By Shalin Desai
Trying to balance the chaos in your home with this Covid reality? SKY Breath Meditation can help you to manage your work-life and school-life with ease.
Families are struggling all over the country with everything that’s happening. Either your kids are going to school and you’re filled with constant anxiety. What if the kids get Covid? Or what if you get Covid at work?
The other scenario is that parents are working from home while schools are also operating online. It feels like an entire zoo inside the home! You’re trying to attend work calls and meetings while making sure the kids are doing things correctly.
It’s a very challenging situation, and if you have younger kids, it’s not an easier feat either.
How to cope with the zoo at home
Let’s take a step back to paint a picture of what’s really happening in there.
From the moment you wake up in the morning you’re running around all-day-long. “Give me a second, my boss is asking me to…”, while your kids are throwing things around the house. You’re getting stressed and that stress is boiling over to your kids.
You know how stress affects your kids, and how much harder everything becomes. But you’re irritated, you’re snapping more easily, you just can’t help it. You want the day to be over as soon as possible.
When you take a step back, you know that you would absolutely love to fully enjoy this extra time with your kids - but it’s just not possible. There are too many responsibilities, and there’s too much fatigue.
Why breathwork matters
Learning how to calm your mind is so important, and breathwork is such a powerful tool to help manage your mind and emotions. There’s a powerful link between them, and if you can learn how to control your breath, you can learn how to control your reaction to life.
Think of it as mental hygiene. In the same way as we take care of our dental hygiene, you don’t teach your kids to brush their teeth once they’ve decayed. You do it so that the teeth don’t decay.
So don’t wait until you’re having a breakdown. Pampering the mind is preventative care that will dramatically enhance the quality of your life. It’s about self-care and taking care of yourself.
Your kids will feel the difference
During a follow-up session with the SKY Breath Meditation course, a parent shared a great story about the impact of SKY. She had been doing her breathing practice every single day since the course. But over the last few days, she started slacking.
She kept telling herself she’d pick it up again the next day. One evening, she was telling her kids to do something and didn’t realize how irritated she sounded. Her 10-year-old son sensed her anger.
“Mommy, why don’t you do your breathing exercise first? And then we’ll talk.”
This is about YOU
The people around you will feel your stress, but nobody feels the impact of it in the same way that you do. Because you’re the one living with it, dealing with it, sleeping with it, and waking up with it.
Before the pandemic, more than one-third of the American population was reported to be dealing with symptoms of anxiety and depression. If it was that high before, imagine what it’s like now! So it’s really high time for self-care. You don’t want to deal with bigger consequences later on.
In my own life, my kids are shouting and fighting in the background. They’re pulling each others’ hair. But it doesn’t bother me that much because when the mind is happy and pleasant, the craziness around you doesn’t have the same impact.
This is what SKY Breath Meditation does.
Art of Living is thrilled to offer our signature SKY Breath Meditation course throughout the year! Click here to see a full schedule of available programs or click here to join a free intro session.
Shalin Desai is an international instructor for the Art of Living. He teaches breathing and meditation around the world and has been practicing these techniques for over 20 years. He has a wealth of experience leading national programs, building teams, and empowering community initiatives.
