As one of my monthly goals is to meditate every day I have signed up for a free meditation challenge with Oprah and Deepak. This 21-day challenge focuses on manifestations of success. Feel free to follow along, try it yourself and/or comment below.
Success Meets No Resistance
Q1) Take notice of an area of your life that you usually resist. Maybe you feel yourself emotionally pushed back when a certain person starts to dominate a staff meeting. Write down an alternative response for yourself next time, one in which you don’t feel the need to control the situation and aren’t threatened by anyone’s behavior.
The area where I push back the most is listening to my husband’s feelings. This hasn’t always happened, to me its something that has slowly happened over time and my excuse for doing it is that he doesn’t hear me or that he tells me that I am over-emotional. Either way, I should be leading by example and listening to him and then asking him to listen to me. My alternative response to this should be to relax, don’t jump to conclusions and trust that he is coming from a place of love and not criticism. It is more important than ever that we hear each other so I need to make listening a priority.
Q2) When awareness expands, trust grows. Write about an experience in which you gave more freedom to someone, and discovered things turned out better than if you had tried to control and micromanage each step.
I find that when my husband and I go out I try to control and micromanage our dates. He will come up with a plan and I will completely undermine it. I have noticed that I do that a lot and have been trying to stop. There have been a few dates where I trusted my husband to plan something I liked and would enjoy. I find on these dates where I go with the flow I actually enjoy myself more. We have more fun and it seems more genuine to me.
Q3) Write about a way you can practice alert, appreciative awareness with someone today. It might be praising someone for taking the initiative, or for contributing a helpful idea.
I think praising someone would be an easy one for today. I have a house full of people I can do this with. My sister, B, is currently visiting and I could easily praise her for coming all the way out here. My husband has been amazing with the kids today, I could easily praise him for taking the initiative to make breakfast for everyone and then for keeping the kids happy all day. I have, but could again, praise my boys for being extra good listeners for the entire weekend. They both have been amazing and I am so proud of them.
Q4) Use this space to reflect further on your experience today.
Although I am quite tired after not much sleep last night, this meditation has energized me enough that I want to go out finish some long procrastinated chores and drop some praises on my loved ones.
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