“Strangely, I wake up much earlier whenever I‘m away from home. I always feel inspired after a productive trip and think that I’m going to be a ‘new me’ when I get home and wake up every day at the crack of dawn, but I inevitably go back to my old ways within a week.” — Jing Wei, Illustrator

Here are tips to consider when traveling and staying in a different environment

Working out of a hotel room can make you more productive

This is especially true if you’re traveling alone, because when you work from a hotel room you eliminate all your at-home distractions. Andy Hayes, a premium tea seller, notes: “I find hotels to be a great place for quiet, mindful morning moments, as there is no temptation to clean out the refrigerator or reorganize my desk.”

If you want to add some familiarity to your morning routine in a hotel room without providing too much of a distraction, consider traveling with an electric kettle or blender so you can make your favorite drink without having to leave your room.

Do some smart scheduling ahead of time

Schedule your flights to make sure your morning routine is not disrupted. Or, if you know you sleep well on planes, schedule them so you travel overnight and land at your destination relatively early in the morning, so you can enjoy an active out-of-doors morning routine from the moment you disembark. If you know that you never tend to work well in different environments, you may choose not to travel at all when you’re in the middle of an important project, instead choosing to protect this time and ensuring that any travel is scheduled for afterward.

Make a plan and stick to it

This can be hard to implement on the fly once you wake up in your hotel room, so if you travel a lot it might be a good idea to keep a simple morning routine at all times. That way it won’t require much adaptation when you’re away from home.

“My schedule is dynamic, so I have to be prepared to adapt. I keep a suitcase packed with thin gym shoes and socks and workout stuff so I can weave that into my schedule when I travel. I’m pretty disciplined about sticking to it.” — Kevin Warren, chief commercial officer at Xerox

If you travel only occasionally and therefore want to keep a bulked-up home routine, think about what key habits from your morning routine you can still do on the road — meditation, yoga, or light stretching —and plan to include this in your routine when you’re away from home.

Don’t beat yourself up

Don’t beat yourself up about not perfectly following your morning routine [or even a shortened version of it] while on the road. Whether you’re staying in a hotel room alone, or sleeping on a friend’s couch, you may find that you’re just not as efficient away as you are at home. That’s okay.

“Routines are funny things. Following them causes a certain level of stress. Not following them causes a different level of stress. Either way, I’m never totally comfortable.” — Steven Heller, Former Art Director of the New York Times Book Review and Co-chair of SVA MFA Design Program 

The next time you’re planning a trip to stay with friends or relatives, remind yourself of Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip from Poor Richard’s Almanack: “Fish and visitors smell after three days.”

Get in and out of there as soon as possible, and abide by their morning routine while you‘re there. Writer Paul French puts this rather wonderfully: “Dawn can be an unforgiving hour to be cluttering around in someone else‘s home. I‘ll just do what I can without waking people or riling anyone’s cat.”

Reversals

There are a couple of instances on the road when you‘ll want to throw all notions of following your morning routine out the window in favor of enjoying the here and now. These are:

I. When traveling for important work meetings and events

2. When traveling for pleasure.

Regarding the first instance, many of the people we spoke with noted that when they are traveling for work, their wake-up time mostly depends on why they’re traveling in the first place. And so it should be, especially if you’re only away on business for a day or two, and the reason you’re away is especially important to your company or career. In this situation, take this time to work as hard as you can, sacrificing all but sleep.

When traveling for pleasure, just go with the flow. Unplug as much as possible on vacation. If you’re visiting family members [especially those you don’t see very often], enjoy the time you’re there with them instead of fretting over your morning routine falling by the wayside.

The post How to Maintain Your Morning Routine When Traveling appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”
—Henry Ford

Have you given up on learning new skills, even though you know they will bring great value to you, just because of the time and effort involved? Do you use the I-don’t-have-any-time excuse for justifying stagnancy in your learning and knowledge? Chances are that you believe that you can never get good at something unless you put in hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of practice. Perhaps you know about (or have heard of) Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, which states that one needs at least 10,000 hours of practice to become proficient at something.

Well, that may be true if you want to achieve a level of unparalleled mastery. For example, if you want to be able to compete with Tiger Woods, you will likely need to spend hours on the golf course daily, for years together. But for most of us, the goal is to get good enough to enjoy doing it and to make it work for us, says Josh Kaufman, the author of The First 20 Hours. According to him, we don’t need loads of time and effort to learn anything new: a new sport, a foreign language, computer programming, music instrument or whatever else you wish to learn.

Josh believes that you can get good at anything you set your mind on; all you need is 20 hours of focussed work that includes research, understanding and practice. In this candid interview with Jonathan Fields, founder of Good Life Project, he outlines five steps that can take you to a reasonable level of proficiency. Watch the video now, then embark on an exciting new learning trip.

About Josh Kaufman

Josh Kaufman is an acclaimed business, learning, and skill acquisition expert. He is the author of two international bestsellers: The Personal MBA and The First 20 Hours. Josh’s research and writing have helped millions of people worldwide learn the fundamentals of modern business.

The post Want to learn something new? You need only 20 hours! appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

To Begin Your Meditation Practice, Start Where You Are

You might feel that you are the single most stressed-out person on Planet Earth; you might be hopelessly in love; you might have six children and a full-time job; you might be going through a depression or a dark night of the soul. Wherever you are, you can begin there. You don’t need to change a thing in order to start a meditation practice.

When you decide to become a regular practitioner of meditation, it’s wise to settle on a schedule ahead of time. The fruits of meditation are manifold, and you really begin to see them and feel them when you practise regularly. So first and foremost, choose a schedule that is realistic for you—and then keep it. For example, decide what time of the day you are going to practise. Perhaps it works best for you to practise in the early morning, before you have breakfast and get ready for work. Perhaps it works best for you to practise after your kids are in bed at night. Decide when you are going to get into a regular habit of meditation—and commit.

Next, Consider How Long You Will Practice

How long will you sit for? You can sit for 20 minutes or two hours; this is up to you. But set yourself up for success. When you commit to a meditation practice, you don’t want to put yourself in a position where you will easily feel defeated. For beginning meditators, I suggest starting with 20 minutes. Then, after a month or several months of practice, you can lengthen your time by another 20 minutes. If you are a seasoned meditator or if you are returning to a meditation practice, you might commit to an hour a day.

Perhaps you have an hour for your meditation practice, but sitting for more than 20 minutes feels daunting to you. If this is the case, I suggest sitting for 20 minutes, then perhaps taking 10 minutes to slowly walk in a quiet, contemplative fashion, or to practise slow yoga, or to simply stretch, re-energize yourself and give yourself a break through movement. Shifting your focus to something body oriented might help you to sit again for another 20 minutes.

Ideally, the Environment for Meditation Is As Simple As Possible

It is simple in the sense that it does not require a great deal of setup. As you will discover, meditation is about letting the world in and awakening to your life, which means you can even meditate on a bus! But for the purposes of creating a regular practice, find a space in your home that feels sacred or relaxing for you. You might decide to create a little altar, a display of reminders that you feel supports your practice. You might want to place a picture of a teacher whom you connect with on your altar, or a candle, or perhaps some incense.

Then Consider Your Meditation “Seat”

You want to sit in a way that allows you to feel lifted—and this can be done on a cushion or a chair. Some choose to use what is called a gomden, which is a hard, square seat that lifts you up so your knees are below your sacrum. You can also use a zafu, a circular cushion, which is a bit softer and lower. Find the cushion or seat that works for you. If you have a bad back or a lot of knee pain, you can sit in a chair.

Lastly, Find a Timer

This can be a wristwatch, an alarm clock, or anything you can set that will alert you when the time you decided on is up. In meditation halls and on retreats, a gong [or bell] is often used, which is an extraordinarily gorgeous and peaceful sound.

You might practice alone, or you might decide to begin a meditation practice with a partner or a group. If you are a beginning meditator, I often recommend practising with one or more people, because this will provide you with a great deal of support. You’ll find that if you go at it alone, it is much more difficult to keep the schedule. The time-honored way of doing meditation is very often to practise alone, and in that case the commitment and devotion to a schedule can be more difficult, but I’ve found it gets easier as time passes.

Begin Your Meditation Practice With Just 10 Minutes Day

Once a college student who came to me asking for instruction on how to meditate said that he experienced a lot of anxiety. He also had ADD [attention deficit disorder]. This young student was longing for relief from all the stress in his life. He was also concerned about how he was going to integrate meditation into his busy life, with all his studies and obligations. I suggested that he meditate just 10 minutes a day first thing in the morning, before even getting out of bed. I told him he could sit up in bed or on the side of the bed, cross-legged or legs extended, however he felt comfortable.

He came back after one week and said that this had really been helpful. He said that one morning he woke up really early, around 2.30am, and he was having a panic attack because he had so much to do. His instinct was to jump out of bed and get to it, work on his huge list of to-dos. And then he remembered his commitment to start his day with 10 minutes of meditation. So at 2.30 in the morning, he sat up and entered his meditation practice. In that experience, he said everything slowed down, and he was able to look at his wild, intense mind and his energized body.

By being present with himself for those 10 minutes, he had clarity about how to mindfully work through his list and see what needed to be done and in what order. The meditation allowed him to settle down and organize what he needed to do with clarity. It occurred to him that many of the things he felt he had to do actually didn’t need to be done that particular day—and this settledness allowed him to return to sleep and feel much more refreshed when he awoke again at a more reasonable hour.

Related » Tools to facilitate meditation

So perhaps you only have 10 minutes that you can commit to meditation. Just 10 minutes can help you come to your senses or slow down enough that your natural intelligence, or what I call basic goodness—the part of you that knows what the right action at any given time might be—can click in.

This excerpt first appeared in the March 2016 issue of Complete Wellbeing magazine.

The post Pema Chödrön Explains How to Begin Your Meditation Practice appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Practising Yoga in your career

Would it be appropriate for a Yoga practitioner to be a hired overseas enforcer for an international corporation, a factory farmer, a casino manager or a lobbyist for a cut-throat pharmaceutical company? We think not. All these jobs involve unsavoury practices or goals that definitely compromise a Yoga practitioner’s moral integrity. We actually had a student who, attracted by a handsome salary, took on a job at a casino. Before very long, he found that the atmosphere in the casino was so disagreeable that at the end of the day he felt filthy and didn’t even want to continue with his practice of Yoga. In the end, he resigned and has never regretted his decision.

It is important for a Yoga practitioner to pursue a proper livelihood. That means earning one’s living in a decent and respectable way that does not violate any of Yoga’s many moral virtues

Your beliefs are not part-time

We cannot practise integrity part-time, or in one aspect of our life and not others. Integrity cannot be compartmentalised; it is an all-or-nothing matter. We regard integrity as an aspect of truthfulness, which is considered a major virtue in Patanjali’s Yoga and, of course, in other branches of Yoga as well. He tells us that when a practitioner is firmly established in truthfulness, whatever he or she affirms comes true. We personally would limit this ability to spiritual matters, because in worldly affairs a master often relies, like everyone else, primarily on information that may or may not be entirely correct. As a rule, however, a master does not indulge in chitchat or unconsidered opinions.

The splintering of Yoga

Regretfully, the contemporary Yoga movement in the West lacks integrity in several respects. The first is that many Yoga teachers give the wrong impression that Yoga is no more than a postural practice. This is unfair to traditional Yoga, which is obviously much more. It is also unfair to newcomers to Yoga, who don’t know any better, but should be given an opportunity to explore the spirituality of Yoga and the full range of its practices.

Most deplorable is the absence of traditional Yoga’s moral disciplines from many of the teachings offered at modern centres.

This is like offering a person a chair with only three legs to sit on, which is an accident in the making. What good, one may ask, will it do for a student to know the headstand if, when he or she has a car accident, they do not know how to manage life afterward? Or, of what advantage is mastering the Warrior III pose when the mind is worrying about death?

It is irresponsible for a Yoga teacher to tell his or her students that the moral disciplines are unimportant

Not only is modern Yoga by and large not grounded in the moral precepts, it is also shot through with the moral apathy and shallowness that characterises our mainstream culture.

Yoga is a way of life

It is irresponsible for a Yoga teacher to tell his or her students [as we have heard] that the moral disciplines are unimportant. In fact, without them there can be no attainment of mental health, never mind inner freedom. And it is negligent for a Yoga teacher to publicly dismiss the spiritual orientation of Yoga, because this is precisely what is missing from our troubled culture. Integrity, among other things, means to present and practise Yoga as the spiritual tradition that it is. Anything less is dishonest.

Excerpted from Yoga: A Beginner’s Guide by Georg and Brenda Feuerstein.
Published by Jaico. Used with permission.

The post What has yoga got to do with your work life? Plenty! appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.