Existential Psychology

Give Your Body The Gift Of Stillness And Your Mind The Gift Of Clarity

By  | 

Near the end of class, while we were all lying in final savasana, our yoga teacher Miranda told us, “Give your body the gift of stillness and your mind the gift of clarity.” I told her afterwards I thought it was a great line and she happily responded that she came up with it in the moment. It’s awesome that she trusted her yoga sense, and psychologically speaking her words were spot on. Whether you practice yoga or not the idea is applicable, especially if you live in the West. In a culture where productivity is God many of us are negative about doing nothing, some of us are downright afraid of it. We feel compelled to fill up all our time with activities, to always have something to keep us occupied.

You know that you can’t work all the time, that you need to take a break or else you become mentally and physically exhausted, but you might not pass on that same favor to your brain or your body. Even when you’re relaxing you’re not really relaxing, you’ve simply taken the intensity level down a few notches. Thoughts are still flying across your mind and your body is still active, so from their perspectives it’s no break at all just a diminution of what they were already doing.

The reason to regularly give your body the gift of stillness and your mind the gift of clarity by quietly focusing on your breathing is that you are your mind and body, so a gift bestowed upon them comes back to benefit you too by making you feel more refreshed and resilient throughout your day, capable of facing the challenges that come your way with equanimity.

Think about how you choose to relax when you’re not working and ask yourself if these activities are actually relaxing or are just more work for your mind and body. If you can find some time every day to simply be in the stillness without trying to do anything except breathe you’ll start to notice a big difference in your life.

Related posts:

  1. Psychological Help For Shyness It’s not easy being shy in a big anonymous social world. From the shy person’s perspective there’s an invisible but very real barrier to fast and easy human connection, a barrier the outgoing among us don’t see or at least have no problem breaking through. And the bitter reality is that shyness is usually interpreted by […]...
  2. Activity and Repose During most Bikram and Hatha classes there is a sequence of poses about two thirds of the way through that alternates between lying in complete stillness in dead man’s pose and activating by taking a deep breath, letting it out in two strong, short exhales and springing your upper body forward at your waste in […]...
  3. Malicious There are certain types of people who attempt to hide their malicious intentions under a veneer of friendliness. Their seemingly genuine interest and innocuous questions are in fact designed to humiliate, exclude, and to help them feel superior to you. All of this occurs under the guise of open body language, smiles, and friendly interactions.It […]...
  4. You Are Capable of More Than You Think The comfort zone. It’s just so comfortable. But if you stay in yours you can say goodbye to growth, goodbye to further self-actualization. Staying within the parameters of what you already know provides the benefit of certainty but at a price. You can think of existential anxiety as a monster who patrols the boundaries of your comfort […]...
  5. Challenge Yourself Through Physical Exercise There are some very good psychological reasons, along with the obvious health benefits, to challenge yourself through daily physical exercise. Learning to stay focused and keep going while your body screams at you to stop is pretty much all mental even though the activity is physical, and it will make the various mental and emotional […]...
  6. Gift For Language What keeps a lot of people from learning a second language is their own entrenched belief that they lack the gift for language acquisition. But this is a rationalization, an easy excuse that’s accepted without too much push back. If this sounds familiar, realize that you do have the gift for language. How do I […]...
  7. Body Language During The Winter Months What happens to many of us during the cold, dark winter months is that our body language changes to fit an environment more suited for hibernation than for an active lifestyle. We hunch our shoulders, stick our hands into our pockets, turn our gazes towards the ground. We close off as we fold into ourselves. […]...
  8. Find Time For Stillness Every Day Most busy people complain about their stressful schedules. They are well aware that rarely finding any downtime is hurting them mentally, emotionally, and physically. Yet the irony is that the moment they do happen to inhabit a space of stillness, where there are few external stimuli to pull out behavior, they grow uncomfortable, even anxiety […]...
  9. Your Presence is a Gift The greatest present you can give someone is your true presence. We recently wrote about overcoming loneliness and came to the conclusion that at the deeper level the only lasting remedy is to feel understood by the people who are close to us and to feel like we understand them too. But there is a […]...
  10. Body Of Evidence Most people agree that the first Matrix movie was awesome, the second was okay, and the third was a piece of garbage. Where things get interesting psychologically is that for many, the first movie is retroactively ruined or at least diminished in value because of the failures of the subsequent two. After looking at the […]...
  11. Outer Body There is an idea that feels quite foreign to the Western mind, yet if you give it time to sink in you will not be able to deny its validity or its potential to profoundly alter the way you relate to the world. Our mentality centers around individuality, and it goes without saying that having […]...
  12. Give People Another Chance You can use some psychological ideas to make yourself a gentler, more forgiving person in how your characterize and regard the people you know. We always hear the expression ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’, and the sad part is that for most of us this holds true, both in […]...
  13. Take Care Of Your Body If you’re struggling with mental or emotional issues and you’re not taking care of your body through healthy eating and daily exercise you’re not giving yourself much of a chance. It’s astounding how many people have a major complaint on the psychological side of things without realizing that the psychological and the physical are inextricably […]...
  14. Mind Reading And The Narcissism Of Abusers One of the hallmarks of abuse is that the abuser expects the people around him to know exactly what he’s thinking and gets upset when they don’t. He’ll often react in an abusive fashion, especially towards those close to him like familial relations, probably because it’s safer to do so than in the social environment […]...
  15. Eradicating The Racist Mind And Retaining Personal Freedom Psychologically speaking, conversations and ideas meant to eradicate the racist mindset are problematic because the attitude of wanting to eradicate anything is militaristic, or at least perceived that way. It sets up two opposing camps, one hell-bent on maintaining the status quo, the other hell-bent on changing it, and this pressure results in increasingly entrenched […]...
  16. All You Need To Do Is Give Your Best There are just as many people who take credit for accomplishments when many of the necessary components for a successful outcome were outside of their power to control or influence as there are people who wallow in failure even though many of the things that went wrong were outside of their power to control or […]...
  17. When To Give Up When should you throw in the towel and give up? The short answer is never. I’m reminded of the start of the movie ‘Gladiator’ where Quintus says “People should know when they’re conquered” and Maximus replies “Would you Quintus? Would I?” Refusing to surrender means you still have that internal striving and it means you […]...
  18. Give Thanks Thanksgiving is a great opportunity to consciously take time to appreciate your life. We’ve written in several contexts about the difference between a having culture and a being culture. In a having culture, we try in vain to get important emotional and psychological needs met through external sources. These external sources are physical objects like […]...
  19. Give Yourself Permission to Grieve Many of us carry around our unfinished grief our whole lives. We don’t give ourselves permission to grieve because we’re afraid of what letting down our guard might do to us. Grief is a dark, unknown abyss and the secret fear is that if we allow ourselves to sink into it we’ll never find our […]...
  20. Give Everything You Have To Your Pursuit You have to be willing to give everything you have to the pursuit you’ve taken up, to make this endeavor the center of your existence, to eat, breathe, and sleep what you’re doing. If you’re not ready for a total commitment then we can predict the outcome right now. You’re going to get average results, […]...
Related Items