Sit up a Tree

Many people feeling the effects of stress try meditation and often use tapes of bird song or CDs with the sound of crashing waves to soothe them into a state of relaxation.  These can be ideal, enabling you to get away from it all for a little while with a just set of headphones.   But it’s worth remembering if you’re able to get outdoors that taking a walk or sitting under a tree can be every bit as therapeutic. 

Just watching nature is an excellent way to calm your mind.  Find yourself a patch where you can take in nature regularly throughout the year, watching when the leaves, blossoms, and seeds appear and when they fall.  Recognizing bird songs or listening to how the volume of the birds rises and falls with the volume of the traffic  Doing this often enough practitioners of this natural therapy found that they had not only become their own almanac for that location but also that they had created an inner space within themselves that was free of the stresses of their daily lives.  Not to mention finding a new interest in nature to distract them from their problems also! 

“Teach us to care and not to care.
Teach us to sit still.” – T.S. Eliot

In the movie ‘Pretty Woman’ Richard Gere plays a stressed-out and out-of-touch businessman. Julia Roberts teaches him (among, ahem, other things) how to to relax by taking off his shoes and as she called it ‘copping a squat’ in the park.  I like that phrase.  It implies something stolen and reclaimed and indeed both the act of taking a moment out of our busy days to notice our own natural habitat and the act of squatting have been taken from us in the Western world. Traditional peoples the world over, where people don’t sleep in beds or sit on chairs, know the benefits of both!

Chair and desk culture has done a lot of damage to us all by forcing us to sit in a position that does a lot of damage to our spines and wider health.  Personally I would love to have the level of flexibility to be able to squat comfortably for long periods as people of other cultures do.  In Western culture the squat is regarded either as a brief muscle building lunge or as a stress position for interogating military prisoners.  But the health benefits from squatting extend beyond just improving your posture. (This site for example claims a whole raft of health benefits to squatting in the bathroom too!)  Thankfully you can teach yourself to squat comfortably for longer periods.  Begin by aiming for a 30–second squat, then next time try for a minute and so you build up.

So find yourself a ‘sit spot’ but better yet make it your ‘cop a squat spot’!

nature |
stress |
personal development |
bushcraft

When was the last time you came across someone who had something or could do something that you didn’t have or couldn’t do.  Think back.  Did you see someone in a car that you wish you had, or a house, or a job.  Or maybe it wasn’t a thing but a skill, like playing the guitar, a sport or communicating in a foreign language. 

How did it make you feel?

• Did you feel envious? 
• Did you feel jealous?
• Angry?
• Inferior?

The emotions that envy bring out in most people are, on the whole, negative ones.  People see something (either a physical thing or maybe a skill or a relationship) that someone else has, and they see a void in their own life.  This bring up negative feelings.  The bigger the void the bigger the negative feelings will be.

I’m not saying that negative feelings are bad (negative feelings can drive us to do great things) but left unchecked, negativity can become all-consuming.  When you find yourself starting to become overwhelmed with negative feelings, stop and examine the situation.  Feeling bad isn’t going to make anything better – actions are what’s going to cause any change, and the best way to cause change is to ask better questions.

Here are some better questions that you can ask yourself:

• “Did I want what whatever was making me envious before I actually saw it?  If not, why?”
• “What are the specific things (these are usually either skills or disciplines) that are ”
• “How could I get to have XYZ?”
• “What skills does the other person have that, if I had them, would allow me to achieve the same results?”
• “Is changing my goals and priorities to achieve XYZ worth it?”

By asking these questions you are focusing your mind in a much positive way, examining the reasons behind why you might not have what you desire, but also, and perhaps more importantly, whether it is something that you actually want or just a passing fancy.

If come to the conclusion that you do actually want the thing or skill that you are lacking, then thank your mind for making you envious (because that’s what made you notice it in the first place) and then, using the answers to the questions above, start working out a way to achieve your new goal.

Now isn’t that far better than just stewing in your own anger?

Do you want to learn how to speed-read?  WikiHow has an excellent article on how to learn to speed read that will cost you nothing. 

Compared to most systems that will cost you anything between $10 to $100 (or more), the information in this article is quite thorough and should, if you practice enough (and learning to speed read requires a LOT of practice) you should be able to increase your reading speed dramatically.

The article breaks down speed reading into 11 steps, but the four steps that I feel are the most important are:

• Time your current reading speed
  Know where you are starting from – this way you’ll be able to spot improvements that you make.
• Stop reading to yourself
  One of the main obstacles to speed reading is subvocalizing the words you see in your head.  As odd as it might sound, this dramatically reduces your reading speed.  Humming to yourself or playing music through headphones while you read are both good techniques for eliminating subvocalization.
• Read with your hand
  One of the keys to speed reading is smooth eye movement and it helps if you use your hand of finger as a guide for your eye.
• Practice and push yourself
  If you want to learn to speed read then you will need to put in hours of practice time.  Don’t expect to speed read in 5 minutes!

Try it and see how you fair!