Take a moment to ponder how you want the new year to be.
“What do you want to create this year? How do you want to invent yourself in the new year? What is it that needs to be released or closed off in 2022 so that you can fully step into 2023?” — these are some of the questions that trauma and inner-mind therapist Sheryne Wilson will help bring clarity to at her "Guided Soul Journey Meditation" session at Move Yoga Studio on Jan. 7.
At the one-and-a-half-hour session, Wilson will guide the participants into a “deeper place of relaxation” with the use of sound (of tuning forks and crystal bowls), visuals and verbal techniques.
“Meditation is allowing the mind to receive rest,” said Wilson. ”Sometimes it’s (meditation) about laying there thinking about your grocery list, and thinking about what you should have said to your sister yesterday, and allowing that to happen so that then the mind is emptied out.”
“We are so overstimulated, our computer systems are back-loaded. And if you ever use a computer that’s back-loaded, you know that it just short circuits. It shuts down because it's like, ‘I need to process 18 other programs before I can do the next thing.’”
Meditation offers the space to process those programs and gives your mind some rest, she said.
“And 'rest' can look like sorting through files so that it can finally be emptied out.”
'We're in a hypnotic state 90% of the day'
Wilson’s meditation session aims to create a setting for just that. “The sound bowls, the environment and just being in the collective, makes it easier for you to relax,” she said.
“It’s a little different than if you were just at home with your kids in the other room.”
Wilson, who is also a certified clinical hypnotherapist, said “I like to use more questioning to help people access those inner parts of them.”
According to Wilson, we spend 90 per cent of our day in a hypnotic state.
“Within three seconds of picking up your phone, you're in a hypnotic state; within seven seconds of turning your television on, you're in a hypnotic state, and within 30 seconds of getting in your vehicle, you're in a hypnotic state,” Wilson explained.
“When you pick up your phone, your brain already knows where all the apps are, what button it needs to push. It's automatic. You don't go into the shower and go, ‘OK, now I need to use my shampoo.’ You are in a hypnotic state. When you get in your car, you don't go, ‘Okay, my blinkers are on the left.’ You already know.”
Hypnotherapy or guided meditation, she clarified, is a very specific focus state where we're telling our mind what to think, rather than being on auto mode.
“Through guided visualizations, prompts, or music, we're just putting ourselves into a state where we're giving our mind permission to bring up whatever it is that wants to come up.”
And that is the essence of meditation — it doesn’t have to be necessarily like what the Tibetan monks do, Wilson added.
“Meditation is evolving. It's not what we think it used to be.”
You can meditate while walking, listening to music, in a quiet room or in the shower, she noted.
And you can add it as part of your routine — by taking five to 10 minutes a day to listen to music, binaural beats, or ocean waves; sitting in your car five minutes before you go to work with eyes closed, listening to the sounds that you hear outside; focusing on our breath; counting in your mind backwards.
“All those things can bring you back to presence, back to awareness, and back into your body.”
Guided Soul Journey Meditation is scheduled between 6.30 and 8 p.m. at Move Yoga Studio, 426 East Columbia St., on Jan 7. Registration fee is $50. For details, visit movenewwest.com.
