Remember the main themes of the workshop: centering, sympathy, equality and balance. These movements and principles of life engender security, nurturing, bonding, productivity or generativity and grounded thinking.
1. Centering: What helps you regain your center? Do you meditate,practice qigong, garden, exercise, play music, etc.? Set time aside to practice whatever helps you relax, center and feel at home inside, and cultivate the compassionate witness. This practice will help in reducing worries, anxiety and excessive thoughts.
2. Sympathy/empathy and nurturing: How do you nurture and take care of yourself? Look at your eating habits, the quality of the food you eat and how calmly you enjoy your meals. How do you nurture yourself emotionally, mentally and spiritually? Make room for affection, supportive relationships and love as well as good reading, prayer and spiritual practices. We need all of these things; sometimes our hunger is not for physical food but for these other “foods.” When hungry, notice what you are really hungry for.
3. Use the Dalai Lama’s or some equivalent practice for engendering forgiveness, equality, generosity, gratefulness and cherishing yourself and others.
4. Pay attention to the warning signals that let you know you are off balance and may possibly get sick: for example, getting too tired, bored, lonely, hungry, angry, anxious, disconnected from your center and inner flow. When you are sick, take time to recuperate fully.
5. Find a form of exercise that you can enjoy and do regularly. Vary your routine so that you are inter positioning cardiovascular-respiratory exercises, muscle toning, internal exercises as well as other practices that add fun, spontaneity and zest, such as dancing.
6. Notice the cycles of the earth and tune into them. Garden or at least spend some time regularly grounding and feeling the earth.
7. Enhance your home environment and your sense of feeling at home. Your home is a reflection of how you live inside.
8. Be aware of the earth and what it represents. Be grateful.
9. Liver/ball bladder energies influence our dreams. By listening to our dreams more carefully, we may engender new visions or allow suppressed parts of ourselves and our energy to flower.
10. Spring is a wonderful time for stimulating creative expression. How can you allow your creativity to bloom now? Projects, art, dancing, writing, etc.?
11. Spring is a great time for action, starting projects and planning. Make use of that added energy.
12. Ask yourself, how important is this issue to me? Is the frustration and anger the only option? Look at the situation from a broader perspective, as if you were someone else looking at a distance, or view it like a movie camera. What is the limiting belief being activated which has control over me right now? What do I need to accept? How can I bend or go around the obstacle?
13. In avoiding opposition attitudes in ourselves, it is helpful to remember that it takes two people to pull on the opposite ends of a rope in order to maintain its tension level. All it takes is for one person to let go of the rope.