Yes! You do have choices - more than you realize. Our problem is perspective: we're too close to the problem to see it clearly.



In her beautiful book Total Meditation, author Susannah Marriott provides an easy meditation to 'Widen Your Horizons'.

"Spaciousness is a state of mind you can cultivate through meditation. This quality enables you to step away from the habitual treadmill of work, eat, sleep, work that encourages self-limiting ways of thinking and behaving. Finding vastness of mind liberates you to think outside the box, to open up to all possibilities and potential.

"This can transform your career, your relationships, and your lifestyle by helping you find spontaneity, see the bigger picture, understand from other points of views, and above all maintain that youthful belief that life offers you infinite choices and everything is there for the taking."

Here's Marriott's easy meditation that you can do just about anywhere and anytime:

- Sit comfortably upright, eyes closed, slowly breathing in and out.

- Allow intruding thoughts to just pass through. Be patient.

- Picture yourself sitting on a cliff overlooking a wide beach beside a vast sea.

- Mentally, view the horizon line: see how wide, distant, and open it is.

- Picture yourself looking at the sky, and feel the vastness of it as you look from one side to another at the horizon line. Sense its spaciousness.

- Visualize your challenge appearing on the horizon; so far away that it no longer has any urgency. Let it slip below the horizon.

- Take the feeling of expanse and spaciousness within you. Visualize it expanding your internal organs, including your lungs and your brain.

- Take your focus to your breath and draw it downward. Let your abdomen expand and contract outwards and then toward your backbone.

- Breathe from beneath the earth, imagining it seeping up into your feet and buttocks to ground you. Sit quietly for a few minutes.

It might take you a few times to soak in, but when it does, the answers will come quickly and won't have to be forced. My request of you this week is that you set some distance between you and your challenges with this method.

If you've never meditated, try this shortcut. Close your eyes; place your feet squarely on the ground and consciously breathe in and out several times. See how this one or two minute experiment can give you a sense of perspective. Then, try the above meditation. Read through it a few times before trying it and let me know how well it works for you. Enjoy your choices and have a great week.