As the CEO of Pure Life, I get people calling in every day with serious emotional and physical issues. Of course almost always they are related. There is, I find, an emotional component to everything in your life, including your health and disease states.
What people most seek is to change things. They want to feel better, to have less stress, anxiety and depression. To lose weight, to make more money, to have better relationships with their family. The list goes on and on for most of us. Yet quite often things do not change, or they are too slow to change, or worse – they can take a turn for the worse. Other than taking healthy products like Gabatrol to make ourselves feel better, are there other positive things we can do? Of course there is, exercise, a good diet and proper sleep can make us cope better too, but these things don’t seem to be the solutions we are searching for.
Fortunately there is one special thing that all the great teachers of the ages have strived to teach. This one special thing is the key to unlock everything. This one special thing is the art of doing nothing. This is not a couch potato, lethargic, lazy, disconnected, apathetic nothing more of us are familiar to when we think of doing nothing. This brings us away from life, and its a way we trick ourselves into thinking we have escaped our problems. But it does not help in the long run. Neither do drugs, alcohol or any other addiction.
This form is an active, focused form of doing nothing. Its one of the key things I tell all my personal clients is to practice. Our minds have us convinced we need to do something to solve our problems. While this is helpful, at times no matter what we do things might not change. So the reason you would want to practice doing nothing is that it can create inside you a feeling of calm, of balance and peace. Resisting the urge to do something, we (with practice) gradually see that we can have the inner peace we desire simply by choosing it.
In fact it is always there, we just need to see it. The practice of doing nothing (others call it awareness, focus, meditation, etc) strengthens this insight and then allows us to go forward into the world of ‘everything’ from a different perspective. It empowers us. You have already experienced it in some form or another, as often doing one thing – being focused and in the moment while playing a sport, or gardening, fishing, watching a sunset, etc – gets us in the flow of the game of life and out of our minds.
But the most direct form of doing nothing is to just do what is needed to live: breathing. This is why breath work is so important, and why so many forms of meditation focus on the breath.
Those who devote themselves to the power of doing nothing, soon realize it is in fact the best way to change everything! It can cause a profound shift in your entire life. It sounds so simple, yet try it yourself and see just how (at first) hard it can be to quiet your mind. You too will one day see that this ‘nothing’ is in fact the source of ‘everything’!