Personal Development: Sarbani Sen offers 5 tips for a peaceful summer and for making more of your life.
Peaceful Summer Tip #1: Follow the Joy. Whatever you do this summer, let your inner joy be the GPS of your days. How to identify what energy you’re in? Well, usually when it’s joy, you will feel something like bubbles in the abdomen, a sensation of lightness – you could even feel there’s light in your body and in your face. Sometimes people feel expansion in the chest, like an enlargement of our breathing capacity. This is called a ‘heart chakra expansion’.
Shoulders will go back naturally and you will breathe deeper, with more serenity. You can also activate this sensation by actually doing these movements, sitting up
straight or laying down, breathing deep and pulling your shoulders back, connecting your shoulder blades. Feel the sensation of joy filling your body and soul.
And when in doubt on what to do, don’t do anything. Stick to what your heart and body dictate. If it’s nothing, then do nothing. Don’t compare and slide into the social media ‘Instagramable’ victimization syndrome. Let others do and show what they want – this is about you. Don’t feel miserable if nothing big or worth sharing is coming up for you. Let the universe provide exactly what you need, and sometimes it takes time. Be confident, trust the process. In the meantime, do something that really makes you feel good. Read a book, play with watercolours, take care of your plants, buy a new plant or anything that comes up. Don’t judge what’s there for you. Just be and do what feels good.
Peaceful Summer Tip #2: Get some alone time. If your summer is packed with loads of fun moments in groups, travelling to festivals, meeting people, family or friends, taking care of and nurturing the kids, make sure to make some space to be alone. Spending time alone, allows us to regenerate, to reconnect with our inner source, to unleash our creativity and gets us back on our mission path. Being with people all the time is draining our energetic fields – it can weigh on us and reduce our light. We need to be very careful how and with whom we spend our time. Let’s be more conscious and cautious about our actions, thoughts or deeds.
Alone time is perfect for reading some books on spirituality or self-help. It will reduce our stress, help us find out about a new technique to release tension even more and get to the zero point of needs and fears. Just be. Being consistent with having alone time will frequently enable you to feel more confident and less dependent on others. You may increase your comfortableness in your own skin, making it easier for you to meet new people and develop long-lasting and healthy relationships.
Find a suitable space to be alone. Decide on suitable ways to keep your sacred time alone, such as locking the doors, barring access, going somewhere where others can’t find you, or leaving your usual spot and going where people don’t know you. Discuss your preference to be alone in given spaces as well. For example, you might tell your family members something like, “On Wednesday and Thursdays from 6:30-7:15 I will be putting up this ‘do not disturb’ sign on my bedroom door. That means that any questions or emergency things will have to wait until 7:15.” You can also leave your home to find some place to be alone, such as a garden, park, local library, small café, or art gallery.
Peaceful Summer Tip #3: Learn something new. The more people practice a new skill they are learning, the denser the myelin in their brains becomes, which helps them learn even better. Your learning speed increases. Learning a new skill helps you learn things faster over time. By stimulating neurons in the brain, more neural pathways are formed and electrical impulses travel faster across them as you attempt to process new information. The more pathways that are formed, the faster impulses can travel.
Perhaps the most important reason of all is that learning something new will make you happier, will boost your self-esteem and give you the pleasure to enjoy some new activity or skill in your life.