What Are You Carrying Around?

Here’s a Zen story about two celibate monks who were on a journey. One morning they came to a stream that was quite deep. There was a woman on the bank who clearly wanted to cross, but couldn’t. The older monk lifted her, walked across the stream, and put her down on the other side. The monks then continued on their way.

 That evening the younger monk was still ruminating about what happened, and eventually exclaimed with much emotion, “The rules of our religion forbid us to touch women. How could you have done that?”

 To which the older monk replied, “My son, I picked her up and set her down this morning. You have been carrying her ALL DAY.”

Just like the younger monk, do you carry around strong, unhelpful emotions long after the event is over? Humans are unique in the animal kingdom for our obsession with the past and our fear for the future. Alas, our bodies do not know the difference between our mind’s ruminations and actual events. Both will WRECK your nervous system, chronically raise stress hormones to UNHEALTHY levels, and move you away farther away from happiness and fulfillment.

The ANTIDOTE? TRAIN your brain to stay PRESENT in the moment...yes, THIS moment....and now THIS moment. And now here we are at THIS new moment. Just now, here, moment to moment awareness. Not constantly focusing on the past or the future, for which we have no control. Staying present and being MINDFUL stops the hamster wheel. It’s a pretty simple concept, but NOT EASY in practice.

InnerBalance is a wearable tool that trains your brain to be present. Just weeks of short practice starts improving your neural pathways. It is a low cost, low time investment way to train your brain. One of the reasons it’s so effective is that it tracks your heart rate variability, and you can see how you are doing on an app. This allows you to make real-time adjustments to train your brain.

I wore the InnerBalance tool while driving many years ago, and realized I was always “in the red”, aka stressed about getting to where I needed to be, whether someone would cut me off, just generally being vigilant and on edge when driving. But with the help of the tool, I trained myself to not be. It’s powerful stuff.

And for the month of August, I’m offering the InnerBalance tool AND a 45-minute virtual instructional session with me for $199. (The InnerBalance alone is $169.) Just email me if interested.