Hi there, you're listening to Take Out Therapy, short lessons in popular topics about emotional health. This is your host, Rebecca Hunter. I'm a therapist by day, and we don't really tell people what to do.
We listen, we validate, and we focus on helping people reach their goals. But in the next few minutes, I'm just going to be straight up with you about what to do in certain situations, because sometimes we need some damn instructions. Clearly, this is not a substitute for therapy, but I guarantee you it might help.
Listen up. And if you have little people in the room, throw on some headphones, because I swear. Okay? I'm grateful you're here.
Thanks. Hi friends, thanks so much for joining me today. I am excited about this episode because I think it will provide people with some information about something that is a very popular topic right now, which is sitting and breathing, or as is commonly referred to as meditation.
So I want to talk a little bit about why it's a great idea to sit your butt down for a few minutes each day and breathe. I know, it's such an odd thing to be sort of instructing people to do, like, hey, do nothing. And I'm not a huge meditator, just so you know.
I have a very sporadic and haphazard, at best, meditation practice. But I know this, I know when I'm doing it, not when I'm sitting there, but the rest of my life, when I'm doing a practice, I just feel good. I feel like I'm really, well, I feel more grounded in my body and less thinking and more like kind of being able to feel how my life's going and what's going on.
It's a good stress reliever, frankly, it's a nice way to start the day. So there's, for me, there are definite benefits and I can see the difference. I'm talking about this because, well, because people are pretty stressed out.
I see a lot in my work, as you know, we're moving really fast through life. We just, we have to, you know, we have to go from here to there to the other thing, like quick, pretty fast without a lot of transition time. And so what happens is that we get our brain and our body and our system get really overwhelmed.
And then that kind of is very taxing on our body system. And we get tired, exhausted and kind of burnt out, basically. So this episode is an effort to sort of help you see what's what and where you can start to affect some change.
You know, we can't always hear ourselves. And what I mean by that is we're moving so quickly that we don't know what we feel about things. So that so also what comes up for me when I'm talking about this is like, not only do we not know what's what how we feel about things, but like when we do kind of know how we feel about things, we kind of ignore it because we have to because there's not room in life for that or that seems like a really tough thing to do.
Right. And so we start to kind of know, not really know what we need, basically. So and and this is really important because when we don't when we don't know, like when things are moving so quickly and we can't hear ourselves and know what we need, we don't really have good insight.
And when we don't have good insight, we're we're kind of dysfunctional. We can be dysfunctional in relationships, including our relationship with ourself. So like some of us like to stay on a little bit more of a shallow level, which is totally fine and frankly, very necessary in this time and age.
But this kind of a practice, a morning practice that includes sitting and breathing will help us come just a little bit deeper into some confrontation with ourselves. And it's very interesting. It's a very kind confrontation.
So I'll talk more about that. People don't generally have a sitting practice because they don't really understand what the point of it is. We're living in an age of instant gratification.
So why would I exactly sit down and do nothing that seems sort of wasteful, right? We don't have time and I'm putting time in quotation marks for that. It's a little bit confusing. So even just the word meditation, like, yep, Buddhists meditate, but meditation itself is not connected with like religion or spirituality or any kind of dogma.
It's just sitting down and doing nothing. You guys, it's not like, don't worry, right? Don't worry that you're kind of going against your spiritual path in trying a meditation practice because a meditation practice is just sitting and breathing, just so you know. It doesn't actually have to be much more complicated than that.
But we can, we can like make it more complicated. We can make everything really complicated if we want to. But what I'm talking about is just sitting and breathing.
Um, and just, there's some definite like guidelines to that, which are simple, but also flexible and easy. So yeah, it's like people don't do this because it's sort of confusing the whole thing. Right.
And then the other thing is like, we just really want that tangible benefit really quickly. And a sitting practice, it's not like a Labor Day sale. Like it's not exciting.
Things are not going to shift like miraculously in your life. When you start a sitting practice, it's a very, very, um, subtle incorporation of something that becomes incredibly helpful. I guess that's what I'll say.
So my, um, proposition to you is like, let's talk about what it would look like to have a sitting practice for like five minutes each morning. Um, and the reason I say morning is because we, we also start our day in this time and age in kind of a dysfunctional way. I'm not trying to pick on you because I'm with you.
But the first thing I grab on my way to the restroom is muscle phone, which is not healthy. It's just really not healthy. So I'm not going to do that anymore.
Um, I, myself, right, this podcast is kind of how I process the world and work on things. And so I, myself will be working on a sitting practice. Um, and Hey, who knows if you have any interest, maybe I could do like a little, um, a sitting practice thing, right.
Where I can record some videos and just some tips for people. So they know what to do and how to do it. I mean, that wouldn't be that hard, right? Just let me know if you have any interest in that.
A sitting practice, like just literally five minutes a day, sitting and breathing, it can help you lower your baseline. And so I'll just explain quickly what I mean by that. A baseline being, if you just were on a scale of one to 10, in terms of your stress level and your ability to handle anything you perceive as stressful, where do you wake up? Right.
So I know a lot of people that wake up at five. So if you wake up at five and anything happens, like your husband, like leaves his towel on the floor, or I don't know what annoys you, but, um, it's hard for me to think of things because I never get annoyed. Just kidding.
Anyways, like if, if you're at a five and you wake up and something happens, that's like irritating or stressful in any way, then you're already like, what, up to a seven, right. In your stress level, like that's not functional. You're going to be to a 10 by 10 AM.
So we want to lower our baseline first thing in the morning if we can. And one of the great ways to do that, it's just belly breathing. It's just getting deep breaths and just sitting and breathing.
We can create change through a sitting practice in the form of bigger, greater insight. And insight is like, um, just knowing ourselves and understanding our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. That is insight.
So, um, having more of that is never a bad thing, right? Insight. It's a good thing because otherwise we're running around and we're sort of getting our information about how we think and feel and are from other people. So we got to get that from ourselves, guys.
We got to get insight. And the other thing is that just, um, a sitting practice will help you develop self-love. And so I don't know.
I mean, I feel like I'm like an advertisement right now, but having a sitting practice where you just spend time with yourself being you is really a caring thing to do. I'll just say that. Like, it's just nice.
It's just a nice thing to do for you. It's just a way to take care of yourself and everything we do to take care of ourselves in a big way or a small way lends itself to our self-love, right? And then like, hey, so if you started a five-minute sitting practice every morning, what could possibly go wrong, you guys? Just pretend you slept five more minutes, right? You don't even have to tell anybody you're awake yet. Just pretend you're not awake yet.
Just go from your bed to your cushion or your floor and sit and breathe. What could possibly go wrong? So let me explain to you kind of how to get it going. Let's just talk about how to get it going here since we're in January and it's a month when we try to get things going.
I might put this out in February. I don't know. We'll see.
The first way is just set an intention, right? Set an intention that you're going to have a sitting practice for a set amount of time. So the way I like to do things like this is like for the next week, I'm going to sit five mornings out of seven, right? And maybe in your life, you want to go, well, I'm going to do it for this month and it's going to be every day for five minutes. So just make it specific and measurable.
Please make it low, right? Not too low that it's not challenging, but low enough so like you could do it. So maybe it's just three times a week. Hey, nobody has the tape measure.
Nobody's measuring your progress but you. And so just cater your expectations to yourself. Does that make sense? And then I would say another great setup for doing this is just make a space.
And what I like to have in my space is just, well, first of all, a door on your space is incredibly helpful, especially if you live in my house. So I do this either in my bathroom or in my room, in my bedroom or in my studio, actually. So just having a space where nobody's going to like walk in, but it's not the end of the world that they do.
Like it's no big deal. There are no rules here. But I have a cushion and then I have like, well, I like feathers.
I have like a little picture of an owl. I have a couple little gemstones there, just like little doodads. Oh, I have this really cute brooch that was my grandma's.
So I have like a little something, you know, that was passed down to me. So just little things that mean something to you to mark out just a nice, calm, loving, cherished space. And then it always helps when you're going to do something new to have an accountability buddy, right? Meaning if generally when I start to try new habits or I get ready to do a new habit, I'll talk with John about it and then just say like, hey, so I'm going to do, you know, a five minute sitting practice each morning this week.
And so I'm not going to come out for coffee or whatever. And then he'll be like, oh, how's that going later on? And so or you could do it with a couple of friends, just be like, hey, is anybody interested in, you know, this challenge of, you know, sitting in February and then like being in touch with each other about how it's going and exchanging ideas and things like that. So get yourself an accountability buddy.
That kind of helps. And then the last way to really like make this happen is do it right. Just make a commitment to yourself to just sit to to try out a sitting practice.
I didn't list all the benefits. There are a lot of benefits to meditation. Just Google that, right? You'll figure out real quickly that this is a super beneficial thing to do.
And I'm just suggesting you start small and in a very simple way. So just do the thing. Just do it and like see how it goes.
Be open to it being awful. Be open to it being pleasant. Be open to being completely neutral about it.
But I recommend a five minute every morning in at the least sitting practice or, you know, a few times a week. I recommend just doing it enough so you can see what's up with that and gain some insight about how that is for you and see if it might be something that might be helpful to insert into your morning routine. So at some point, I think I will probably upload some videos, like a little instructional videos about like how to do it.
You know, we can get a little bit more in depth, right? There are some things to think about when we're just sitting there doing nothing. One of the things we can think about just as an example is like just being out of judgment. I mean, being in a neutral space and being non-judgmental, which would mean like every time a thought comes into your head, like, oh, I hate this or oh, I'm so bored, right? I'm just like seeing that and not really connecting to it.
Just like, well, that's just a thought. Like I'm going to just like, I'm just sitting and doing nothing. Like I don't need to have an opinion about it.
So just staying out of judgment is one example of a way we can kind of deepen the practice. And so, yes, even though I'm a little bit haphazard with my own practice, I've studied this a lot and do have a lot of mindfulness techniques that I use throughout my life. So at some point, I'll do a little bit more of a piece on that.
But for now, I hope this has been helpful. Let me know how your sitting practice goes. Thanks for listening.
Thanks so much for listening. This podcast is not meant to be a substitute for therapy, but I hope it was super helpful for you in any case. I want to be part of some much needed change, but I'm going to need your help.
Please subscribe and review the podcast, recommend it to your friends and family and share it on social media. We're living in the digital age, people. Let's do some good where we can, all right? Visit my website at rebeccahuntermsw.com to have access to resources, videos and the show notes if that interests you.
And again, I'm so grateful you're listening to Take Out Therapy. Thanks.
