A man is what he thinks about all day long. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’m a bit of a self help junkie. I enjoy reading about change psychology and what it takes to go from being the good person you are, to the great person you want to be. To be honest I don’t think I’ve even had a day of real depression in my life. Not that I haven’t had bad days…. who hasn’t, but I can’t remember ever looking at my self in the mirror and saying ‘I’m depressed’.
How we label emotions is essential to how we manage those emotions. Lets take a second to think about exactly what an emotion is.
Most of us talk about our feelings all the time but if you stop and think about it… what is it that makes love feel differently than hate? When you see your significant other walking through door, and a sense of adoration comes over you, where do you actually feel that in the body?
Emotions are just physical reactions to thoughts, and those physical manifestations are rooted in your body and anchored to your self talk.
Lets say you’re about to give a big presentation and your waiting while everyone files in and takes a seat. You realize that this is a really big opportunity to impress your co-workers and possibly earn that promotion you’ve been trying for.
As more and more people file in to take a seat you realize that this is a really big crowd of people, a lot more than you originally thought. You start to feel that familiar sensation in your stomach, the light queasiness, an internal perception that you recognize as stage-fright from the days of your high school speech class.
Now I have a secret for you… nearly everyone feels stage fright. Or to be more specific, everyone feels that little bit of nervousness at first before they jump up in front of a crowd. The difference here is how you label and work with that emotion.
The same feeling that you identify to yourself as anxiety of stage fright in the mind of a peak performer is ‘excitement’ or ‘the rush’.
Take that feeling into yourself and really give it presence. Become mindful of the actual physical sensation and start telling yourself clearly and confidently:
‘This is just the feeling of my body getting excited about what I’m doing’
or perhaps ‘ There’s that rush, I LOVE public speaking… it makes me feel totally alive.’
With practice and a serious effort you can change the habits and content of your mind to experience the excitement of conquering challenges, where it would have once recoiled in fear.
Most of the negativity and pain you felt on a daily basis would run its course if you gave them the totality of your awareness. By labeling our emotions with negative self-defeating titles like ‘pathetic, lazy, dumb’ we only perpetuate those negative thought loops and push us further away from the happiness that is our base level sense of being. Listen to your inner voice and decide whether or not you could relabel some of those emotions that are blocking you and use them to propel you into your most successful life.
When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern. – Maxwell Maltz
If You’ve ever been up late watching T.V. you have probably seen five or six commercials for different sleep aids. Forty million people in America alone are reported to have chronic sleep disorders. Thirty million more report intermittent sleep difficulties. Itís not all surprising that so many people are affected, between all the thoughts circling around in our heads from work and our personal life. The general pace the outside word is moving at has made it difficult to slow our brains down at the end of the day and convince them it is time for sleep.
However, using awareness techniques you can get great sleep every night, and even fall asleep on long flights or when your neighbors are having a raging party and you have to be at work at six in the morning. Here is one technique for easy sleep, an easy self hypnosis technique, popularized by Milton H. Erickson, actually invented by his wife Betty.[singlepic id=37 w=320 h=240 float=right]
-Lay in your bed/ plane seat / boring lecture. Focus on three things in your field of vision. Shift your awareness as fully as you can from one to the other, take in one fully, and slowly move on to the next.
-Focus on three things you can hear, listen to each one, experience the sound and shift your hearing to another.
-Now concentrate on things you can feel in your body. Remember to divert your focus as much as possible from your external senses and feel individual sensation from within.
-Move through the series again with only two visual, auditory, and tactile.
-Next concentrate on only one thing you can see, one thing you can hear and only one thing you feel
-Close your eyes.
-Imaging a visual images concentrate on it, see it fully. Now imagine a sound, imagine a sensation in your body concentrate on it.
-Now two imagined visual, two imagined sounds, and two imagined sensations.
-if you are still awake at this point, i.e. the party next door goes critical, you can proceed to three visual, three auditory, and three tactile imagined sensations but it almost never takes a third round. There are many meditative/self hypnosis techniques that will work as well or better then pills, with no side effects or dependency and they are all 100% free.[singlepic id=36 w=320 h=240 float=right]
Sweet Dreams
A couple times a week I like to walk to a local park that’s few blocks from my house and do some walking meditation, as prescribed by Thich Nhat Hanh. For me, becoming mindful of my body in motion is much easier than trying to hold my focus on my body while doing sitting practice, but walking meditation comes with some obstacles as well.
While I was walking around the track at the park, I began to hear the intermittent beeping of a truck as it backed up a few blocks over. Then it stopped and I was back to the relative silence of the park. Then the beep again. Then silence.
I decided that giving up and walking home would not be the enlightened thing to do and instead I began using the beep as a type of mantra. When there was beeping, all my focus was on the beep, when there was silence, I allowed my focus to rest on the sensation of my body moving slowly across the earth.
Shifting back and forth like this between the two objects I spent twenty or thirty more minutes in the park, becoming the beep, becoming my body, becoming the beep, becoming my body. Somewhere in the midst of all this the realization that I was neither the beep, or my body, but the awareness that contained them hit me on a profound level.
While I was walking home I was reminded of Krishnamurti’s teachings on choiceless awareness. Often I forget that mindfulness is only a technique to the beginner, but for the expert, its a way of life. Making a conscious effort to direct your awareness to a specific object is useful to train your mind. However while I was walking home paying attention to my environment (the don’t get hit by a car meditation) I realized that I could focus on whatever sensory experiences or thoughts were fluttering in my mind. I could be equally as aware of this random stream of sensory information as I am of a mantra or some other fixed object.
When you are meditating, in the sense that I use the world, It means your making a gentle effort to hold your attention on a chosen object. If you’re in a quiet room or a zendo then holding your attention on your breathing, while still challenging, can be helped along. In walking meditation practice, unless your walking around your living room, or up and down the aisle of an airplane as Krishnamurti was fond of doing, you’ll find that noises, people, cars, horns, birds, everything that can will poke a hole into your consciousness before you can bring it back to being.
Choiceless Awareness is all about focusing on that which is already present in your field of consciousness this very moment. Its not a three step process… or even a two step process. It requires just the attitude of stopping to see where your at, what your thinking, and how you feel.
When you can become fully aware of whatever dances across your field of awareness, then holding your focus on a syllable or some other practice becomes easy. Starting off with certain techniques and tools to train your mind is essential for anyone to get a grasp on their own life, I firmly believe that. But one day when your out having a stroll just let whatever naturally comes into consciousness be there, and give it your full attention, remember that mindfulness is best practiced in the middle of the live moving world, with all its colors, sounds, shapes, and flavors.
When George Lucas wanted an untouched forest on an alien world he chose the Redwood Forest of Northern California. Their eerie splendor has the same potent effect no matter how many times you find yourself beneath them. I walked today under some of those ancient towers and let their awe inspiring immensity diminish any illusions I had of time or space. Contemplating the ages they collectively experienced, reaching towards the sun, pushing new needles, slowly intertwining their ludicrously shallow roots, making widening concentric circles of new sapling that will see the next few hundred or thousand years of the earth go by, slowly reaching ever upwards.
[singlepic id=32 w=320 h=240 float=left]
In old growth Redwood forests the trees climb to over 300 feet and create their own micro climate, as soon as you are beneath the canopy a misty silence overtakes you.
However today the acres I walked were new growth, having been forested to rebuild San Francisco after the business in 1906, smaller trees compared the giants up north. And the woods were not silent, hawks and eagles circle overhead, eluding my lens, calling to each other and scurrying into the shadowed nooks beneath fallen limbs and prehistoric ferns.
[singlepic id=25 w=320 h=240 float=right]
As I sit with by back to a three hundred yeah old Redwood, I focus my awareness of my body, after a time I feel myself starting to become part of the forest. Neither allowing myself to be completely distracted, or completely focused, on the experience. I feel the wind in my nostrils and join it when I exhale. There is cold moss and stone beneath me.
Raptors call overhead, I can almost feel the downdraft from her wings. The winds pick up. The limbs above me come alive, ancient arms stretch into the sunlight. The winds eventually drive me back out into the light, back to reality and society. The moss continues to grow.
My day in the woods reminded me of some of my favorite quotes that can be applied to the practice of mindfulness.[singlepic id=33 w=320 h=240 float=]
ìAs a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.î Henry David Thoreau
The David Lynch Foundation has recently been in the news for its benefit concert supporting his group trying to push meditation in schools. With Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Moby in the line up it shouldn’t be hard to raise the money to make meditation in schools a possibility. The problem for Lynch is that the money isn’t the problem. He’s coming up against people taking the position that TM constitutes a type of religion and therefore shouldn’t be taught in schools. While I firmly believe in the benefits of meditation for everyone including children, I think Lynch is going about it the wrong way.
I think its a spectacular idea to teach kids how to meditate, don’t get me wrong, but the problem here is that the opposition hes coming up against clearly sees that TM is in large part based in Hindu dogma and includes beliefs such as the possibility of flight or levitation. This very conflict is why I am a huge supporter of secular meditation practice.
The TM technique consists of sitting down for a twenty minute period twice a day and reciting a special mantra (a repeated verbal thought, in this case a hindu god name). The TM group and practitioners of TM claims it can reduce stress, sharpen focus, and increase overall well being. The group has numerous scientific peer reviewed research to substantiate its claims making it difficult for the opposition to claim that TM practice has no effect.
Of course the practice does have an effect. Any repetitive activity which you focus and hold your awareness on will lead you to a state that Ken Wilber calls ‘radical subjectivity’. This relaxed but alert state of mind does seem in research performed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mathieu Riccard, and others to reduce the overall state of stress and anxiety in a person.
The problem for me is that its unneccesary to pay the several hundred dollars up front that the TM corporation charges for learning its admittedly simple technique.
When meditative practice which is by nature no different than learning to control and hold focus on certain stimuli at will is packaged together with extra baggage like the use of Hindu god names for mantras, when as Robert Anton Wilson so accurately pointed out ‘Cheeeeeesseeee burrrrrrger’ will do, it seems to me that they are both doing a huge service and a huge disservice to contemplative practice in general.
Mantra meditation requires no special training and the benefits of it are documented. Repeating any chosen syllable or phrase for an extended period of time is going to stop your internal chatter and bring you back to a more embodied mindful state.
I certainly don’t teach AGAINST using mantras from spiritual traditions, I only with that the meditation teachers around the world would appreciate the importance of removing any cultural context from the meditation practice, so that the student can make it something truly his or her own.
Mantra Meditation in Three Simple Steps
1. Sit somewhere comfortable, make sure your spine is erect and your breathing is relaxed. Take a moment to do the body scan technique and relax each muscle group one by one.
2. Pick a suitable mantra that you find easy to repeat mentally and simply start repeating it in your own mind. Common Buddhist mantras like OM MANI PADME HUM, or NAMU AMIDA BUTSU, are used. But in keeping with my interest in secular meditation I often just use gibberish of some variety, ‘TO-NOL-FOR-POW’ or something similar.
3. Continue for twenty to thirty minutes before stopping. Take a moment when your time is done to stay with your eyes closed and let the repetition of the mantra quietly begin to fade into silence in your mind. Then simply open your eyes and go about your day.
Its recommended to perform this twice a day in the TM literature, but I’m a big proponent of experimenting and finding what works for you. Again I want to reiterate at the end of this post that I am in overall support of the efforts of people like David Lynch, I only want to make a personal effort to reach the people who would never for culturally specific reasons consider meditation. We can both agree that learning to focus our minds and see past our own attachment to thoughts is the beginning of the end for suffering among all living creatures.
RSS Feed
Find us on Facebook
