A Meditation on Digital Wellness Amidst COVID-19
Meditation makes transitions easier. We often dream of big things. Our consumption-driven society teaches us to dream about big-ticket items: cars, homes, extravagant parties. The Hollywood machine has taught us to dream about particular lifestyles, specific fashions, ideal body types, relationships, behaviors, even love.
We often forget to slow down and ask, “what do I want,” to feel into “what do I want to feel like right now, today.”
Self-acceptance and self-love are the support that I try to give myself and my clients. That said, I often notice self-acceptance and self-love are difficult for my clients (and myself) to drop into, which is why I want to share with you a practice that works.
This practice of self-love and acceptance applies to Feng Shui because the spaces we spend time in are not just an excellent catalyst for creating change and balance, our homes and office spaces are also an invitation to settle in and feel safe to explore internal work. When we bring ease to the areas we spend the most time in, I believe it brings comfort internally.
When we bring ease to the areas we spend the most time in, I believe it brings comfort internally. — Nested Feng Shui
For the time being we are all spending most of our time in front of screens, for work or to keep ourselves busy. This is the best time to evaluate your relationship with technology. To ask how it supports you and how it is getting in the way of your goals.
Knowing What We Want
All right, step one: knowing what we want.
Asking what someone wants is the most critical and often intense part of the Nested Feng Shui practice. With every person I work with, I am always amazed at how hard it is to verbalize wants and needs. This difficultly is especially surprising regards their own homes — it is their space, they can want whatever they want. It is also surprising with tech use.
When stuck, I offer specific intentions like, “maybe they want to call in love, money, better business relationships,” and most clients still say something like “I want it to be better” or “more peaceful.” Peace and improvement are beautiful, but unspecific goals.
Feng Shui practices will make the home, office, digital space, even your mind feel better, more balanced, and peaceful.
Feng Shui can also inform how to physicalize digital wellness goals so they become actionable and easier to approach. Feng Shui and nesting digital wellness in Feng shui practices will help a home feel more clear and harmonious, but that work and those goals only the tip of the iceberg. What I see time and time again is clients feeling more fulfilled when they want something, ask for it, and see the results of Nested Feng Shui remedies.
Things to ask for are: more money, ease in the morning waking up and getting out, more sleep/better sleep/deeper sleep, more friends, a lover, a partner, increased self-esteem, ease with food
Knowing a specific want or need allows me as an “Intuitive Design Consultant” to blend just the right feng shui remedies, with just the right digital wellness and urban-wellness knowledge. Hence, the surroundings support the clients’ wants or needs.
Supporting Wants and Needs
Understanding and optimizing our spaces so they “support” what we want seems so straightforward, but what is support.
Support is moving through your everyday tasks smoothly because the home or office supports the flow; this system means tasks are both effortless and enjoyable.
To find where we need more support we must feel into what it is we want before we can begin to see how the space around us can support all of our goals. In finance, they use the phrase “make your money work for you.”
The Nested Feng Shui approach is to cultivate a space that serves us. The easiest way to understand where to start this practice is to know where we want to go. The easiest way I have found to be clear on where we want to go is through meditation.
Meditation makes everything easier. Often at the start, meditation can feel intense, daunting, even impossible, but with each breath and moment of mindfulness, we begin to build a sense of ease and an ability to zoom out.
Meditation, A Guided Visualization for Wants and Needs
With myself and my clients, I have taken to employing a specific type of guided visualization. When I am nervous, I use this for myself. With clients, we start meditating at the beginning of our consultations or when they are hesitant about a shift that will set them up for success.
The overall goal is to feel how good it is on the other side of a situation. To go deep into the underbelly of potential and understand how something can go well and what about it feels good. Here are the exact steps. Super simple, super magical.
1. Take a moment to close the eyes and drop in.
A system that works well for me is inhaling deeply through my nose and holding it in for a moment. Next, I close my eyes and set my hand to my sides. Then, I form a hand shape — a mudra — pulling all my fingers in to meet the thumbs (like a flower closing back into a bud or a chef kissing their fingers), and finally, I exhale slowly through my mouth.
2. Dropped in, project oneself into the foreseeable future — a day from now, a week from now.
Feel what it will feel like in future moments.
This feeling-into is doable because we know what it feels like to walk to the bathroom each morning and turn on the sink, often, without evening knowing, we know. In this meditation, remember we know how to project ourselves into our day-to-day life and sensations to come.
3. Take stock of what’s around.
What is touching the body, what is the temperature, what does the body feels like, what impulses are there, any food craving, the level of natural light? There are a million little daily details each day, go deeper into them, make them real, allow them to dance from this place of feeling the future as if it were the present, ask “what do I want?”
Knowing this question will be challenging to find! What I notice for myself and my clients is often a complete silence. The silence can be because it is rare in our culture to be permitted to peak into our futures and shape ourselves from that perspective.
The freedom and responsibility can be daunting. Maybe there is regret: “I have not done enough,” “I wish I had,” etc. it is a project, you can! Ask what you want as your future self so you can come back and support yourself in the present.
The freedom and responsibility can be daunting…Ask what you want as your future self so you can come back and support you in the present.
4. Breathe through the awkward moments.
There will be awkward moments. Remember, this is a projection of yourself, you are in control, when you encourage resistance to say hello to it, inhale “let” exhale “go.”
5. Ask, “what do I want?”
Now, projected firmly in the future with the eyes closed, having confronted any blockages, excuses, ways to avoid, gently ask, “what do I want?” Your answer is there, invite it to land with you.
Personally, at this point, future Tracy loves to kind of zone out. Much of my previous life was getting from one thing to another thing mindlessly, panicked, just trying to stay afloat, basking in the being busy.
Now, when I invest in this mindful meditation of projecting myself forward, imagine myself moments, days, weeks, months ahead of myself, and kindly ask, “what do I want?” I learn about how to take care of myself in the now. Even better, I have the foresight to do the things I need to do fun.
For example, showers often make me uncomfortable, big transitions like water all over me that sometimes spook me. SO, knowing this, I take the time post-work-out to project myself ten minutes into my future shower, I have to time feel what I want that shower to be.
Usually, I realize I want it to be fun and now I have time and space to recognize that adding music with a portable speaker to the bathroom will make the experience more enjoyable, and then I am able to act on that little ease addition with ease when I get home.
Remember
We want to raise our vibration as often as we can. Feng Shui allows us to brings our internal and external worlds into balance so we can maintain feeling good. Feng Shui is also common sense.
To be happy, ask yourself what you want and work backward.
The disconnect I observe in my practice is an epidemic of people not knowing what they want. This mindful meditation of projecting into the future makes space to gently and with loving-kindness ask what we want, so it is easier to come back to the present support building a better, more supported future for ourselves and those around us.
Adapted from a piece initially published at https://www.nestedfengshui.com.
