“At The Broad Place we share ancient knowledge and modern neuroscience, tools and experiences for higher grade living,” says Jacqui Lewis, one of our 30 Days to Glow partners. With a focus on integrated meditation, she “creates education for people to understand and empower themselves, and to live with more clarity, creativity, and consciousness.”
Healthy Not Perfect
“Perfect is a concept created by our own egos to drive ourselves crazy!” she says. “There is no perfect in nature, and therefore cannot be created in us. Healthy for me is living in the present moment, being responsive and resilient to everything life throws at us without hardening ourselves. It’s understanding there is no single perfect formula for how to live, and we must step into each day with fresh eyes and a beginners’ mind, and do our best to flow and not fight what is happening for. Healthy isn’t just physical, but emotional and spiritual as well. Our thinking, our souls, our hearts—all in alignment for better health.”
Rethinking Resolutions
For 2021, Jacqui advises against setting goals that are bound by timelines. “We all need to be far more loose and flowing with our ideas about what should be happening within certain time parameters that we are creating for ourselves.” Her goals this year involve “creative input—study—and output—art, writing and teaching—but the when and the what are still to be decided. I don’t want to be bound up with expectations like 2020 crushed out of me! My focus is on enhancing my spiritual, emotional and physical health, rather than setting tangible outcome and deadlines.”
Consistency is Key
As opposed to guided meditation like Headspace and Smiling Mind, integrated meditation “is a mantra-based, twice daily 15-20 minute practice that has an accumulative effect on clarity, creativity, compassion, kindness and a sense of calm and confidence. Regularity is really key with anything, and especially meditation.”
Three Mindful Moments
1. “Take time in the morning every single day for yourself even if this means waking at what feels like a crazy hour. Stretch, journal, have a cup of tea, meditate.”
2. “Meditate even when you don’t feel like it, and this will be often.”
3. “Take as many pauses as you can in the day to breathe slowly. Place awareness on your out breath and slow your breathing right down, breathing from your belly not your shoulders. This pulls you back into the present moment and turns off the fight-flight-freeze response.”
Jacqui will be sharing her daily wellness routine and practical advice on how to create a meditation practice on our Instagram—stay tuned!
