If your life is feeling a little like you’re forcing shit up hill right now (and I think some of us have so far this year),  you might like to reflect on this: Sukshma.

Photo by Aquabumps

In Sanskrit it means “subtle”. Actually, it means more than that…it’s to touch life “innocently, faintly and effortlessly”. It softens. It allows compassion.

Like when a child touches your arm when they come out at night to tell you they can’t sleep.

I was taught this term when I first learned to meditate. Sometimes, when you meditate, you can go at it aggressively, forcing yourself (with internal berating) back to your mantra or third eye or candle flame or whatever when your mind wanders. And you get grumpy with yourself for “not doing it right” and not being able to stay focused. But this is highly unuseful in meditation. It kinda ruins the vibe.

My teacher taught me to try instead to return to focus with sukshma. Sukshma is a gentle steering, like we’re merely turning our head gently from the action over there to the left of us, back to centre. Gently and kindly.With no expectation of outcome. It’s feather light.

Lately I’ve been applying sukshma beyond meditation. And this, of course, is the point of meditation – to take the consciousness you foster in meditation out into the world. Who wants to stay in the cave on the bloody mountain, I ask you?! (Indeed, I asked the Dalai Lama the same and he agreed as much.)

I tend to internally berate and bludgeon myself with all kinds of silent but violent verbal abuse. It’s pretty non-stop. You’re either a carrot or a stick person. I’m a stick person. It’s got me places with my career. But at a cost. Part of that cost is a friction.

I’m always banging my little square self into round holes. The friction hurts.

So you’ve reached the end of eight weeks of sugar-free life. Here’s to a new, calm, life – free of sugar (!)

To that end, this week I’m giving away

five x premium memberships to Science of Stillness, each valued at $297

to help you kick off your new life.

image via maui yoga

Tom Cronin (who I met in Bondi a few years back) and Nick Broadhurst have created the Science of Stillness , an online personal transformation program that teaches you meditation.

My assistant Jo has been testing it out for the past few weeks and I asked her to share the gist:

Jo: I was keen to check out the Stillness Sessions as I’ve been wanting to try this meditation style for a while now. The Science of Stillness program is a seven module online video program. Once you’re logged in, you have a personalised dashboard, which you can edit and update, and use to search posts, comments, and the forums. Easy, clean to navigate. No angst!

I get asked rather often what therapies, of all the ones I’ve tried – and I’ve tried a few -  I personally use and recommend. So I thought I’d post on it.

I’ve tried just about every therapy in Christendom. It’s an occupational hazard. From the noise of it all I’ve distilled things down to a bunch of smooth routines and approaches.

Photo by Steven Klein

As a general approach, I keep to a morning routines. Routines are good.  They create a firm launch pad and determine the tone of the day.

I also do some regular maintenance stuff. Sometimes I think to myself, “my parents would never do this kind of thing…they’d just get on with it”. Also, it can get expensive, all this “maintenance”.

But I justify it thus:

I do a lot, am engaged in a lot, and I need help to ensure I can keep doing what I love to do.

An athlete gets regular physio. TV stars get blowdries. A rally car driver gets their car serviced. I get regular treatments to keep me well and open and energised.

I rotate the various therapies, according to what continues to keep me open and intimate with life. I’m also a little challenged by the idea of taking good care of myself (I forget and burn out very easily) and so some of these healings are about getting into that space. Being intimate. This is important. I don’t buy nail polish or magazines or shoes or throw cushions. I prefer to do this kind of thing.

My daily practice:

Meditation. I practice the vedic style (with a mantra, 20 minutes  twice a day). I’ve blogged about it here. My teacher Tim can be found here.

Exercise. I move every morning – a mixture of walking, jogging (I’ve taken to barefoot running), yoga, ocean swimming and home weights. I also ride a singlespeed bike. My thing is this: I set out to move every day for 20 minutes minimum. It’s the “every day” bit that matters to me, and my aim is to simply get blood flowing and to feel fresh and to get into the outdoors. I don’t focus on “getting fit” or losing weight. It’s also about flow and agility and feeling vibrant.

This week in Sunday Life I break the Catch-22 bind

Back when I used to work stupidly long hours in a normal office job I would spy people on my way to meetings sitting at cafes – on a Tuesday, at 11am – and I’d think, “How do they have the time? What have they got right that I haven’t?”.

Your sun-basking, Sudoku-doodling café lingerer might be the neighbour who gets to a 5pm yoga class each week, or the friend who can spontaneously take a long weekend when the weather turns nice.

“How do they have time?” you cry out, half in envy, half in contempt. How come they got their life so sorted?

Recently I was invited on a meditation retreat. The idea of withdrawing from life – from email, laptops and planning dinner each night – for five days is something I fantasise about. I have an image: people who go on meditation retreats have interiors magazine-ready homes and organised spice racks and cherubic blonde children and wear leather-soled shoes. You see (my logic goes), they have their life sorted.

So they’re able to.

Personally, I don’t know that my life will ever be sorted. And I’ll never have blonde kids. So this week I took the plunge, left my iphone at home, and signed up to the retreat. Regardless.

Goodness. You’d think I was heading off to Siberia. Or whatever other outpost where Vodafone doesn’t have coverage. Of course, it coincided with my busiest period all year. Sitting in the hall with a dozen others, I fretted as my brain slowed to a blunt, foggy stop. It rained outside. I clung with white knuckles. But eventually I had to give in to the atrophy.

On day three the following occurred to me. Have you read Catch-22? I haven’t. I think it was a real early “70s thing when people had time for holidays and dense reads. But I know the gist. A bomber pilot wants to quit his job due to the inherent dangers. But he’s denied because the fact he understands the danger means he’s sane, and only mad pilots can be relieved. So he has to keep flying, even though it’s insane to do so.

The best thing I ever did was to learn to meditate. As in properly meditate.

For years I flim-flammed around trying different techniques. They gave me the shits. I never “got” it. I then bit a bullet and tried TM or Vedic meditation. I’ve talked about the TM style before here and here.

When I first met Tim I was wary. I was in a fug at the time – no job, sick, broke, lost. He told me things would turn around in a few weeks of meditating. Within six weeks they did – I got the MasterChef gig out of the blue. I asked him why he was so confident. He replied:

“Sarah, you are trying to go forward with your life with the handbrake pulled full on. Don’t keep trying to put your foot on the accelerator to go forward – it’s a pointless exercise. You’ll just keep burning yourself out.  You need to learn how to take the hand break off. Meditation will help you do that. The rest will start to happen after that. “

So I thought I’d share that Tim my teacher is holding a weekend course up here in Byron Bay this coming weekend.

As I shared a few post back, I met Brene Brown face-to-face during her Australian visit (Sunday Life column on the matter to come).

via Everything is Going to Be OK

Her big thing, the thing that resonated for me when I read The Gifts of Imperfection was that making a change in your life is about getting serious, deliberate. You can talk about it, think about it, half do it…

but if it really matters to you, you have to fire up and hone your actions
and bunker down and BE IT. Live it.

I asked her how she actually does it. How does she prepare for it. Run up to it. Jump to it.

Her answer:

No sugar