Reflections and practices will be offered each day. Journalling the thoughts, images, dreams, emotions, sensations and experiences that arise throughout the entire week can deepen your journey and the process of healing and transformation.

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Offered by Shelley Ostroff

 

INVITATION

 

DAY FIVE: Rest in Loving Communication – Reflections and practices

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1. Embodied Communication: Your entire body is always communicating. At different times of the day and in different situations, pause and pay attention to what your body is saying in the way that you are sitting or standing or walking. If you were to look at yourself from the outside, what would you imagine yourself to be communicating through your body language to the world around you?  Offer yourself some gentle attention, transform the way you are holding yourself and experience the impact of this shift.

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2. Communicating with your body: Notice the internal sensations of your body, what is it saying to you, what is it feeling, what is it needing? Notice how you communicate with your body, both in the way you think about it and the way you treat it. How can you listen and communicate more lovingly with your body.

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3. Smile: Even if you are not happy, just for a moment, smile, and notice how the shift in your face impacts the rest of the body. Notice the communication of the smile within you and beyond you.

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4. Loving inner messages: What words of support, love or acknowledgement would you like to receive right now? What words would soothe you and inspire you? Offer those words lovingly to yourself. Notice how receptive you may or may not be and soften into even greater receptivity.

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5. Witnessing communication: As you communicate through the day, watch the communication and reflect on it. Notice how you are communicating, the tone and pace of the words you choose, the content of the words, the essence and energy of the words. Notice the body language you use as you speak. And as you notice imagine what this communication would look like if it these communications were more heartful, more loving to yourself and others? Practice bringing heartfulness into these communications.

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6. Deep listening: Notice the way in which you listen to others.  What is your body language as you listen? What are the voices in your own head as you listen? What are the interpretations and judgments about what is being said?  How can you perhaps hear what is said by the other from a different vantage point or from a more open and empathic perspective?

7. Practicing empathy with others:  Put yourself in the position of those you are communicating with. Imagine what it is to be them. What is the story that has led them to this moment – and to the communication they are offering. 

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8. Practicing empathy with yourself: We are constantly communicating with ourselves through our thoughts, judgments and interpretations. What is the quality of the way in which you communicate with yourself? Practice being kinder, gentler and more understanding of yourself as a bridge to transformation

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9. Honest communication: Honesty and integrity involves practicing self-awareness. Honesty often gets confused with judgment – but honesty is generally less about ideas and more about emotions, and personal experience. Honest communication entails developing a vocabulary of emotions and experiences and spending time listening to and acknowledging what one is experiencing. Practice noticing the difference of energy when you speak with judgment and interpretation of yourself or another and when you are speak from personal experience, taking responsibility for whatever you are feeling.

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10. Sifting messages: Discern the messages that are nourishing to your soul and those that are not. Practice listening to those that are nourishing and letting go of those that are not.  In the same way practice nourishing others with your communication.

11. Interspecies communication: Spend time with an animal, either physically or in your imagination.  Watch its behavior, sense its breath and its energy – what is it feeling? What is its experience? From a very calm and unexpecting place, send it a loving message.  Spend some time with the animal communication webinars offered through 7 Days of Rest.

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12. Journaling:  Spend some time writing your thoughts and feelings. Optimally spending at least 15 minutes a day writing whatever comes to mind without censorship offers a powerful journey of self-awareness. Start today with taking 15 minutes to talk to talk to yourself and listen to yourself through this process.

 

13. Intention: Set an intention to grow more and more into loving and honest communication with yourself and others and cultivate practices and processes for doing so.