How to Handle the News
By Theresa Shay
If you don’t consciously handle the news, it will handle you. Lines of information are filled these days with stories of government happenings. With President Trump signing more than 60 executive orders since he took office a few weeks ago, the changes require nonstop reporting. If you are eager to feel solid while you stay updated, you need a strategy for handling the news.
Start with the most worthwhile source: your Self. Before sitting down to consume news, take inventory:
Is your breath under your control: moving through your nose, deep, rhythmic, and steady?
Have you moved consciously today to release tension: yoga, walking, dancing?
Have you given time and space for cultivating the calm, focused mind: rhythmic breathing, concentration, meditation, self-inquiry, chanting the names of the Divine?
Have you connected with the natural world?
Have you attended lovingly to your basic needs of food, water, shelter, sleep?
Have you smiled at your neighbor?
Have you touched your bliss?
Putting these in place before you move toward news secures your center. You need this internal attunement to receive, digest, circulate, eliminate, and uplift your vibration amidst the complexities of the world. Such integrity establishes home base at your immovable core. From here, you are ready.
Failure to attend to your inner state disrupts your cohesion. The resulting scattered attention and disorganized upset make you vulnerable on three levels. On the physical level, you become susceptible to dis-ease. This breaks the body down through illness and fatigue and compromises your systems from regulating themselves, as they were created with such intelligence to do.
At another layer, separation from your organized core makes it impossible to the have perspective you need to meet reality and discern wisely what your response will be.
Finally, your disintegrated internal state means your power is no longer yours. You’ve given up your most precious resource. You are no longer in control of your mind.
Energies without your best interest at heart love to find a host with a disorganized center. Moving in is easy when no one is tending the door.
The desire to stay informed may, indeed, align to your well-being and your calling. You will be able to sense that.
Be cautioned that many people follow news out of habit or duty. Even worse, some are pulled to reports because they are addicted to the drama. If you find yourself disturbed or enraged by a news story, hopeless because you cannot control the situation, ask yourself immediately, “Am I in control of that which I am responsible for controlling: my breath, my body, my mind?” That inner read will transform a disturbed moment to one of clarity. Now you have effective energy to move forward.
The principle of spiritual work is to understand that despair about what is going on “out there” is a call to transform what is going on “in here”.
Your attention is a valuable commodity. Others will spend plenty of money and effort trying to capture it. You alone control that attention, and you are responsible for directing it consciously.
On the subtle level, a huge story is breaking. “She’s Solid in Her Bliss” the headlines exclaim. Attention is riveted. How will this story unfold?
This is how we handle the news.
Theresa Shay is the founding director of TriYoga of Central Pennsylvania, where she teaches weekly yoga and meditation online and trains others to teach TriYoga®. Each week, she shares wisdom cultivated from decades of TriYoga study and practice.
Learn more about her here. Theresa can be reached at Theresa@PennsylvaniaYoga.com. Find her on Instagram @theresa_of_triyoga for more inspiration and light.