Jean’s Word of the Week: CALM

Stay Calm and Grounded in Your Breath to Help You Better Respond to Stressful Situations

Jean Edelman: Hello. Great to be with you this week. This week, my word is CALM. How do we stay calm? There is so much going on in the world. There's so much going on in our lives. It's summertime. It's hot. It's just a lot. But I think we need to understand how to calm ourselves. So stretch out your arms and go around in a circle. You know what? That's about as much of the world that we can control, because that's our bubble. We control our bubble. We control our bubble by staying calm. How do we stay calm when everything around us is just exploding? And it's one easy thing, but it's hard to do. 

Practice Deep Breathing to Ward Off Stress

But we need to practice. And it is our breath. When things are spinning around us. We need to anchor our feet to the ground, and we need to breathe. Now, you're probably saying, Jean, I breathe every day, but no, we don't take full, deep breaths. We're going to put our hand on our stomach and our other hand on our chest. And when we breathe deep, we fill our stomach, our belly with air, and then we exhale. And so that's a full belly breath, and that's what we need to practice. Because when the kids are screaming or there's deadlines or when the markets are crashing or whatever is going on in the world, the only way to get calm is to ground ourselves and to come back into our body and our breath, because life is a test every day and it's there to trigger us.

And our learning and our journey is to stay calm, grounded in our breath, so we don't get triggered so that we can respond instead of reacting. So what I want to take us through is four quick steps. The first is we need to learn how to breathe. 

The second is we need to learn to pause. Because when there's something going on, we can ask ourselves, Do we need to engage? Can we step back and give ourselves some space from it? How important is this to us? We need to figure out the emotions of whatever's going on. 

The third is we just want to give ourselves what we need. Okay, so maybe something's going on, but maybe we've stopped breathing because it's really gotten to us. Maybe we're not feeling safe or we're super unhappy. So we just need to check in and say, Hey, you know, everything's going to be okay. Come back into grounding and come back into our breath.

And the fourth is to look around and observe others, put a smile on and just share it. Share it with others. We may be feeling very flustered inside, but if we can calm ourselves and breathe and share that with others, tremendous help. And then always, always, always observe how different we feel after we have taken our big breaths. And so we can only control ourselves. 

And so my word of the week is CALM. 

The C is for Courage,

the courage to know ourselves, listen to what we need versus getting pulled into whatever the fray is around us. 

The A is for Affirm,

to declare, proclaim, and pronounce what's important to us and stay in our truth. 

The L is Listen

to our body, our mind, and our intuition. Our intuition is the greatest key to what we need. 

And the M is for Mindful.

Create the time that we need. Don't be rushed. Instead of multitasking, stay in the moment. The best way to do that is to come back to our breath. 

And so practice staying calm this week. Let's put positive, happy kind thoughts out into the world. It's much easier to do when we're calm. Have a great week, everyone.