I don't know what you're recovering from,
But I'm recovering from pneumonia and it takes a long time and I'm so used to being super functional and so used to being able to do everything I want whenever I want to that I'm starting to realize that recovery,
Physical recovery itself and mental recovery for sure are long-term life-changing phenomena that we can actually harness to shift our experience of how we live.
So I started doing this practice that I want to share with you and this isn't a meditation.
This is just some information about a practice that seems to work really well when you're recovering from something that has given you a heads up or like a red flag or some pieces of information that has told you something about the way you're living your life isn't working and you need to start considering more fully who you are.
So here's the practice.
Each morning when I have breakfast instead of looking at my phone or looking at my computer or interacting with a screen at all,
I get out a piece of paper and a pen and I create a new normal for my breakfast time and the new normal is that I have two columns.
Column on the left I put the word mind and on the column on the right I put the word body.
And I might want to add a third column.
I haven't done it yet but I'm thinking of adding a third column that says spirit or soul or something.
But anyway right now I have these two columns and what I do is I let my hand write what those pieces of me want to do today.
So in the body column I've been surprised to see things like take a nap on the couch.
I know that my body likes taking naps but I didn't realize it wanted to take a nap on the couch.
Or another thing in the body column that surprised me was just walk around the house while you're on a phone call rather than sitting or standing.
Just move.
So that was surprising to me and I did those things later in the day.
I kept my list with me and later in the day I would just cross things off as I did them and on the mind side I would notice things not just the things I usually do for work because my work is very mind oriented.
I write and I do science and stuff and so I almost always have something that I want to write or some scientific idea I want to get down on the mind side.
But also on the mind side I'll notice things like write a letter to the editor.
Well I didn't know I wanted to write a letter to the editor because I'm really just eating my breakfast and allowing my mind and my body to tell me what they want to get done that day.
And then the neat thing is as I said I carry that piece of paper around with me and then when I do things I scratch them off the list and if I notice I've been doing a lot of mind things in a row which is pretty common for me because I get excited you know this and then that and then this.
I'll stop and I'll say wait this is the third mind thing I've crossed off and let me look at my body list and I give my body full permission to do one of the things on the body list even if it's you know simply take a body brush and rub it around my body so that my body just feels good or maybe it's do a little dance or sit in a hammock or punch a pillow.
And what I'm noticing is that this sort of strategy seems to be helping me recover better because I am allowing what happened which was for me this time getting pneumonia to tell me what it wants to tell me which was for me that my mind and my body want joint custody over my life.
They both have things they want to do and I need to respect both of their limits and both of their desires.
So I'm learning and that's the best part of recovery is to come out of something more informed and more clear about who you are and what you can do and what you can't do than when you went in.
So thanks for listening.
