Meditation Tips
You Are Important Instagram featured a meditation series centered around calming anxiety that was inspired from the previous blog. Below is all the tips compiled with a link to each of the posts. Some of the meditations live on the page, check it out!
Anxiety tip Day 1: You are the awareness that moves through.
At any time, you can shift your awareness at attention. Let’s try it quick:
Think about what you had for lunch.
Think about a monkey.
Think about the last time someone made you angry.
Easy to access those memories? What about that feeling?
You are the observer, the awareness, that can shift your focus. Notice the anxious thoughts. There is a noticer, the observer, the person experiencing the anxiety. It’s you. When you realize this, you begin to detach.
Anxiety tip day 2: Take your ego out of it.
Much of our suffering comes from self-centric thinking where we become fixated with our own world and problems.
Realize that, yes, you may be the center of your own universe, but you are not the center of everyone else’s. That conversation that you had yesterday with the stranger at a coffee shop? You remember your awkward response and the coffee you spilled on yourself. They don’t. They were thinking about their own personal drama to remember what you said or the stain on your shirt.
Remembering that we all have our own inner dialogue can help you empathize and connect with others rather than live in an anxiety about our own perceptions.
Anxiety tip day 3: Ask yourself, ‘Is this true?’
Neuroscience tells us our repetitive thoughts create pathways. As our brains want to work efficiently, we default to think and do the same things day after day.
This may sound like we’re stuck but the opposite is true. euroscience also tells us we can create new pathways with our focused attention. this knowledge is powerful.
For the next few days (or weeks), I invite you to keep a journal close by. Notice the stories you tell yourself and write them down. Ask yourself, ‘Is this true? What are the origins of this story?’
You may find that many of the things you ruminate on have no real basis in reality. With this awareness, we have the power to shift the narrative.
Anxiety tip day 4: Focus on what connects you to the world.
To highlight this here’s a quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson:
“The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.
These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.
These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.
So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small because they’re small and the universe is big—but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity.
That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings-on of activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.”
In times of anxiety, we can remember that at our core we are all the same. We are intricately connected to everyone and everything around us.
Anxiety tip day 5: Prioritize making time for the things that bring you joy.
Taking time out to create or to connect with the things and experiences that make you feel alive can help you access that inner joy within yourself.
