We’re focused on acquiring all the best advice on calming down and zen-ing out. Our new favorite resource is meditation expert davidji and his new book, destressifying. davidji has worked with people under some of the most extreme, high-pressure stressors possible – think world-class athletes, Special Forces, people facing loss. His practical, proactive tips to transcend life’s stressful situations are some of the best we’ve ever come across. davidji’s method: looking at the five main areas of your life and calming down, all around…

Whether you are dealing with a stressful period in your life or have just come through a difficult time, wherever you are in your life, you need a pattern interrupt to see clearly and could greatly benefit from the non-stop onslaught of your fight-flight conditioning. Maybe you’re in the midst of an argument with a friend, relative, or co-worker, or maybe you’ve just bitten off more than you can handle right now.

The Five Realms of Existence is a personal self-transformation tool to help bring clarity to the often overwhelming process of looking at our life and its millions of moving parts by taking a holistic and systematic approach to meeting your needs, healing your emotional wounds, and bringing balance back into your life.

The Five Realms are the basic categories of your life – the physical, emotional, material, relationship, and spiritual. When we look at our life through the lens of the Five Realms, it allows us to move back and forth from the big picture to the more granular aspects, irritants, and blockages of our existence. It brings us single-pointed intention so we can look at our life under the microscope and make tiny, incremental shifts that have huge impact. And by limiting it to only five lenses, clarity naturally flows to all of our answers.

Our life in its totality consists of some overlapping parts, and others that are distinct. We’ve all heard of the concept of work-life balance. But in truth, that separation between work and life is artificial, since for many, work is our life. For all of us, however, the behaviors and actions we perform in daily life, spill over into work, home, commute, relaxation, meals or the bedroom. A more accurate breakdown is to separate our life into the five truest aspects of our existence: the physical realm, the emotional realm, the material realm, the relationship realm and the spiritual realm.

During times when it seems like you can barely catch your breath, if you can look at your life through the lens of The Five Realms, you will keep you moving forward while keeping everything in perspective, and bringing greater clarity into the moment.

Here’s an example: Your to-do list is bursting at the seams; you’ve got expectations of what needs to get done, several obligations that you have committed yourself to, when a brand new set of circumstances arises and the basic day-to-day tasks and chores still need to get done. So, let’s slow it all down.

Simply walk yourself through The Five Realms and spend about five minutes on each realm.

Reflecting on each realm and the intention or commitment you made to yourself will reinforce the destressifying process. If you really want to ground your intentions, write them down and place them someplace where you will regularly see them. But the key is to live them – live your intentions… lean into them. As Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “Yogastha kuru karmani,” or “Establish yourself in the present moment, and then perform action.”

The swirl will slow. Clarity will unfold. Your choices will become more evident. Your decisions will start to truly nourish you and those in your world. With gentle repetition, this can become a daily practice. And it only takes a few minutes each day.