Living life every moment...consciously!
Pause this moment
Blog by Anouk Brack – co-director of Experience Integral and certified Leadership Embodiment teacher
Thinking of great men and women like Mandela and Mother Teresa, it seems their wisdom comes with such ease and grace. It is easy to assume they were born this way. They weren’t. True,…
The excitement of success can feel close to anxiety for some.
Here is an easy exercise:
- Recall an event where you were successful or excited when you were younger, and notice what you are feeling and sensing in your memory. Stay with the sensation of for 5 minutes.
- Recall an event where you were successful and excited recently in your life, and notice what you are feeling and sensing. Stay with this sensation of for 5 minutes.
- Now tap into the sensation of a memory of an overwhelming situation. I suggest not to start with a truly traumatic event, at least not without a therapist’s support. Start with something only moderately disturbing to you.
- Now, go back to visualizing your success story. Do you notice a difference?
When we say “I don’t have the energy..” - What do we mean? Physiologically, we may simply be in a time for rest and regeneration. However, if one has ever felt energized after a yoga class, workout, or veggie juice, its clear that our experience of energy is generated from within. Even the nature of our response to a tense or challenging situation can leave us feeling clear and full of vitality, or deflated, tense - in limitation. There are various “channels” of energy in our body, from the nervous system, the metabolic channels, muscular energy expressed through movement or exertion.. Just as each of these channels or systems is a part of a larger complex system comprised of interweaving channels, influencing and influenced by the elements of our life.
Hanna: All my life I have been profoundly concerned with being free. I have always understood that to be free does not merely mean to be without external hindrances. Rather, the prime requisite for being free is to have the internal power and the internal skills, judgment, perception, and intelligence in order to be autonomous, because freedom is essentially self-responsibility and independence. Not to be a subservient part of an institution is very much a theme of my life. You can’t be independent unless you can stand on your own two feet, and it’s not a matter of just rebelliously standing on your own two feet, but of knowing who you are, knowing your powers, and being able to be creative and productive on your own. I think that this has, more and more, become a main theme of my thinking as well as my life. What I seek to encourage in other human beings is a growing selfcompetence, so that they can become freer. This marks everything that I do, practically, in my own work at the Novato Institute. It haunts my own work and editorial interests in publishing, and it is the constant theme in what I think about and write about as a philosopher.
Thomas Hanna in an interview with Helmut Milz
