Active Stopping

A relatively quick overview of Active Stopping, a name that sounds contradictory. How can you be both active and stopping? It's all in the preparation. Go beyond simply finding a nice place stop, turning off your phone, and preventing any disturbances. Prepare more actively by being more of a participant in the preparation process. It makes the stopping far more beneficial and longer lasting. In this video, we highlight a couple of breathing techniques and specific movement practices for aligning well with each phase. Please note, besides Floor Time, which we covered at the end of the video, we did not touch upon specific postures for opening and releasing. Instead, we went into greater detail regarding some of the highly effective breathing techniques of Active Stopping. Know that Active Stopping is extremely helpful for people who struggle with classic meditation practices and that the benefits are many. "Stopping for the Sake of Stopping" for example, provides a great deal of positives. Emptying the mind is easier when you prepare the way Active Stopping does. "Stopping for the Sake of Awareness" has two main components. 1) You can simply choose to enhance your awareness beforehand. This directly influences your perceptive abilities. 2) You can allow yourself to enjoy the insights that spontaneously emerge as they do when the noise, chatter, and suboptimal thoughts diminish. Epiphanies (sudden realizations) often come in under the supportive conditions of Active Stopping. Lastly, "Stopping for the Sake of Answering the Call" involves making productive modifications. Beyond just repositioning your body, you can move in accordance to any and all higher degrees of "in-touch-ness." This puts you more in alignment with the flow of life and the stream of consciousness and how they relate to your current version of self. The "in-touch-ness" with life involves both the internal environment (you and your body) and external environment (variables all around you). As you begin to explore Active Stopping, get to know all of the phases really well. Memorize them. The sequence will help you tremendously. For example, "opening" allows "releasing" and unwinding to be a more natural occurrence. "Releasing" and unwinding goes to new heights when you visualize and feel a purifying, energetic "flushing." "Releasing" and "flushing" allows for "elongating," of creating more space in your body where you will feel lighter, taller, and less dense, less compressed. The elongation automatically creates space in the body that gets filled with Swirl, which is living energy that flows freely, unimpeded, throughout and all around your body. Enjoying the Swirlful interplay in and all around you comes with a feeling of lightness. THIS is the ultimate space for stopping. When stopping with Swirl, the noise that otherwise would be integrating more deeply in your body (by not addressing these steps) is delightfully gone. I cannot emphasize enough how important this all is. Because you are actively participating in all of these steps BEFORE stopping, you gain significantly greater benefit than you would by just stopping. Many offerings in Thriveapeutics are stand-alone practices. Catalyst (bodywork sessions) and Floor Time (positional stopping) are both examples. Both of them, however, can be enhanced by practicing Active Stopping beforehand. If you're interested in learning more, check out the Thriveapeutic Mind Map at https://www.thriveapeutics.com