Being mindful, in the now, and taking pause, is essential to sustaining a healthy lifestyle. To reset our balance, fully live, and have the awareness to take care of ourselves and others, it is helpful to create a vision. Life is about change. Our visions can change from year to year. Our seasonal life changes and perhaps we need to add a bit more into our circles of health. Hopefully, our life in our teens did not define us for the following decades, nor our 20s, or even 30s. As we move through the seasons, we evolve, we release, we gather and grow, and we create a new vision for ourselves.
Enjoy this downloadable technique. I am practicing it now as I manage a bit of anxiety of creating my 2020 vision and goals. Best wishes as you prepare yourself to create your 2020 vision.
Working from home might seem magical, but it does have its pitfalls. There can be just as many diversions at home as in a regular office setting – perhaps more including a stocked refrigerator. Squirrels are leaping from branch to branch outside my window. Mia looks longingly at me to take her on a walk. It’s the first of the year, and like many of us, I am ready to be focused, set goals, and go. So, how do you reset your mind to create your 2020 vision?
Mindfulness training is huge now in both the corporate and personal world. The 2020 individual is required to multi-task a good percentage of the day. In reality, he/she is really just “switch-tasking” and trying to keep up with what needs to be done against what one really wants to do. Sometimes during the day, the mind needs a break and a breather, time to recharge and rest. As we recover from the joys and bustle of the holidays, we may also want time to reset ourselves, determine if what we see, feel, hear, and touch has changed, and if a vision correction is warranted.
In the 1990s, when I worked in cardiac and pulmonary rehab, our team wanted to introduce mindfulness techniques to manage stress and reduce resting blood pressure and heart rate. Our local culture was not quite ready for non-traditional medicine so the best we could implement was breath colorization. Our patients were a little wary of this “woo-woo” medicine but in the end, they loved the easy technique.
Like others, I sometimes forget techniques in my toolbox to relax and recharge myself into the “now”. If the “now” is to relax and clear the internal chatter, I find this technique works well. I use it now when I am trying to “blank out” stimuli or quiet that internal voice that sits on my shoulder and says, “and don’t forget this. Remember to do that.”
Create Your 2020 Vision – Preparation:
- Choose a peaceful color. It can be any color. Your peaceful color is yours.
- Choose a stressful color. It can be any color. Your stressful color is yours.
- Choose a quiet spot and a create a comfortable position.
- Close your eyes.
- Breath in slowly through your nose to a count of five.
- Exhale slowly through pursed lips for a count of 10.
- Now as you prepare to breathe in the next breath, visualize your peaceful color.
- As you breathe in through nose, envision yourself breathing in your peaceful color and your total body releasing and allowing your peaceful color to move through your lungs, into your heart and through all of your body to your finger tips and toes.
- Exhale slowly through pursed lips for a count of ten.
- Now, visualize your stressful color throughout your body.
- Repeat steps 5 and 7. This time, visualize your peaceful color pushing your stressful color gently through body, through blood vessels, back through your heart and through exhalation of 10 seconds. Breath in your good color for five seconds. Breath out your stressful color over 10 seconds.
- Repeat five times.
- Open your eyes. Take pause. Choose your life moment and go.
