Immune Boosting Tips for Life Post-Lockdown
Building Our Emotional Resilience and Immunity
How are you feeling as we slowly return to normal life? Exhausted, depleted, fearful…?
Look inside
Challenging events like the Covid-19 pandemic offer us the opportunity to look inside ourselves and refocus. This is not about being selfish or denying what is going on around us but rather it is about focusing on our purpose and who we truly are.
Yumiko Asakura, who founded The Leaves Institute to teach others her powerful self-healing approach called Jikochiyu, explained that this is how she navigates difficult times. She said:
“When you look outside yourself at the world around you, you may not see very much harmony but by looking inside and focusing on your heart, it is always possible to find perfect harmony and peace. Many people right now may be experiencing emotions like sadness, fear, loneliness depression. While these emotions are real, they are only part of who we are. Most people identify with their thoughts, their emotions, their physical body…
But, when we can learn to dwell in our heart, we access the wholeness of who we really are and we can connect to our true purpose.”
Meditation connects us
The most effective way to connect with our infinite, unchanging self is through meditation.
By quieting our minds and disassociating ourselves from our thoughts, we can gain an experience of pure awareness and glimpse the core of our being. It can be difficult to access this in everyday life because we tend to see only from our experience, from what we see in the mirror or from what other people reflect back to us. Meditation enables us to get in touch with our true essence.
Supporting wellbeing
So, as we tentatively resume our normal lives, many of us may be wondering what we can do to support our emotional resilience and physical and mental wellbeing. While it’s important to care for your physical health by eating healthily and exercising, Yumiko recommends developing a meditation practice that can help you connect with your own unchanging self.
Always in harmony
She said:
“As a society we have a tendency to want to define things and measure things and quantify. However, meditation is not like that. The experience of connecting with your essence is not easily defined, as it is beyond time and space. Meditation helps us to know that we are always in harmony with the universe, no matter what is happening around us. When we can learn to practice meditation, we are no longer disturbed by any emotional, mental or physical experiences. Instead, we can observe without becoming overwhelmed.”
“When we realise that our thoughts and emotions and experiences are not ourselves we can be more detached and this gives us more choices about how we want to live our life. We can acknowledge and appreciate our experiences – even the difficult ones – and look for what we have gained from them rather than feeling overwhelmed.”