What if you could find peace in any chaos?
Day to day, you might deal with many triggers to your survival brain, unleashing a host of emotions, thoughts and body sensations each minute that can feel chaotic or out of control.
What does chaos look like to you?
Is it getting stressed scrolling through social media streams on conflict-ridden current events? Getting constantly interrupted by your kids on a video call while sharing space with your partner who is also working from home? Or trying to make many decisions in the face of the unknown?
Chaos often shows up internally. Maybe it’s a dull, throbbing headache, stiff neck or tight back. Or maybe it’s your constantly running mind that never shuts up, analyzing what happened or what needs to get done the next day right before bedtime.
It may be impractical to take time off for a 10-day silent retreat or meditate for an hour, let alone 15 minutes.
Here are three quick, simple ways to find peace in chaos in any moment:
Moving Meditations
We often focus on exercising our muscles, but what about our organs?
With your legs shoulder-width apart, gently use your fists to tap two inches below your belly button, and imagine the vibration going into your core or “gut.” This is a major energy center in your body where life is birthed, and it is also known by some as the second chakra.
Close your eyes, and relax your mind. Focus your awareness where the vibration is on your energy center.
Where your mind goes, energy flows. Energy travels as light, sound or vibration. This exercise utilizes vibration to help bring your awareness back into your body’s core and center.
After 100 or so taps with your fist, now suck your belly button in to your spine, similar to a crunch standing or sitting up. Keep pumping. This is called intestinal exercise.
Now that you’ve used vibration through tapping, you’ve brought your brain’s scattered energy from outside yourself back into your body, drawing downward to your gut. Intestinal exercise helps you keep your focus centered on the gut and heat up your core.
Typically, we have hot heads and cold guts. By reversing this improper circulation using the “water up, fire down” principle, you can bring the “fire” in your head down to heat up your core, and bring the cold gut energy back up to your head for a calm, cool mind.
By exercising your intestines, you’re pumping fresh oxygen, increasing blood flow, better absorbing nutrients and processing undigested waste to achieve the proper “water up, fire down” circulation. You’ll know you have proper energy circulation if you heat up, sweat or form saliva in your mouth.
Master Your Emotions
Other exercises can really allow you to master your emotions by embracing the “bad” or unwanted emotions like anger, sadness or jealousy.
This practice takes five minutes or less and keeps your focus on observing the emotion rather than becoming or identifying as the emotion itself. There are many exercises, but here’s a sample of one exercise that has proven very powerful with my business leader clients.
Close your eyes. Scan your body from your head to your toes. Where do you notice tension, pain or unwanted emotions?
Ask yourself, “What color is the pain or unwanted emotion? What shape? What texture? What movement?”
Now imagine one of your happiest memories. Who’s around you? Where are you? What songs and smells surround you? How does it feel?
Saturate every cell in your body with the energy of that happy memory.
Now go back to the pain. Ask yourself, “What color is the pain now? What shape? What texture? What movement?”
My clients who practice this are able to shift their unwanted feeling’s shape, color, movement — sometimes disappearing the unwanted emotion altogether.
The more you master your emotions, the quicker you’ll be able to develop your emotional resilience as a leader.
Listen Within
The final exercise to access peace in chaos is listening within.
Simply close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and ask your heart, “What’s my message for today?”
Continue asking and listening. Often, the response is simple in just a few words.
You can not only talk to your heart, but any organ, or area of pain, as well.
By tapping into your own inner wisdom to listen within, you’ll get very aligned answers to decisions you need to make without having to question or regret the decision.
The more you practice, the easier your body and heart can communicate clearer messages, and the more power you’ll have to simply notice your thoughts, feelings and body sensations passing through, rather than getting lost in them.
Mastery Requires Practice
Before you can experience peace, it’s critical to bring your awareness from outside yourself into your body. Then bring that energy down from your head into your core. You’ve now aligned your body, heart, mind and soul in just a few minutes.
By focusing inward, you’ll build your inner guidance system more strongly to guide you through uncertainty. You’ll be the calm in the eye of the storm, no matter how chaotic it gets inside or out. You can choose the most aligned response each moment.
When you have the courage to practice these moments of peace of moving meditations, mastering your emotions and listening within, you will not only find peace amid chaos; you will become a source of peace in the chaos of our world.
By embodying peace in any chaos, you can access an abundant, infinite supply of energy to serve your team, your customers, your stakeholders and, most importantly, yourself.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com here.
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Anna S. Choi helps growing, six figure earning, over achieving, conscious business leaders–who are exhausted meeting the demands of their day–prevent burnout as they scale their impact. They want to build habits for staying happy, energized, and focused to perform at their optimum given the demands, complexities, and uncontrollable environments that suck up their energy. Learn more at www.annasunchoi.com.
