of your self and be able to feel the joy of your life no matter what is happening on the outside.
So let’s put you in the center of your life.
I recommend that you access the free audio version of this short meditation at www.StartRightWhereYouAre.com, because I think you’ll find it easier to visualize the concepts if you listen to me say it rather than reading it silently. You could also make a recording of yourself reading it and play it back with your eyes closed.
And if you’re the kind of person who avoids meditation, no worries — I invite you to try only the simple, effective breathing pattern. I have been doing this breathing pattern for over twenty years, and it has helped me through panic attacks, boring sermons, bumpy airplane rides, Los Angeles traffic, audition jitters, and insomnia. It’s a miracle worker.
Here’s the pattern:
Inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of seven, exhale for a count of eight.
That’s it. 4:7:8.
You can just do it once and get a nice effect, although I usually like to do it three times. You can also keep going and repeat the cycle as many times as you like. Once, at a party, I stayed up until 5 AM, sitting on the couch, counting out this breathing pattern with a friend who was having a bad experience on some psychotropic drugs. She said later that the breathing kept her from “completely freaking the freak out.” So, while I’m not making any medical claims here, it’s good for defreaking.
I like this breathing cycle because it is so simple, and because the counting pattern is just unusual enough to distract me from my thinking. It returns me to my center.
Here’s the text of the meditation to read, read aloud, or download as audio:
If you’re somewhere where you can close your eyes, go ahead and close your eyes. If you can’t or don’t want to close your eyes, just soften your gaze a little bit. Let things go just a little blurry. Soften your gaze, soften your heart. And now feel the very center of you. Feel the energy in the center of yourself like it’s the core of something, like the heart of a tree — the heartwood. Focus on that energy in the center of you. And let that center beam be really clear and strong. And let everything else relax around it. So your hands can relax. Your feet can relax. Your belly can relax. The back of your neck, your jaw, your tongue, your heart, your joints, your mind, your judgment. Feel that beaming energy drop down into the earth so you are connected to the living planet. And feel it extend upward out the top of your head so you are connected to the sky above.
Now imagine that the beam is illuminated. Imagine that it glows. See if you can turn an imaginary rheostat to make it glow more brightly. Experiment with the color, intensity, and size of your illuminated center beam.
And just staying in the center of yourself, we’re going to inhale, two, three, four; hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven; exhale, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Inhale, two, three, four; hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven; exhale, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Inhale, two, three, four; hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven; exhale, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Thank you. Thank you for doing that with me.
There are several versions of this meditation, designed to support you as you move through the material in this book. Feel free to use them however you want — there’s no need to be all precious about it and feel like you have to light candles or do it perfectly or anything. Just play around with the ideas, do the work that interests you, and leave the rest for some other time. Do what feels easy. Little changes, remember?
LITTLE CHANGES ACTION STEP: Right now, do the 4:7:8 breathing three times. Repeat at will.
3.
I CREATED the Start Right Where You Are workshop and this book so that you and I could talk more about the inner game of leading a creatively and spiritually fulfilling life.
I love offering material that is both functional and doable. My first book was called Get It Done: From Procrastination to Creative Genius in 15 Minutes a Day, for Pete’s sake. I’m a practical person, and I really enjoy teaching about creative productivity.
But eventually I realized that I was leaving out a big, important chunk of information about being centered in yourself and connected to everything, which is what had enabled me to go from being broke and exhausted all the time to not-broke and not-exhausted all the time. It was time for me to start talking about the inner journey.
If you don’t believe that you can be creatively fulfilled, well, it doesn’t really matter what productivity tools I give you, does it? And if you’re not sure that it’s really okay for you to be calm and successful and loved no matter what, then no amount of helpful advice will change your patterns. So we need to start at the very beginning — at the very center of you — and work outward. We start with your soul.
This means that I will, in fact, be talking about God. And it’s not important to me whether or not you believe in God, or what you call God. I trust that you’re a sophisticated enough person that you can make whatever mental substitutions you need to make. I want to be clear: I’m not proselytizing. I don’t want to turn anyone off or freak anybody out. I know some of you have been really burned by the whole God thing, and I truly don’t care if you’re religious or spiritual or philosophical or none of the above. I’m not trying to position myself as any kind of spiritual leader or teacher. I’m just using the words God or the Net to signify that eternal thing that is bigger than us.
My partner, Luke, is a committed atheist. He’s done quite a bit of reading about the topic of God, and he tells me that what I mean when I talk about God is not what most people mean when they talk about God. So I’ll get into a little bit more of my definition of God later on, but for now, I want you to identify for yourself what word you like to use to describe the mystery of life.
You’ve felt that sense of mystery when you gaze at a sunset or at the mountains. Maybe you’ve felt it when you spend time with animals, or when you have been in the “flow,” physically or creatively. So you can call it Love or the Divine or Spirit or Source or Buttons the Clown if you want. I’m going to use God or the Net, because those words work for me, plus it’s less awkward than having to say, “that eternal, mysterious thing that is bigger than us” every time. (And really, if you want to go through this book and cross out the word God and replace it with an X or another word, I think that’s great. Do what works for you.)
Let me walk you through a two-minute exercise so you can experience what I mean by the Net, rather than discuss it further. Experience is much more important than theory.
You can find the free downloadable audio for this exercise at www.StartRightWhereYouAre.com.
Start by shifting around in your seat a little bit. Just wiggle slightly or get up and turn around — something to signal to your body that we’re up to something different. And let’s go back to that image of your heartwood, the center of you, the core of you. Just feel that energy in the middle of you and feel it drop down into the earth and extend upward toward the sky.
Focus in on this heartwood core of you that’s now plugged into the living earth, that’s connected to the sky and the stars and the sun. Imagine that that beam glows — that it has a color, and an intensity. And visualize all the spokes radiating out from you like a dandelion puff, extending out, out, out, into infinity. The spokes glow, too.
And now imagine all the other people who are reading or praying or meditating right now. Imagine their center, and the glowing spokes emanating from them.
And