The post There Is No Right Way appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Click below to listen. Join the conversation by letting me know your best decision-making strategies in the comments section below..
*To download this podcast, click HERE. Then, click the 3-dotted line and click “download”.
The post There Is No Right Way appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post Know Thy Virtual Self appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Click below to listen. Share your strategies for meaningful social media engagement in the comments section below.
*To download this podcast, click HERE. Then, click the 3-dotted line and click “download”.
The post Know Thy Virtual Self appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post How to Love Laundry appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Click below to listen. Join the conversation by sharing your questions and strategies for making the most out of chores in the comments section below.
*To download this podcast, click HERE. Then, click the 3-dotted line and click “download”.
The post How to Love Laundry appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post There Is No Cushion appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Click below to listen. And as always, please share your questions and meditation experiences in the comments section below.
*To download this podcast, click HERE. Then, click the 3-dotted line and click “download”.
The post There Is No Cushion appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post Sound It Out appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Click below to listen. And as always, please share your questions and experiences mediating with sound in the comments section below.
*To download this podcast, click HERE. Then, click the 3-dotted line and click “download”.
The post Sound It Out appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post Grab Your Mind By Your Breath appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Click below to listen. If you enjoy this new, podcast format and would like to hear more, let me know in the comments section below.
*To download this podcast, click HERE. Then, click the 3-dotted line and click “download”.
The post Grab Your Mind By Your Breath appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post The Art of Doing Nothing appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>This style of meditation, known as vipassana, helps us become more aware of how our minds work. With practice, it becomes clear that thoughts generally appear on their own, often out of nowhere, as opposed to us “consciously” thinking them. Likewise, they spontaneously disappear, moving through our awareness like clouds in the sky.
Through vipassana, we discover that our minds exist somewhat independently; we exist in relationship with our minds as opposed to being one and the same as them. This insight can radically shift our sense of who we are as conscious beings and how we operate.
While it’s important to understand how our minds generate thoughts and emotions, what can we actually do in terms of dealing with them? Thankfully, vipassana can also be utilized as an effective tool for self-regulation.
The basic instruction here is to get out of the way by allowing your thoughts and emotions to arise and disappear on their own. We don’t need to suppress thoughts of despair or fits of anger. Instead, notice and accept them by simply experiencing them without trying to change anything. In time, usually far shorter than we expect, those thoughts and emotions will disappear like rain clouds in a passing shower.
To appreciate the principle of this technique, imagine a barking, agitated dog in a cage. What is the best strategy for calming and quieting it? Yelling at it to stop or prodding it with a stick would only agitate the dog further. A more effective approach would be to place the cage in the middle of a wide-open field and just unlock the door. At first, the dog would likely continue barking and run around aggressively. But after a while, recognizing that it is no longer caged in and sensing the expansive space around, the dog would eventually just lie down quietly on its own.
Likewise, giving space to our thoughts and emotions through simply allowing them to come and go creates an inner environment for our minds to settle down on their own. With continued practice, the space between thoughts will grow longer, revealing a natural calm and quiet which underlies the superficial noise of our inner chatter.
In meditation, change happens by doing nothing. Like magic! This principle is counterintuitive, especially compared to how we have been trained to operate in our lives: “Nothing comes from nothing, so you must work hard to achieve anything!” This philosophy is not wrong in principle and certainly drives us to accomplish a lot, both individually and collectively.
Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work when applied to the workings of our minds and hearts. The more effort and pressure we exert internally, the more entrenched and intense our thoughts and emotions become. We need a different approach, and thousands of years of meditative investigation have demonstrated that allowing our experiences just as they are gets the job done.
This month, I encourage you to continue your vipassana practice, aiming for eight minutes every day. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed and experience your thoughts, emotions, and sensations just as they are without trying to change anything.
Keep going and let me know how you’re doing in the comments section below.
The post The Art of Doing Nothing appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post Why Meditation? appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>It was the first time my attention had been directed inward and I was humbled by the vast amount of mental activity going on in my mind — and my inability to regulate it. Unable to focus on my own thoughts for even three minutes, I became deeply curious about those who had spent decades training their attention and what they had discovered about our inner landscape and outer reality.
This pursuit guided my undergraduate studies as I spent countless hours pouring over traditional meditation treatises in the library, perhaps a sad testament to my college social life. What I discovered were comprehensive maps of human consciousness, which offered insight into my ordinary experiences and detailed descriptions of extraordinary ones — of perceiving events in distant places and times, sensing the thoughts and feelings of others, and ultimately recognizing the interconnected unity of everything.
Beyond mere descriptions, these teachings were manuals, intended to guide “inner explorers” in a stepwise fashion through the hidden depths of their own minds. I was ready to be all in and have never looked back.
Meditation is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of practices from many different traditions. A common denominator amongst them is the development of self-awareness. At one level, meditation offers a methodology for becoming consciously aware of our ordinary mental-emotional experiences. Even a cursory look under our “inner hood” reveals a multitude of thoughts and emotions that come and go haphazardly, seemingly out of our conscious intention and control. In turn, this messy inner dynamic serves as the source of our desires and actions — what we think we want and what we actually do.
Modern life challenges our minds and hearts with unprecedented demands that the human system did not evolve to handle. Consequently, we are facing a growing epidemic of mental-emotional issues such as chronic stress, anxiety, depression, and attention disorders. In this complicated modern age, developing a more accurate sense of how we operate mentally and emotionally is no longer an option; it’s a requirement for self-preservation and self-actualization.
As essential as it is, discovering the day-to-day operations of our minds is just the tip of the iceberg. As those treatises that I discovered in Widener Library lay out, each and every one of us possesses the necessary hardware and software for extraordinary experiences. As we learn to quiet the inner noise of thoughts and emotions, deeper layers of calm, ecstasy, and transcendence reveal themselves. Discovering these deeper states and what they reveal about ourselves, other conscious beings, and the world around us is the highest meaning of self-awareness and the ultimate payoff of becoming a skillful meditator.
Over the next several months, these blog posts will explore the many facets of meditation. On the evening of Monday, June 25th, I will be offering a Kundalini meditation workshop in NYC, which will be a wonderful opportunity to put this discussion into practice. Regardless, as a first step on this longer journey, I encourage you to do the following simple exercise between now and the next installment in July:
Every day, set a timer for five minutes and just sit comfortably, in a chair or on the floor, with your eyes closed. Without trying to do or change anything, simply experience whatever you are consciously aware of. Sense the flow of your thoughts, emotions, and sensations in the same way that you would listen to some music. You cannot do this incorrectly!
After five minutes, take a deep breath and slowly open your eyes. Intentionally register the images that strike your eyes as though it were the first time you had ever seen anything at all. Then, go about your day.
Commit to this simple practice for just five minutes. If you’re up for it, please share your experiences in the comments section below as I’d love to hear about them. Enjoy and stay tuned!
The post Why Meditation? appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post A Pound of Self-Care With A Pinch of Support appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Have you ever paused to consider what’s involved in that seemingly simple movement? The sequence of activity is mind-boggling: electrical impulses are generated and conducted from the cerebral cortex of the brain to motor neurons in the spinal cord, which release chemicals that trigger the coordinated contraction of muscle fibers that require the stabilization of bones and the mobility of joints, all fueled by innumerable chemical reactions within cells.
Thankfully, arm movement generally involves only a simple intention on your part – the act itself is executed and coordinated by a multifaceted set of unconscious bodily processes.
In many ways, establishing and maintaining your health and happiness are analogous to moving your arm. Your body, mind, energy, and spirit are unfathomably complex, consisting of trillions of cells, hundreds of muscles and bones, in addition to thousands of subtle energetic pathways, centers, fields, and bodies recognized by ancient healing traditions.
Like moving your arm, you do not consciously need to orchestrate this entire show. Instead, to stay healthy you can establish conscious, positive habits in a handful of areas such as diet, exercise, sleep, stress-regulation, purpose, and relationships. By learning the principles for optimizing each of these domains and gaining the discipline to put them into consistent action, your multifaceted system automatically takes care of the rest. It’s truly amazing!
In my experience, effective self-management covers 85 percent of establishing and maintaining our health. However, even under “perfect” self-maintenance conditions, health challenges do arise and working with professional practitioners through targeted therapies helps cover the final 15 percent and addresses specific conditions as they come up.
But whom should you work with? Figuring out which approach and practitioner are most appropriate can be an overwhelming task, especially when biomedicine often touts itself as the only viable option and many “holistic” healing practices profess to address everything! In such a marketplace, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of the healing landscape, especially the intended focus of various modalities.
My particular healing practice focuses on mind, energy, and spirit. Through spiritual counseling, I help clients get to the heart and soul of their challenges and offer actionable solutions. Through Sat Nam Rasayan – a healing technique based in Kundalini Yoga, I directly adjust the energetic patterns that underlie those challenges, giving rise to both positive mental-emotional shifts and transformative meditative experiences.
While I aim to cover a lot of territory in my practice, there are important gaps. I don’t offer comprehensive dietary plans. I don’t order lab tests or prescribe pharmaceuticals or targeted supplements. Working over the phone, of course, I don’t make manual adjustments to correct structural misalignments, which can result in chronic pain or headaches.
In truth, no single doctor or healer can address every single health-related issue, as the human system is simply too complex for that. Instead, it is generally best to work with a team of practitioners who complement each other’s areas of focus. Many of my clients are referred by their doctors, chiropractors, or psychotherapists and our coordinated care results in better outcomes than any of us could achieve on our own.
If you would like to learn specific strategies for self-care and gain a better understanding of what options for healing are available for addressing your particular issues, then I invite you to join me for the Roadmap to Healing workshop at the beautiful Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York this Memorial Day Weekend, May 25-28.
I will be joined by three other inspiring practitioners, and together we will guide you through the landscape of healing, taking a deep dive into several popular and prominent traditions: functional medicine, osteopathy, EMDR, energy medicine, and meditation. This roadmap will provide you with a lifelong guide for making informed treatment choices and maintaining your health and happiness in body, mind, energy, and spirit.
I hope you’ll join me over Memorial Day Weekend as we explore these topics in more detail.
The post A Pound of Self-Care With A Pinch of Support appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>The post Back from Retreat & Ready to Share With You appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>Applying this approach to my own life, I realized I had a longing to spend more time in meditation exploring the practices of Kundalini Yoga. One of my teachers, Guru Dev Singh, has recommended for many years that I become fluent in a set of about 300 meditations. In Kundalini Yoga, also known as the “Yoga of Awareness,” meditations focus on developing expanded states of consciousness through a combination of seated postures, chanted mantras, and breathwork.
Continuing to develop my own consciousness is what I like to call “cooking the rice,” while teaching and supporting others is what I call “the steam.” I use this analogy because steam can only come from hot rice. Practicing these meditations for several hours a day, I’ve dedicated myself for the past two-plus years to “cooking rice.” To avoid becoming a total recluse, I also kept some “steam” by continuing my healing practice and teaching weekly meditation classes at MNDFL, a meditation studio in New York City.
All this is to say I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me for a while as I took time off from my newsletter to focus on my healing and meditation practices. My experiences during these past two years have re-inspired me to share what I’ve discovered with you through both my continued healing sessions and workshops, and a return to this monthly newsletter.
One of the key insights from my meditation intensive was, “If you have an itch, scratch it.” We all have aspirations that we are not taking action on and the most common reason is what I call the “something-nothing” fallacy.
Let’s say you long to be a great novelist, but you fear, as we all do, that you will fail. If you don’t take any action, then becoming a great novelist remains a possibility, or a potential “something.” On the other hand, if you actually write your novel and it’s bad, then your dream of becoming a novelist is officially dead, which is a real “nothing.” In order to avoid the “real nothing,” we attach to the “potential something.” Ironically, this “potential something” is, in fact, nothing at all. It’s just a fantasy. Clinging to this dream, prevents us from taking the necessary action to create a real something!
To get past this limitation, we must recognize our infinite horizon. Your current aspiration is not your last and only one. Whether you accomplish your immediate goals or fail, infinite hopes and dreams exist for you down the pike, as that’s the nature of our creative spirit. Our fear of not realizing one prevents the rest from revealing themselves, and we are left with nothing.
So if you have a book to write, write it. A career move to make, pursue it. A new relationship to explore, spark it. An itch to scratch, scratch it—and scratch it right now.
My highest aspiration for these past two-plus years has been deepening my meditation practice. Fulfilling this longing has awakened my next one—sharing more with you.
If you’d like support in realizing your highest aspiration you can book a phone-based healing session with me. In addition, I also have several workshops coming up including Roadmap to Healing at the Omega Institute May 25-28, which I am especially excited about.
I’m thrilled to re-engage with you all via the newsletter, workshops, and more. I would love to hear from you too. Please leave a comment below and let me know an aspiration that you would like to move forward on.
The post Back from Retreat & Ready to Share With You appeared first on Aaron Teich.
]]>