Some days seem to be laid out in an obstacle course of hassles and distractions. You wake up with a clear idea of the BIG IMPORTANT THING you want to accomplish today, but you can’t find a matching pair of socks. You finally find the car keys under the sofa, but when you start the car you realize you’re just about out of petrol. Then there is the traffic, and the frustrated drivers in the traffic. By the time you get to work your mind and emotions are a little on edge, and the clear vision of that Big Important Thing you were going to accomplish might have gone a bit fuzzy.
So you get a cup of coffee to sip while you collect your thoughts. But before you leave the kitchen you’re accosted by someone you can’t refuse who needs a report that is key to them and seems trivial to you. You walk back to your desk trying to figure out how to generate that report as quickly as possible. Then you sit down and check your mail. There are three more people dragging you in different directions, HR says your performance review is due, and the credit card company confirms that, yes, you really did spend too much money before Christmas. By this time, that edgy feeling you had when you arrived at work might have turned to full-blown panic, and that big important thing you envisioned when you first arose is discarded because you have been drained by the distractions.
Unless you live a fairly hermetic life, each day brings a variation on the obstacle course. I know the feeling of being overwhelmed by it. I would get to a point where I’d look for more (pleasant) distractions to make me forget about the original (less pleasant) distractions.
Grounding and using Reiki helps me release that feeling of being overwhelmed, and the emotional and mental fatigue that can come from the obstacle course. I use Reiki to calmly energize myself and to give energy to the things I want to get done on a given day so that they go smoothly, with more chance of success and less chance of stress.
Will there still be distractions if I don’t use Reiki? How do you test that empirically? What I do know is that any distractions don’t affect me as much. I don’t give them as much energy, it’s easier to let the small ones go, and the large ones don’t cloud my thoughts and emotions as much as they might, which gives me the opportunity to make more aware decisions.
I also have a few guidelines I use to help me through the obstacle course.
- Don’t sweat the small stuff – One encounters a lot of little hassles over the course of a day. Many of these are little blips. When they’re over they should be gone from your life. Hold on to only the parts that can be used to make amusing anecdotes. The rest can only wear you down if you keep giving them energy.
- Live in the moment – whatever you’re doing right now, that’s what you’re doing. Everything before already happened, and everything later hasn’t happened yet. Focus on where you are.
- Determine what is important – Try a little time management. Some tasks are urgent. You can’t defer collecting the kids from school, for example (although you might be able to delegate, which is another story). Other tasks are important, like creating a January budget you can live with. You don’t actually need to do it, but it could improve the quality of your life in the cold, hard winter. Other tasks are not so urgent or important. If the task is neither, maybe you don’t need to do it at all.
- Learn to say no, or at least “later” – You might be surprised how many people who need things “right now” don’t need them quite so much an hour from now, or maybe they even figured out how to do it themselves. You don’t need to process every request immediately like an organic CPU. Determine what is important; some requests you don’t need to handle at all.
Just for today, I will not worry
See a list of Reiki precepts.
Reiki Flow 