This post is going to diverge from the normal mindfulness-based topics I’ve been writing about lately so I can share a short, sweet, and simple technique straight out of the old NLP handbook.
Its called the ‘Circle of Excellence’
I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I don’t subscribe to the idea that anchoring takes place instantly or on the first firing of the anchor. While this is no doubt the case for some people, others have much deeper negative emotions anchored to certain stimuli that a little click of the fingers or a rub of the elbow won’t cure.
Over time though I do believe that repeating any anchor will eventually condition a certain state to respond no matter how anchored the negative state already is. Thats the idea behind the circle of excellence.
Creating Your Circle
Find an appropriate place on the floor somewhere and make a circle there. You could do this with tape, string, anything that will form an enclosed spot on the ground. A lot of the NLP literature encourages people to visualize the circle. While this might be effective for those times when you will want to use the technique but aren’t in your office etc, I’ve found from my own experience that having a physical circle of some kind works better.
Now whenever you just happen to find yourself in a positive, resourceful, energetic or focused state, take a moment or two to go and stand in your circle of excellence. Take this time to really feel the positive sensations in your body. What does this positive, enthusiastic, creative state actually feel like? where do you feel it in the body? The goal here is to become deeply aquainted with the physiological state of success, really feel your own power and don’t step out of the circle until you think you’ve really experienced that state fully.
Repeat this process at least four or five times. Some people will feel effects right away, others will take time but the rules of conditioning work either fast or slow for EVERYONE. So don’t be afraid to input five or six good positive experiences before you begin to use your circle to elicit positive states.
Now the final step of course is actually using the circle. You shouldn’t need much help here. If you’ve really given your mind the chance to associate those positive feelings with that circle, at this point just stepping into it should drop you straight into that positive state. Combine your circle time with some positive self talk and affirmations and you’ve got one of the elements of a champion lifestyle.
Try and treat your circle like a bank account, the more money you put in, the more interest your going to accrue. If you really put the work into depositing a minute or two of those peak experiences, you’ll find yourself able to make a withdraw at those crucial moments when you really need it.
Dealing with physical pain is a normal occurance in the life of any human. We all occasionally get a headache, migraine, achy joints etc. The usual remedy is to pop a couple tylenol or aspirins. Some people have a few beers after work… but what about those of us who find ourselves in much more than that. What about the millions of people around the world every day dealing with various types of chronic and constant pain , for whom taking a few pills isn’t enough? Or what about the people who find pain killers TOO effective, turning grandma into a puddle of giggling mush.
“Whatever it takes to take the mind off the pain”
But what if pain wasn’t really that bad. What if the actual sensory experience of the pain your feeling didn’t really ‘hurt’?
When dealing with pain of the physical body in mindfulness practice the important thing to remember is that you want to go into the pain rather than try to avoid it.
You can do this by allowing your awareness to become totally focused on the actual sensation of the pain away from comparison to ‘not pain’ and away thoughts floating around in the mind about how horrible the pain is. Resting as the witness of the pain and taking notice of its individual charateristics and features will allow you to adopt a different relationship to your pain.
When you can recognize yourself as the awareness separate from the content of what is occuring within awareness, you are doing what ken wilber calls
‘resting as witnessing consciousness’.
In some of the medical research being performed on mindfulness for specific pain reduction applications, the researchers have found that the physical sensation of pain in some subjects suffering from arthritis remained the same while the psychological discomfort they had been experiencing dropped significantly…
These kinds of findings only further illuminate the distinction between what we feel, and how we feel about what we feel.
When we’re practicing mind training or mindfulness we are always trying to first relate to the freedom of being awareness no longer identifying with its own content.
This idea of learning to use the awareness like a muscle is the foundation of mind training techniques found in nearly all spiritual traditions.
So next time your dealing with a bout of pain in the body follow a few simple steps that will help you alleviate the suffering.
1. Take a few deep breathes and find somewhere quiet where you won’t be disturbed. Unplug the phone, turn off the t.v., put the kids to bed, whatever you need to do to build a sanctuary for yourself. After all, on its deepest level, this is about getting back to yourself and in a profound way learning to honor your own feelings and experiences with an open mind and heart.
2. Perform a scan of the body allowing your awareness to travel up from the feet to the top of the head. If you find your attention being pulled elsewhere by the physical pain present at the moment, simply acknowledge the pain is there and move your focus back to the part of the body you were scanning.
3. Once you have relaxed your breathing and you’ve become aware of the activity going on in all parts of your body outside of the pain, allow your awareness to focus on the physical pain itself. Take note of the particular qualities the pain has… is it sharp or dull? wide or narrow? rough or smooth? you get the idea. This type of passive non-judgemental relationship toward the pain is key. Just allow the pain to be, study it like a scientist who has never experienced pain before.
4. After five to ten minutes take a break by becoming aware of the room around you, colors, sounds, etc. and repeat this exercise as many times as you feel is effective.
I hope this and some of the other techniques we’ve been putting up on the blog are helpful. If you have any questions or comments, or you’ve been dealing with chronic pain yourself by using mindfulness, please feel free to leave us some feedback. We’d love to hear from some readers.
If I had to pick one thing, one single idea or practice, that makes the difference between success and happiness on the one hand, and despair, depression, and general unhappiness on the other, I would have to say the difference is present moment awareness.
Just the simple experience of feeling exactly what you;re feeling…
right now, moment to moment, non-judgmentally.
Not only is it important to allow your thinking to subside when it isn’t necessary, but really being in your body, where you are, already presumes success. Let me explain what I mean.
When a person identifies as someone who is ‘TRYING’ to be successful, they are living in the future. They are projecting fantasy ideas about what success is i.e. ‘I’ll be successful when I finally have that Bugatti Veyron’ or ‘I can stop struggling and just be happy once I’ve gotten settled into my new beach house.’
Now there is nothing wrong with having goals, even material ones, the only problem is waiting for those goals to be accomplished before you are happy is misunderstanding happiness all together. So what is happiness?
GETTING UNSTUCK
Think back to a time when you felt truly happy in your life. For most people a truely happy moment is often described as ‘time stopping’ where their concerns about the future fall away, their habitual clinging to the past does the same, and they are left with the brilliant clarity of the present moment.
When your mind stops groping into the future waiting for some event to be happy, or clinging to fears and frustrations from the past, it only naturally rests in the present moment. People often describe these moments of embodied presence as feeling ‘more alive’ than they had ever felt before.
A SIMPLE THREE STEP TECHNIQUE FOR COMING TO YOUR SENSES
Before you start:
Sit comfortably in a chair, with your back straight and your hands resting comfortably in your lap, take a few deep breathes through your nostrils and continue to breath normally
1. Begin by becoming aware of whatever there is in your visual field at the moment. Could be a bike tire, maybe a window, perhaps some people walking down the street outside. Try to stay focused just on the colors and movements without thinking about them in too much detail, let whatever you’re seeing sort of move across your field of vision like an abstract brush stroke. If some thought or noise distracts you, simply notice that you are thinking, and return your attention to the scene in front of you. Maintain this effort for at least two minutes.
2. When you begin to find it difficult to hold your attention on your visual field without your mind wandering again, slowly shift your attention to your auditory experience of the moment. Do the same thing in step 1 only allow yourself to become aware of the total field of sounds around you. Try to become aware of the 360 degrees of ambient noises resting just beneath your normal conscious awareness. Maintain this mindful listening for at least another two minutes, coming back whenever the mind wanders, before moving on to step three.
3. Shift your awareness to your physical bodily experience and proprioception. Feel the weight of your body and the rythm of your own breathing in this very moment. If you can allow yourself to become aware of your body as a whole, passively watching, resting as awareness experiencing the experience of having a body. Dwell on the body for at least a minute before repeating this series again from step 1 once or twice.
After sufficient practice with this technique, just the desire to shift your awareness to a particular sensory mode and hold it there becomes significantly easier. Controlling where you direct your awareness is a crucial skill when it comes to finding success and happiness in life. The more you learn to direct your focus the stronger it becomes just like working out a muscle. So practice using your mind every day and mastering its behavior, once you come back to this moment, you may find You’ve already been successful the whole time.
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