Three Easy Tricks to Get Out of a Rut

Thank you Helen.

I touched on aspects of these emotional transformation tricks in a post last month on managing holiday stress. If I only I could remember to put them into practice more often! Nudged to reconsider these today when I was stuck in a rut, I once again marveled at how instantaneous they were in shifting my state of being. I went from feeling irritated, frustrated and focused on what wasn’t happening in my life to feeling alive, inspired and focused on what I can do next to grow as a person, to be fully expressed, and to provide value to my family and my community. Within minutes! Knowing how well it can work for me, I’m now inspired to guide my 3 year-old in trying these out when she gets emotionally stuck.  I can remind her of how she felt in this picture when her arms were outstretched in pure, unfettered bliss. 

1)  Change your physiology. When you’re pissed off at life, how does it feel in your body?  What do your shoulders do?  How do you breathe?  What happens to your forehead, your mouth, your jaw….?  Now think about your physical state when you’re feeling your favorite emotion.  My favorite emotional state is a combination of inspired and secure.  When I feel this way, I feel energetic, powerful, open, and tapped into Life.  My chest is open versus hunched, my face is bright and content versus scrunched or clenched and my breathing comes easy.

To find the emotional state that matches the physical state, start with the latter.  Stretch.  Walk outside.  Dance.  Practice Yoga. Check out this great article from Fit Yoga Magazine posted in Yoga in Tribeca on how to impact the way you think and feel and create through direct manipulation of the body.

2)  Check in on your focus and your beliefs in that moment. This morning my rut was around focusing my mind and perception on “everything taking so long”. Putting my focus there, I was energetically blocking anything else from happening and ultimately inhibiting any number of miracles that can happen every day.

3) Change the question.  If you hear any version of “What’s wrong with me?” or  “Why can’t I figure this out?” in your head, get conscious of it, recognize that no valuable answer comes from a negatively oriented question, and try asking a different set of questions like:

• “What’s next?”
• “How can we have fun?”
• “What am I grateful for right now?”
• “What am I willing to do to create a new reality?”
• “How can we make this an amazing adventure?”
• “What is perfect about this moment?”
• “What am I learning?”

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under AP & Self Care. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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