I have spent a good part of my life practicing some form of wellness. Yoga, meditation, breathwork, movement, nutrition. I’ve studied these things, taught them, built businesses around them and watched what they can do in people’s lives.
And for much of the past year, I wasn’t doing a lot of them myself.
I had plenty of reasons. My mornings were busy. Work was busy. The kids were busy. My body had been through a few things. There was always something that needed my attention before I seemed to get around to giving any of it to myself. I would think about meditating and decide I didn’t really have enough time. Yoga somehow became something I needed an hour for. Breathwork was something I knew I should get back to. Days passed, then weeks.
It’s funny how easily something that was once simply part of your life can begin to feel like another thing you’re supposed to do.
Over the past several months, I’ve been creating a new series for Awakenings called The Wellness Minis. The idea was pretty simple. What could we do with six minutes?
Not because six minutes is some magical number. It just felt realistic.
I started recording short meditations. Then breathwork. Then movement. We began working on nutrition and coaching. Somewhere in the process of creating these for other people, I started using them myself.
Every morning before I sit down at my computer, I do six minutes of breathwork. Then I move. Then I meditate. Lately, I’ve been paying more attention to what I eat afterward too.
And I love it.
I’m not getting up at 4:00 in the morning. I haven’t created some elaborate morning routine that requires a checklist and an hour and a half before the rest of my life can begin. I’m just doing a few small things that I know help me feel better.
This morning I realized I’ve meditated every day for more than a week. I’m proud of that. I’m also noticing how I feel when I sit down to work. I feel a little clearer, a little more grounded, some mornings calmer than others. I’m beginning my day having already done something good for myself, and I think that matters.
It has also made me think about how often wellness becomes bigger than it needs to be. We decide we need to exercise for an hour. We need a proper meditation practice. We need to completely change the way we eat. We need the right program, the right schedule, the right time. Sometimes the size of what we think we need to do keeps us from doing anything at all.
I know better, and I still did it for almost a year.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself for the hour. I had six minutes.
That realization became the foundation for The Wellness Minis: Wellness for Real Life.
Each Mini is a 21-day experience built around one area of wellness:
MINI MEDITATE
Six Minutes to Yourself
21 Days of Meditation
MINI BREATHE
Six Minutes to Breathe
21 Days of Breathwork
MINI MOVE
Six Minutes to Move
21 Days of Movement
MINI NOURISH
Six Minutes to Nourish
21 Days of Real-Life Nutrition
MINI COACH
Six Minutes to Shift
21 Days of Coaching
Mini Meditate will be the first one we release. Each morning, one short guided meditation arrives in your inbox. You open it, give yourself six minutes and go on with your day. The others will follow.
You can do one Mini. You can eventually combine them. You can use them to begin something you’ve wanted to begin, or to make something you already do a little easier to keep doing. I’m still figuring out what my own routine will look like as I create all of these.
For now, I know this much. This morning I breathed, I moved, I meditated and I ate something that would nourish me. Then I sat down at my computer and started my day.
It didn’t take over my morning. It became part of it.
Six minutes can change what happens next.