I’ve always had trouble meditating – I simply can’t sit still for any length of time. But recently I tried Japa meditation, made popular by Dr. Wayne Dyer in his CD “Meditations for Manifesting”. In Japa meditation, you take a deep breath, and slowly breath out while you make the sound “Aaaah”. This is the sound of the creator, as is evidenced by the many names given the creator: God, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Ra, Dao. All these names have the “Ah” sound in common. I’ve found that calmly repeating this sound allows me to focus my tumultuous mind for up to 20 minutes!

I’m reading a great book on body-centered coaching, and it has caused me to become more attentive to my own body signals. We tend to ignore our body unless it signals us in very dramatic ways: Back aches, stiff necks, viruses, and worse. Then we usually react by resenting our body, filling it with medicine and trying to ‘get better’. So, I figured I would try to tune in to see what my body is telling me.
Signal #1 – stiff shoulders and neck. Hmmm…. What does “stiff neck” bring to mind? I looked it up in the Thesaurus and was unpleasantly surprised by the results: