FEATURE

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Start the Day Connected and Protected

By Christine Arylo

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Women stretched beyond capacity. Women struggling to get it all done. Women sacrificing themselves to take care of everything and everyone else. Not just for a moment or a season, but as an ongoing cycle from which they can’t break free.

 

In her new book Overwhelmed and Over It: Embrace Your Power to Stay Centered and Sustained in a Chaotic World, bestselling author Christine Arylo offers women who have come to accept the frenzied, fast pace with which they live and work to stand up and say: “This way of working isn’t working. And it has to change now!”  We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

 

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Your power to maintain and retain your life force starts with the choices you make within the first hour of every day. You know it’s not good to reach for your phone first thing or plug into work or the world before you’ve even had a chance to wake up and get your bearings. You know rushing through your morning makes you more stressed. But you make these self-sabotaging choices anyway. Why?

 

My research over the years has revealed that most people just don’t know the full impact of the choices they make in the first hour of their morning. We don’t equate the overwhelm, anxiety, frustration, confusion, doubt, and stress we feel throughout the day with the choices we made with respect to how we woke up, who and what we interacted with, and what we put into our bodies.

 

But from the moment you register It’s time to wake up, you’ve initiated a string of choices that either (1) give you the strength to meet and rise above the swirl and stay clear, confident, and calm within; or (2) program your internal operating system for a day of overwhelm. Because of your choices. Answer these few questions honestly.

 

In the first hour of your morning, have you ever:

• Checked your email or text messages before you brushed your teeth, peed, and looked at yourself in the mirror?

• Jumped out of bed without taking a few breaths to connect with your body?

• Hopped on social media or the internet, connecting to what’s happening with others or in the world, before you’ve checked in with how you feel?

• Turned on the TV or radio, inviting the world’s chatter into your personal space?

 

Don’t feel bad if your answer is yes to any of the above. In fact, if it wasn’t, I’d be skeptical. Every one of us, including me, has chosen to start our day in at least one of these self-sabotaging ways, on more than one occasion. Mostly because we just don’t know how much the choices we make in the first hour of our day affect us. Or we fool ourselves by starting to doubt that our small choices have a significant impact on us, until we fall so far out of rhythm that we have to struggle to get back in alignment.

How you start your day is how you live your day.

Think of the first minutes and hour as the most important of your entire day. The choices you make with respect to how you relate to your body, others, and the outside world will tune your mind, body, emotions, and energetic systems to either harmony and clarity or chaos and clutter. What you as the conductor of your life attune to before you start your workday has a direct impact on how the parts play together.

 

Self-Sustainability Principles for Starting Your Day, Every Day

 

• Set your field for harmony by choosing what you interact with and ingest in the first hour of your day.

You set the frequency and rhythm of your personal field by your choice of what to let into your mental, energetic, emotional, and physical fields from the moment you wake up through the first hour of your day. Sounds, images, information, conversation, stimulation — all affect the frequency of your field. Do you want your morning to feel like a techno rave, a four-alarm fire, an enlivening festival, a peaceful garden, a vibe-setting yoga class, or...? Consciously choose the feeling and frequency you desire via the sounds and images you wake up to and the information you engage with and conversations you engage in.

 

• Connect with yourself before connecting with the outside world.

Connect with yourself — body, mind, spirit, and heart (all four) — before you connect with the external world, which encompasses anyone who does not live with you. Remember this the next time you reach for your phone or computer and are tempted to let the outside into your field.

 

• Protect your energetic and emotional fields so other people’s stuff does not seep into your magnetic field.

Imagine walking out the door of your house stark naked and then getting on public transit. You would never sit on a city bus or train with nothing covering your body. You know to protect your physical body by wearing clothes. Your energetic and emotional bodies are the same. You may not be able to see these bodies with your eyes, but they are just as real, and they need to be zipped up so you are protected.

 

• Embrace your power to set the rhythm and reality of the first hour of your morning, even if that means doing things differently or asking others to do things differently.

 

It can seem impossible to change how you start your mornings without having to rob your sleep or get up at four o’clock just to find some peace. Whether it’s kids or animals climbing into bed, people in your house running around making noise like dissonant banjos, or the pressure of having to be someplace by a time way too early for any human being to start work, I want to say to you, “I get it; those pressures and people are real.” And it’s my job, also, to remind you that you are the leader of your life, the matriarch of your family and home, the arbiter of and advocate for your reality.

 

We cannot wait for an organizational policy to change or for our kids to go to college before we take back our power to set the rhythm of our mornings. We cannot expect the people around us to admit they are adding to our disharmony. We teach people — whether those we work or live with — how to treat us.

 

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Excerpted from the book Overwhelmed and Over It. Copyright ©2020 by Christine Arylo. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.