You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
Download 5.46 Mb. View original pdf
|
| Making Your Body Comfortable Dress in comfortable, loose clothing and remove your watch or any jewelry that might be distracting. If you wear glasses, take them o, too. Drink a little water before you sit down, and have a glass within reach in case you need it. Use the bathroom before you begin, and try to take care of any similar issues so that you won’t be distracted during your meditation. Whether you’re sitting in a chair or on the floor cross-legged, sit up straight and keep your spine erect. Your body should be relaxed, but your mind needs to stay focused, so don’t be so relaxed that you fall asleep. If your head begins to nod during meditation, it’s a sign that you’re moving into a slower brainwave state, so don’t worry too much about that. With some practice, your body will become conditioned and won’t want to doze off. As you begin the meditation, close your eyes and take a few slow, deep breaths. Soon you should drop from a beta brainwave state into an alpha state. This more restful, but still focused, state activates your frontal lobe, which as you read, lowers the volume on the circuits in your brain that process time and space. Although at first you might not be able to slip easily into the next slower brainwave state, theta, with practice you’ll be able to slow your brainwaves down even further. Theta is the brainwave state where the body is asleep but the mind is awake, and it’s where you 261 can more readily change your body’s automatic programs. How Long to Meditate While your meditation will generally last between 45 minutes and an hour, allow yourself plenty of time, if possible, to settle your mind before you begin. If you need to finish by a certain time, set an alarm to goo ten minutes before you have to end the meditation, to give you an opportunity to finish the session without having to come to an abrupt stop. Don’t let time be a distraction though. Remember, just as you’re getting away from sensory input, you’re also getting away from being conscious of time, so if you’re constantly worried about what time it is, you’ll be completely defeating your purpose. If you need a few more minutes in your day to be able to meditate without this distraction, consider waking up earlier or going to bed later. Mastering Your Will I want to warn you about a very common stumbling block for people who are starting a meditation practice. Anytime you start to change something in your life, your body, as the mind, will signal your brain to be in control again. The next thing you know, you might start to hear negative voices in your head like, Why don’t you start tomorrow You’re too much like your mother What’s wrong with you You’ll never change. This doesn’t feel right. That’s the body trying to unseat you so that it can be the mind again. You may have unconsciously conditioned it to be impatient, frustrated, unhappy, victimized, or pessimistic, to name a few examples. So that’s how it wants to subconsciously behave. The moment you respond to that voice as if what it’s saying is true, your consciousness immerses itself back into the automated program, so you return to thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, and living by the same emotions—but still expecting something to change in your life. If you use feelings and emotions as a barometer for change, you’ll always talk yourself out of possibility. When you instead free the body of the chains of these emotions, you are then able to relax into the present moment (more on that later in this chapter, and you’ll be liberating energy from the body—going from particle to wave—so that it becomes available to create new destiny. To get to that place, to teach your body anew way of being, you have to sit your body down and let it know who the master is. We have a ranch with 18 horses, and mastering the will to stay focused 262 in meditation reminds me of what it’s like to ride a favorite stallion after I haven’t been on him in awhile. When I first climb up into the saddle, that stallion couldn’t careless about me. He smells the mares on the other side of the property, and that’s where his attention goes. It’s as though he’s saying tome, Where have you been for the last eight months I got into some bad habits while you were away, the girls are over there, and I’m not concerned about what you want to do, so I’m going to throw you o. I’m in charge here He gets mad, temperamental, and controlling, and he tries to run me into the side of the arena. But I pay attention to him, and when his head starts to turn toward those mares, I take control of him. So the moment I see him start to move away from my lead, I slowly but firmly grab the reins and pull them in, and I just wait. And before long, he stops and lets out this big snort, and I stroke him on the side and tell him, “That’s right And we take two steps and then I see his head starting to turn just slightly again, and I stop him—and wait. And he lets out another big snort, and once he knows I’m in charge, we start to move forward again. I just keep following the same procedure until he ultimately surrenders to me. That kind of gentle but firm refocusing is exactly the same approach to use with your body when you sit down to meditate. Think of your body as the animal that you, as consciousness, are training. Every time you become conscious that your attention has wandered and you bring it back like that, you’re reconditioning your body to anew mind. You are mastering yourself and your past. So let’s say you wake up in the morning and have a list of people to calla list of errands to run, 35 texts to respond to, and all these emails to answer. If the first thing you do every morning is start thinking about all of those things that you have to do, your body is already in the future. When you sit down to meditate, your mind may naturally want to go in that direction. And if you allowed it, then your brain and body would be in that same predictable future, because you’d be anticipating an outcome based on your same past experience from yesterday. So the moment you start to notice your mind wanting to go in that direction, you just pull the reins in, settle your body down, and bring it back to the present moment—just as I do when I ride my stallion. And then, in the next moment, if you start thinking, Yeah, but you have to do Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
|