word or thought, no need to explain why you are grateful. You can do it like this: I am thankful for _________ (flour, water, my pen, my sister, Charlies braces, etc.)
Advanced: Don’t just think of what your thankful for that affects your life, reach outside and be thankful for what others have and will have. That moves you outside of your realm and opens you up to the service of others (even if you never know them.)
Peace is essential to prosperity and abundance. In fact, you cannot have true prosperity (from the inside out) without peace — they are polar opposites. If you want to really change your life, peace is an essential place to start and it takes so little effort if only you’ll just begin.
Peace be with you.
Tags: euphoria, hum, laugh, music, peace, prosperity, smile