Get Lost - The Art of Letting Go

Most people spend their entire life stressed without ever giving a single thought as to what it is they really want or what's important to them. See, I'm here to cut through all that noise, connecting you to yourself and the life that you were meant to live. I used to slave away at a corporate job that I hated, but I broke through the social norms and pursued my passion. As a result, I own my own coffee company. I'm Espresso Sommelier, and I get to travel the world. You too can live a life that you love, but it starts with getting clear about what you want. It starts with a new decision. I'm your host, Donnie Rouse, and you're listening to the podcast One Life. Get Lost. Many of us feel that we can do anything in our lives except for doing nothing at all. It is this constant pushing that will eventually do you in. Technology has given us so many ways to kind of save time, to be more efficient, and yet you find yourself with an even busier schedule with more to do. The same is said about vacations. People are taking less time on vacations because they feel like they can't get away. So in essence, they're substituting those vacation hours and putting more time into work. Again, going back to a little bit of like a morbidity is because I feel like until you understand what the consequences are, you're not going to be willing to make the change. The first indication of heart disease is sudden death. And it comes from this constant pushing, this driving, this stress, and not taking the time to one give some time to yourself. One take the time to debrief and step away from life for a while. And in your days, I'm not just talking about a big vacation. I'm talking about taking a moment in your day to turn off all the distractions, turn off all the inputs that are coming out or that are coming towards you, Focus on your breath, focusing on the things that really matter in life, and then stepping back into your world with a different state, with a refreshed mind, with a different focus. So how does one start to reclaim their life? How does one start to let go and step back into that living world? I made a few bullet points here. The first is to block time. If you're not blocking time, you are literally haphazardly taking time. And oftenly often, this can be seen as an escape. But when you block time, you're literally making the commitment to yourself, saying, at this point, I am going to do this action and nothing else. So it's important to whenever you do that to make sure that you're committing to that time. One of the things that I was very good at was I would do this time in the middle of my day and don't do it religiously. But I started picking up the habit again. I did it with coffee. So coffee would often be the key for me to stop and take a moment. But I would always block out the same time. Just like with my trips, whenever I traveled, I would always block out a certain amount of time to step away from the world to give myself a different perspective and literally turn off my business mind and everything else that was going to run around me. So let's talk about turning off the outside world. We are constantly connected 24 7. You're being connected, right? What is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Most people, first thing they do is they pick up their iPhone or their telephone, which they're using as an alarm anyways, and they start to scroll, they start to look through the news, they start to look through Instagram, they start to look at the text message and start responding to a world that is commanding their attention. This is the wrong way to go about starting your day and to plan your life, right? Because there's always going to be demands made on you. So once you've blocked time in your day, the next step is to turn off all the distractions to give yourself a moment where you could start to come back to your senses, where you could start to think clearly, connecting to your breath. I was at a visit to a homeopath that I go to and one of the things he has me do is to go back into my breath. I found that I had the habit of sometimes holding my breath and creating tension in my body. When you create, when you hold your breath, it's no similar to like the thought of dying, right? If you can't breathe, your body starts to spasm and you start to. It starts to cause stress. So I found myself doing that pretty often. Even now I'm more conscious of it now. So now, like I'm constantly scanning my body and I'll feel this tenseness and I'll remember to breathe. But in this office visit we were. You had me go into like just to monitor my breathing goes. Imagine yourself just looking at yourself breathe. You're just noticing where the tension you. Where you feel the tension in your body and you're just breathing. So as I would breathe, the breathing I noticed would certainly slow down in that area where I felt the tension would start to expand would start to loosen up to the point where it wasn't there anymore. Why is this? Because wherever you put, your focus starts to expand. It's this expanded, expanded wellness where the energy goes. Where your focus goes, energy flows. So as you start to focus on your breath, your body is going to start to slow down, your breaths are going to start to elongate. If you want a practice for breath to practice, I Recommend One called 4, 7, 8. That is four counts on the inhale through your nose, holding it for a seven count, and then slowly breathe out through your mouth for an eight count. Doing this type of breath will actually start to slow down your body as well as relieve tension and stress. Next, let's go to a joyful memory. One of the quickest ways, once you've actually calmed the body down, one of the easiest ways to get into a more powerful or a better state is to start to pull a joyful memory. Think of something that made you feel good, maybe grateful, maybe made you laugh, maybe where you felt playful. When you recall this memory, it's not enough just to recall the memory, because recalling the memory can make you appreciate it, maybe feel grateful for it. But we want to put ourself in that scene. When you put yourself in that scene, you start to feel the emotions that you felt in that moment. So in essence, you are reliving it and you're triggering. Those same neuropathways come up and you start to feel playful again, you start to feel grateful, you start to feel courageous, whatever it is that you're trying to evoke. And then lastly, see the big picture. So everything we've done up until now is we've calmed our nervous system to bring us to this moment to see, all right, well, what is the big picture? What is life about? What is this day about? So this whole practice I just gave you, the steps I just went through, these are things you could put into your day, but also things that you could use to start planning your life. Start planning. Well, what is it that I want to experience this year? What kind of experience do I want to have? What's going to make my life feel enriched? What's going to make. What's going to. What kind of effect do I want to have on those around me, my loved ones, my family? It comes from going within and realizing what are the things that are really important? A lot of the stuff that happen in your day to day really don't mean a thing. While they may seem important in that moment, if you scan out, if you go 10 years forward or even one year forward, and you look back at that text you sent that may have gotten misconstrued, you wouldn't care. Or. Or the fact that someone cut you off in traffic, you wouldn't care. So in closing, why do I tell you this? Because if you want to have an amazing life, if you want to have a life worth of experiences, it must be planned. You have to put a conscious effort towards it. You have to block the time. You have to say, this is where I'm going to spend my time. This is what I want to have happen in my life. If you don't do that, then you're leaving it up to chance. And if you leave it up to chance, the chances of it happening are slim to none. You might get a couple things, but I don't want you to go through your life trying to get things done and haphazardly running away from it. And I will be the first to say that I've done that in the past, too, with my travels, although you never lose anything by traveling. And. But there have been times where I've been stressed and I didn't plan certain things, and so I would do something on a whim and I would run away. Then often I would come back and I wouldn't even know where I was picking up from my business. Life is about experiencing. Life is about the people we love, spending time with them. Life is about having an impact. All these things require you to give conscious thought, to give time, to really think about what exactly that means to you, if this is at all appealing or attractive to you. I'm going to be doing a workshop on January 8th. January 8th, I'm going to be doing what I call ready, set, live. And in this workshop, we're going to start to plan all the experiences you want to have, not just for a trip, but the things you want to experience in your health, your spirituality, your family life, your finances. But it's, you know, the flip side is kind of like the opposite of looking at a goal. We're looking at those things that are really going to jazz us up and get excited. The things that if we didn't do them in our life, we might feel regretful. So I really want to create the best year ever for you. And this is going to happen on January 8th. So details are to come. You can visit www.donnie-o n n y rous r a u s.com to sign up. And again, that's not there yet, but it will come probably by the end of this week. And I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I hope in some way, maybe it just made you pause to think about your own day, how you go through your own day and what kind of mental states that you bring into that day and how you can start to create some space to get the emotions that you want. Because life is not about, you know, having that one trip and planning everyone for, you know, I'm all about travel, first of all. It's not just about saying, oh, I'm going to go to Bali and I'm going to rent a bungalow on the beach and stay there for that month and then I'll come back into the real world. It's not about that, right? It's every day. If you're living for one moment, then you're missing out on everything in between. So it's about taking each day and making sure that we block time for ourselves, for the things that matter most. So if you enjoyed this, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe, share it with a friend. You could visit my website to ask a question, comment, or listen to other episodes@www.donnyrouse.com again www.donnierouse.com and again, thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to this and hopefully that it impacts your day in some way and just gives you a little bit of a refocus as to what you want your life to be and what's important to you. That is all I've got for you guys today. Hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please give it a subscribe, comment, question, anything. Let me know you're out there. God bless you. And remember, you only get one life. Live it. We'll see you again next week.