San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Appreciation the two-prong key to lifting your vibes
This new year I want to lift my vibration to a new level.
I know, that’s amorphous. Let me explain.
The heart of it is that I want to raise the quality of my energy. I want to feel better. I want to buzz, glow, feel less bogged down by the same old narratives and my habitual inclination to play the victim, and move through my days with more lightness, joy and flow.
I’m tired of my old melodramas, unproductive autoreactions and negativity bias. I want to feel better — to get my energy higher and brighter.
To that end, I put myself on an intentional meditation program. I have a therapist and a coach that I find super helpful. But I also have some firm ideas on what could help me shift gears, so I decided to systematize them.
According to Dr. Amishi Jha, author of “Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day,” meditating for at least 12 minutes, four to five times a week can have a positive impact on attention, mood and stress levels. So, I committed to building up to that frequency and duration, crafting deliberate practices for each session.
I focused first on slowing down, releasing stress and tension and finding calm. Then I moved into practices to help me identify and process my emerging thoughts and feelings in a
coherent, productive way.
Finally, I focused on elevating my emotions, lifting my vibes. Training my mind to see more of what’s good and my body to know how vibrant energy feels.
It’s been a useful process. I’m devoted to continuing to go deeper, and I’ve already felt a boost. I’m still the same Marci. “There’s no cure for being human,” as author and professor Kate Bowler says, and as I’ve focused on building a healthier headspace, I have had moments where I’ve felt better than I have in a long time. Like I’m not so
heavy and limited, but bigger and more full of possibility. It’s hard to put into words, and it’s still a work in progress, but it’s been promising and exciting. It’s felt higher-level.
I know I need to keep up with this work for that vibe to persist and grow more, but in the meantime, there’s one concept I’ve noticed at the crux of it all. Regardless of whether you decide to embark on a similar journey, it’s worth reflecting on this and how we can attend to it more. In one word: appreciation.
I mean that in two ways.
For one — appreciating the reality of this moment. That is, acknowledging life as it shows up right now. This involves dropping our resistance (because we often want things to be different than they are), and instead recognizing, accepting and allowing our feelings to exist — regardless of what life throws our way.
This brand of appreciation puts us on a level playing field. When we stop fighting what is, we stop fighting against ourselves. Then, we can start to actually move up.
This is where the other half of appreciation comes in: the part about gratitude.
Appreciating all the beauty around us moment by moment. Constantly looking around and explicitly calling out the good things.
It’s said: “What we appreciate, appreciates.” Attending to the good things and soaking in the good vibes that yields makes it all continue to grow.
This is the full spectrum of appreciation — what I’m finding to be perhaps the most critical ingredient for elevating our energy and how we feel. Stop fighting ourselves by resisting the moment at hand. Instead, appreciate the way things are moment by moment and honor the grace and goodness constantly at our fingertips. These two pieces of the appreciation puzzle set the stage for our energy to be less dimmed and dampened. Cultivating appreciation paves the way for our vibes to rise.
I invite you to think this over, and if you would like to try the meditation journey that got me started down this road, I’ve launched a program called “Lift your vibe,” that started Jan. 10. Information is available on my website, marcisharif.com.
I’m excited to see where this goes in 2022. But regardless, I’ll be appreciating the journey.