Fitting Spirituality Into Your Busy Day

Five One-Minute Exercises To Expand The Soul

By Alan Seale

How do I fit spirituality into my life? People seem to believe that spiritual exercise, like physical exercise, requires thirty minutes to an hour a day.

Nonsense! Taking tiny moments throughout our day to give thanks, feel our body, empty our mind, acknowledge feelings, or become a vessel for divine energy is easy and highly satisfying. Making time to strengthen our intuitive powers has many rewards. We will feel calmer and our mind will be sharper. We will feel energized and more connected to others, and will even find we are more positive and productive at work.

We are all so busy with our families, jobs, and social life that it’s challenging to find time for regular spiritual practice, such as meditating. As long as we are trying to fit our spiritual practice into our already packed lives, it will probably never happen—at least not in a rewarding way.

I ask clients and students to turn the question upside down in order to find a whole new perspective: How do I fit my life into my spirituality?

We can begin to do this by thinking of spirituality not as something we do, but rather as a way of life. Spirituality is not something we learn, something foreign to our soul. It is our soul’s natural state of being, all day, every day, no matter what we are busy doing. It is an unseen force with which we coexist. Our task, then, is simply to allow ourselves to tap into divine energy.

Think about the unseen forces in our lives, such as radio waves and electricity, that 150 years ago would have seemed pure fantasy. Today, not only have we accepted and incorporated the reality of these unseen energies into our daily lives and become more dependent on them, we have built whole technologies upon them and altered our daily lives accordingly. If we accept these unseen forces as co-existing with our physical reality, why not allow our perspective of day-to-day reality to include the mystical forces of the universe?

The first step toward living in this expanded awareness is to choose that awareness as our mental default operating system. This means disciplining our thoughts. However, disciplining thoughts does not have to be an added time commitment in our daily schedule. It takes less than sixty seconds to find and partake of this peaceful energy, a bit like dipping a cup into a flowing stream, letting it fill up, and drinking.

Here are five exercises to try throughout the day, each of which can be performed in less than a minute. You will be surprised and delighted at how much better you will feel when you take tiny moments to fit spirituality into your life.

Hold A Vision

Take advantage of “mindless” time—such as standing in the shower, driving to work, or downloading new software—to picture something beautiful and hopeful for yourself. Once you form the vision, make a conscious effort to hold it, keeping it at the front of your mind, without letting other thoughts intrude. 

Begin The Day With Breath

Right after you awaken or your alarm goes off, but before you jump out of bed, take one minute to breathe deeply. Pay attention to each in-breath and each exhale. Try to focus only on your breath, not your to-do list.

Open The Third Eye

Focus your gaze on the tip of your nose for thirty seconds. Your eyes will cross and you will feel pressure at the third eye (located just above and between your eyes in your forehead). Relax your eyes. Now shift your focus on the bridge of your nose, directly between your eyes for thirty more seconds.

Who Am I Right Now?

Take a few breaths to calm down and get centered. Now, ask yourself, “Who am I right now, in this exact moment?” Allow the response to come as thoughts, words, feelings, images, colors, or sounds. Make no judgment about what comes to you. Write down your answers.

Release Angry Blocks

With your dominant hand, write the question, “How does it feel to write with my non-dominant hand?” Then write the answer with your non-dominant hand. With your dominant hand, write, “Please tell me who I am.” Answer with your non-dominant hand.

Periodically throughout your day, revisit your peaceful place by taking just sixty seconds to close your eyes and focus on your breath. Allow your breath to find its own natural, steady rhythm. This simple practice will keep bringing you back to your own natural inner rhythms.

It takes only sixty seconds to get back into alignment with our soul. How often do we spend much more time than that fretting over how overwhelmed we are? A minute of intentional breathing and centering throughout our day will actually save time. By sitting in the stillness of our breath and the expansiveness of our soul, we will discover solutions to problems, resolutions to conflicts, and be shown the next steps.

Make the conscious choice to be the keeper of your life rather than let your life be the keeper of you. Choose to live in the vastness of your soul. Then, when your supervisor calls you in for a conference, rather than choosing a fear reaction or immediately going on the defensive, choose to be in your magnificence and hold your supervisor in hers, as well. See how the energy shifts.

Choose to let the events of your life find their place within your greater spiritual awareness, rather than trying to figure out how to fit your spirituality into what life offers. This applies to jobs, relationships — to every part of life.

You’ll be amazed at how life starts to fit into your spirituality and bring a richness of being you never imagined.

Alan Seale, author of Soul Mission, Life Vision, & Intuitive Living: A Sacred Path, is a life coach transformation specialist, inspirational speaker, and spiritual teacher. Visit www.alanseale.com or please call toll-free 866-353-4993. 

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