Transform Your Negativity
The news is really hard to watch right now, with so much anger, hate and divisiveness. Every day I worry about the world I will send my children into.
This month I am sharing with you a meditation by my mom called Transforming Negativity where she asks us to visualize anger transforming to love as it moves through our bodies and out into the universe. The practice then moves into her familiar recitation of the mantra so hum, which means "I am that." The "so" represents the individual and "hum" represents the universal. I am the universal: It's basically a reminder that deep down, we are all the same, with nothing to divide us.
There are already a few variations of the Transforming Negativity meditation in the recordings I've shared, so to distinguish, I'm calling this one MEDITATION Transforming Negativity & So Hum 2. Lately I've found myself worrying that I don't have a lot of new material to post from my mom's collection. (If you don't know the backstory, I learned after her death that there were 190 audio recordings of her teaching meditation and breath work, and each month I post another to a Google Drive folder that you can access for free as a subscriber to this newsletter. Subscribe for free access here.) The majority of the files have yet to be posted, but they are mostly variations on the same two dozen practices already there. Of course, this is because my mom taught -- and did herself -- the same practices repeatedly. The goal cannot be accomplished in one sitting, or even in one lifetime. It is a journey with no endpoint, but the journey itself is the point.
And so I will keep posting and sharing. I hope you find some peace inside with one or multiple versions of the Transforming Negativity meditation.
How to create time for what's important to you
Shortly after learning that her cancer had metastasized, my mom wrote this in a card to me: "Quantity of time is wonderful, but quality of time is a gift."
I think of those words often as the years pass. My sons are growing up rapidly. I am constantly trying to reduce the barrage of distractions in my life. I always want to do more in a day than I can possibly get done.
But here's what I've found is the key to finding more time when it feels like there is none, a nugget of wisdom offered in a time management class I once took.
Spend a day paying attention to your activities. Put them in one of the following categories:
1. Urgent and important
2. Not urgent but important
3. Urgent but not important
4. Neither urgent nor important
The things you likely want to do for yourself (meditation, exercise, etc.) are in category 2: important, but we don't consider them urgent.
Look at how much of your time is spent in categories 3 and 4, doing things you don't consider important. Can you swap out a few of those to make space for category 2?
In my own life, I'm looking especially at category 3: What things am I doing out of obligation that really aren't important? Any appointment becomes urgent when it's happening, but is it more important than, say, having time for a yoga practice or spending time with someone you love? Of course, there's always room to reduce things like social media scrolling in category 4, but if an activity is needed downtime and brings you stress relief, you could also make a case that it belongs in category 2 in limited doses.
Often illness prompts people to see their mental and physical health as urgent. As a preventative, consider what lifestyle changes might give things that are important to you more urgency. My iPhone Health app tells me that I get many more steps now than I did a year ago. Why? I adopted a dog. Walking three times a day is now urgent as well as important, not just something nice to do for myself. I also used to drive my kids to school; now they attend a school in our neighborhood, and we walk. (By the way, I have become a huge fan of walking meditation, and this video shows another way I make the most of my walking time.)
Your happiness and well-being are both urgent and important.