One of the things I’d like to add into my daily routine is meditation. For me, it’s pretty much a hit or miss thing right now even though I know that it would do me so much good. And somehow I don’t think staring at the blank screen and wondering what to write qualifies.

Meditation has always been associated with feelings of peacefulness and well-being, and I don’t know about you but I can always use more of those feelings in my life. Experts say that taking even just ten or fifteen minutes a day to slow down and meditate can have great benefits. Here are a few ways that taking time to meditate can affect our lives:

1. Mediation makes a great stress reliever. If you can manage to relax and be peaceful for just fifteen minutes a day, the effects will be noticeable.

2. Meditation also can improve your physical health. Several studies have shown that meditation can improve overall health because lowering stress also helps to lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart disease.

3. Meditation helps you control your thoughts. A lot of stress comes from being unable to control our thoughts. Taking time to meditate helps to stop negative thoughts in their tracks.

4. Meditation also helps bring feeling of happiness and gratitude. By taking the time to reflect on all the good things in your life, you draw even more good things to you, which results in even more feelings of happiness and gratitude.

5. Meditation helps improve your concentration. When you can achieve peace of mind during meditation it will have an effect on how you live because when your mind is less stressed out, it is better able to concentrate on the important things in life.

These are just a few of the ways that meditating can help to reduce stress and improve your life. It may take some practice to develop the habit but allowing yourself fifteen minutes peace and relaxation is worth adding it to your daily routine.

One of the most common setbacks on the path to personal growth is dealing with a fear of the unknown. Growth means that some change is inevitable, and if you’re afraid of not knowing what the changes will bring, it’s really easy to allow yourself to stay stuck. Part of what we need to learn, then, in order to advance our own personal growth is how to conquer this fear.

One of the first steps in conquering fear is to understand exactly what it is, and the effect it has on us. While fear can be defined in many ways, the most straightforward explanation is that it is an emotional reaction to impending danger or unfamiliar situations. We experience this reaction on both psychological and physical levels at the same time. For example, you might feel anxious, overwhelmed, or even terrified at the same time your heart is pounding and you have a hard time catching your breath. If you’re anything like me, your stomach gets all tangled up in knots, and you start feeling cold and clammy as well.

A lot of the fear that we experience as adults can have its roots in childhood experiences. Mental and physical abuse, or unrealistic expectations put on us as children can cause us to develop fears that stick with us through adulthood. Unless we can overcome them, they can — and will — have a significant impact on our lives, especially when it comes to self confidence and the ability to live up to our full potential.

So just how to we overcome our fear change and the unknown that it brings?

One strategy you can use to help overcome fear is to learn to recognized when you are feeling fearful. When you know that what you are experiencing is fear, you are more apt to try and discover what’s causing it. You may need to take a close look at your life experiences in order to find the underlying cause, and that can be a pretty terrifying process on its own.

You really do need to figure out what causes you to feel fearful though, because once you’ve accepted your fear and you know what causes it, you’re ready for the grand finale — facing your fear.

What’s that saying… feel the fear and do it anyways… or something along those lines?

Push yourself outside your comfort zone, and confront your fear head-on. You can stretch your boundaries a little at a time. You don’t have to conquer your fears all in one go. But by taking the steps to overcome your fear of the unknown, you will open yourself up to new experiences and feelings with a sense of freedom you would never otherwise have.

Photo Credit: sxc.hu

When I posted last night that I was happy to be getting back into the routine of daily blogging, it was with the thought that I was doing a good thing for myself. This morning, I’m wondering just how good it is.

As a creative person I’ve always Detested — with a capital ‘D’ — any type of structured environment. Schedules and I do not get along, and haven’t been on speaking terms for years. Ditto with the alarm clock. I truly cherish my freedom to be able to go where I want, when I want, and to be able to write when the mood strikes.

However, as a creative person working at making a living as a creative person, I also know that I need some sense of structure and routine in my working life at the very least. Case in point — almost three months between blog posts. (Being a diabetic means I also have to have some semblance of routine in the rest of my life too if I want to keep it under control. But that’s a story for another day.)

So anyway, back to the story here… This morning when I was trying to decide what to write I went searching for a quote to sum up how I feel about creating a work routine that works for me. I was really shocked to find a whole raft of thoughts that portray routine in a really negative way. For example:

“Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to waste and destroy.” Henri de Lubac

“Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly” – George Eliot

“Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.” – Arthur Helps

“The less routine the more life.” – Amos Bronson Alcott

“As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.” – Henry Van Dyke

That last one by Van Dyke really resonates with me. I’ve had some friends who schedule every minute of every day, and day in and day out never change their routine at all. They call it good time management. I call it no time to live, but they’re my friends and I love ‘em so I put up with having to make appointments to spend time with them. But I can certainly see the point that is being made here.

As a person who hates being labelled and stuffed into a box — whether of my own or anyone else’s making — being so bound by a routine that there’s no room for change would be a fate worse than death.

But I know that in order to be a good writer, I have to have some type of routine that requires me to spend time with my butt in the chair with a pen in my hand. So I guess the challenge is to find that happy medium that gets the job done and falls somewhere between the no-room-to-live, destroyer of creativity brand of routine and having no routine at all. I’ve come to the conclusion this is another one of those things that there’s no right or wrong answer for — it’s another one of those life choices that is unique to each one of us.

For me, I’m thinkin’ my routine will look something like this: write and work out in the morning, do client work in the afternoon, and spend the rest of the day doing whatever the heck I want.

Oh, and I did find my quote finally:

“Most of life is routine – dull and grubby, but routine is the momentum that keeps a man going. If you wait for inspiration you’ll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street.” – Ben Nicholas

So what about you? Where do you fall on the routine spectrum? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.