Linda Artesani, a yoga-trained accountant, leads a guided meditation to calm your nervous system during uncertainty. She teaches samavritti, a breath-counting technique where inhalation and exhalation match in length, then moves into a heart-centered visualization with gratitude.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So this week's post and video are more geared towards everything that's happening in the world right now. It's hard to escape it. It's hard to not think about it all the time. It's hard to not want to help one another. And it's hard that you feel almost helpless, that you can't help each other and other human beings because we've got this social distancing thing happening. And we're grateful for the tools that we have. For certain, I'm grateful that I have Zoom, that I'm able to share with you some things that I know, but also grateful that we have one another still. We're all still in this together. And I thought this week would be a great week just to do and share a simple meditation. Meditation is one of the practices I use to help ground me, to help me feel that I can have control over something, that I can take the moments and just stop the worry. One of the things I learned in my training, because I am a yoga teacher, one of the things I did learn in my training was that a lot of times you can be full of stress and not know it. Your shoulders can be hiking up. I know in the past I used to grind my teeth because I was so stressed out during accounting season. And now, Through my practices, through my yoga, I'm able to— if I feel like the world is spiraling out of control or my life is spiraling out of control, I can just sit down and meditate. And those, just those moments can help calm, calm the nervous system. Meditation has an amazing benefit of being able to help us just bring everything down and really ground us. So I'd like to take you through a little guided meditation. If you're new to meditation, this is a great time to just sit and have somebody guide you through it. And hopefully, my hope here— and this was actually a suggestion from my friend Misty that I should do a guided meditation— because my hope is that I can help. Maybe if you didn't even realize you were nervous about, about what's happening and you're nervous about your clients and you're nervous about your friends, your family, that just taking this time to kind of pull it all together and just start to calm everything down, you'll be able to feel like you're able to Sit with it. And we know we're going to come out of this. We know it's going to pass. And just sit with it and just be quiet in a quiet space and just calm the insides down. And that's really the benefit of it. That, and there's plenty of other data to support how it can help you overall. So if you want to try it with me, just find a comfortable seat. So I'm sitting at my desk, but you can sit— I have a meditation cushion in my guest room. You can sit Anywhere you want that feels comfortable. There's no real hard, fast rules. And then if you're sitting in a chair, find a grounding point. So press your feet into the floor. Find the 3 corners of each foot. So the big toe, ball mound, and the heel. Press down. If you're sitting on the floor, even in your chair, I want you to take those sitting bones, those 2 bony prominences on the bottom, and just kind of sit down and just let the pelvic bowl kind of tilt forward. You can take your hands, you can place them face up. Face up is more open and receiving, but face down is more grounding. So find a comfortable seat and place your hands wherever feels comfortable. You can actually place them in almost like this in your hands if that feels comfortable. I like to keep my left on top. And just take a few breaths. Maybe take your shoulders, roll them up by the ears, back and down. And take a moment here just to find that grounding point. So sitting here nice and tall, you're stacking shoulders over hips, and the head is just kind of floating over the shoulders. Take your chin just forward slightly and down so it's comfortable. And just take a moment or two here just to observe the body breathing. Noticing the inhale. Noticing the exhale. Feeling the sensation of the air coming in through the nostrils, traveling up to the midbrain. Try to relax the jaw. Letting the breath flow in and out. Taking a moment here to notice the quality of the breath. Does the breath feel smooth? Does it feel choppy? If the breath— as you start to count the breath here, just count the inhale, maybe 2 of 1, 2, 3, 4. Notice that pause at the top, and then see if you can exhale to a count of 4. So 4, 3, 2, 1. And then continuing with that breath, following the breath in. 2, 3, 4. Then there's a point where there's no breath, and then there's an exhale. 2, 3, 4. Making this not a breath that you're forcing, just a calming breath that you're just counting, very simply counting. We call this breath samavritti, same breath. Where the inhale matches the exhale. Now bringing your awareness to where the breath is coming in and out of the body and noticing where you're feeling the breath. Where is the sensation the strongest? Is it up higher on the heart space? Is it in the belly region near the navel? Or as you breathe, are you feeling it more in the diaphragm area of the body, low in the belly? There's no right or wrong answer here. It's just bringing your body to a sense of awareness. Begin to let go of the counting if you're still counting and just observing, noticing. Bring your awareness back to the space around the heart. It's almost like it's a glowing ball of light sending the light out through the heart space, like you were sharing your essence with everyone nearby. Gently take your hands to prayer position at heart. Drop your chin to your chest, soft smile on your face. Take a moment here to just think of one thing you're grateful for. It could be a person, it could be a pet. It can be anything. And letting that thought go, soft smile on your face, gently blink open your eyes. So thank you so much for joining me this week. I think a collective meditation is the way to shift the paradigm of the world. At least, at least help maybe make you feel a little bit better. So I'm glad you're following me and glad you're watching these videos, and I hope to see you back here next week. Bye now.
