The 5AM Club

I once decided to get up at 5:00AM for a week to get ahead on my writing. On the first day, I was so excited that I got up before the crack of dawn to write by candle light. It sounds so romantic. In a way it was. Every morning during that week, I lit three or four candles and wrote for about forty to fifty minutes. Not quite an hour, I know. I lit candles because it was so dim at that end of my bedroom. I now have a cool blue and green sequin lamp. The struggle of getting up early was so hard. By the time I got to work, I was jacked up on adrenaline. When lunchtime rolled around, I was struggling to stay awake. You'd think I'd get used it by the end of the week. Nope. It was much harder. When the weekend came around, I was writing for about thirty minutes. 

I came across the Five AM Club book by Robin Sharma on YouTube. The main thing I got out of it was that getting up early gives you time for yourself to exercise, work on yourself, improve your life through reading/watching videos or going to workshops. Many of the most successful people in the world wake up at 5AM to meditate, workout or journal. He's right about having that extra time for yourself makes the day flow better and decreases stress. He uses storytelling to give us information on meditation, getting more sleep, personal growth and how to use creativity in business. There's a lot more in the book. When I finished reading it, I felt like I had to go through it again to capture all this knowledge. Anyway, if you'd like to watch what he's all about, here's a link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj5gf47UxhI

Robin Sharma is a #1 bestselling author. His most popular book is The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. His other books are The Greatness Guide and The Leader Who Had No Title.

Check out his book if you are into self-improvement and leadership. 

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Wonder Woman

Stress Less, Accomplish More

If you'd ever dabbled with meditation, you'll know that you'd probably felt anything from boredom, falling asleep and bombarded by your thoughts. I decided to give Z Meditation ago when I came across Emily Fletcher on Mindvalley, on YouTube. Here is the link if you want to check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy6uO0MzbPg&t=19s

The science behind meditation and how stress affects the body fascinated me. I was intrigued by what Emily said about how sleep is not enough for recharging the body. Here is a passage from the book based on science and how meditation thickens the corpus callosum when people meditate regularly. The corpus callosum is the thin strip of white matter that connects the gray matter of the two hemispheres of the brain.

"In 2012, a team of neurologists at UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro-modulation and Neuroimaging published a study that clearly demonstrated the thickening of the corpus callosum in people with regular meditation practices. Even more interesting, in 2015, a team from Harvard published findings from an experiment in which they conducted baseline MRIs on participants before starting half of them on a regular, daily meditation program. The subjects were selected on the basis of their overall health; all subjects, however, reported dealing with the effects of stress on their lives. During the course of the experiment, subjects answered questions about their mood and emotional states; those in the meditation group reported more positive overall feelings and a reduction of stress. At the end of eight weeks, the scans were repeated, and the brains of those who had begun meditating showed unmistakable physical changes, including shrinking of the amygdala (that is, the brain's fear center), which expands when the brain is steeped in cortisol or other stress hormones, and expansion of the brain stem, where dopamine and serotonin-the chemical responsible for feelings of happiness, love and contentment-originate."
-Chapter3 Stress Makes You Stupid, page 43.

Emily encourages us to meditation twice a day for fifteen minutes. There are three parts to this type of meditation. Mindfulness, Meditation and Manifesting. The three Ms. I'll spare you another passage on what this all means and how to do it and leave you a couple of links. If you are interested in more, you can try out the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy6uO0MzbPg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBmgHX2e2OQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIJRWVcv8Q

My personal experience with Z Meditation, if I do it properly feels amazing. And I do end up with more energy, more positivity and feeling that everything is going to be OK.

I hope you've enjoyed this blog post.

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Wonder Woman

The Magic

The Magic by Rhonda Byrne is all about gratitude.

She goes into how using gratitude every day can make you more positive, help with manifesting and becoming healthier.

The Magic of gratitude may help your relationships, improve your health, heal past or present relationships, attract more money to you and change the way you see yourself.

The main thing that I got out of it is that being thankful made me more positive and grateful for the small things in life. Try it, you may like it.

Wonder Woman,

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