The morning I was to go on a short business trip, my client and friend Barb Schmidt, the author of The Practice: Simple Tools for Managing Stress, Finding Inner Peace, and Uncovering Happiness, shared her TEDx talk with me called, “Is This Seat Taken?”
In Barb’s talk, I learned that we have more than 50,000 thoughts a day–and half of them are negative. Her talk was about understanding what it’s like, and why it’s important to learn how to just be with yourself by doing absolutely nothing. No reading, no emailing, no texting, no watching a DVD–just peacefully being.
For more than 30 years, Barb has worked hard on developing her inner peace while learning how to retrain her brain. She is an inspiration to me and to so many others who are familiar with her daily practice of contemplation.
As most of us already know, there are many studies, books and even medical doctors who agree meditation is a stress reducer and a complement to living a healthy and happy life. “Meditation helps lower blood pressure,” says cardiologist Dr. Nieca Goldberg, Medical Director of the Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health at the NYU Langone Medical Center, “because it relaxes your blood vessels.”
At the airport I began to notice the constant noise my mind was making. After listening to and watching Barb’s talk, I thought about trying to control and slow down my thoughts. I began to reject some of the noise in favor of the quiet. Instead of reading emails I stopped. Then I waited for the impulse to open my iPhone again. It came, but I didn’t give in to it. I waited and I rested, and slowly began to notice the quiet as my mind started to rid itself of the many distractions that surrounded me.
In this ever transforming world of business, where speed is the currency of success–and success is measured by the unrelenting demand for tweets, hits, shares, and likes–our culture has become addicted to stimulation.
It’s not totally our fault. Or is it?
“Stress impacts our brains by activating the fear networks in the lower brain–the Amygdala–and increases the production of neurotransmitters such as cortisol,” says Judith Glaser, author of “Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results.” Yet our brains have been rewired to crave this stimuli to handle the complexities of today’s business world. With our creativity at risk, and the brilliance that got us to where we are today threatened, can we stop this destructive cycle? Yes, we can. We can wean ourselves off the need to constantly seek out interruptions. We can reset and recharge ourselves. We have the power to take back control, even if it’s one breath at a time.
Here are five simple takeaways that I learned from Barb Schmidt:
- We can turn off the mind and stop thinking unproductive thoughts anytime we want.
- We can’t have a happy life if we have an unruly mind.
- Our mind is with us for our entire journey; we cannot escape ourselves for even one second.
- Take five minutes at the beginning of each day to quiet the mind, we can learn to trust ourselves completely and direct our mind to wherever we want it to go.
- By concentrating on something as simple as taking a breath, we’re quieting the mind. In quieting the mind, we are not silencing it, we are gaining a greater awareness of the thoughts we are thinking. We’re learning to live our lives from the inside out.
Take time to watch Barb’s TEDx talk and share her important message with someone you know who may need to discover the freedom and greater inner peace we so often seek, but never seem to find.
From: Inc