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Health Meditation Self Development

How health affects the quality of our lives!

Posted on November 24, 2016

The following is an article I wrote back in 2013. Enjoy!

How health affects our quality of life

What is health? Why is the western world in such bad mental and physical health? and How is health of central importance to our lives?  The mechanisms which control us may be grounded in biology, but our experience of reality is plastic and is shaped by our perceptions and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.  Can humans bring awareness to their internal mechanisms and take conscious ownership and responsibility of their lives and apply ‘self navigation’ to make more constructive decisions and and take more constructive actions?

Physical and Mental Health

Health is usually defined as the condition of the mind and body.  Excluding any external forces, the health of any individual will be the result of any decisions and actions taken by the individual. I interpret this as the ability of an individual to generatively be aware of and make consistent constructive decisions/actions with respect to activities that will affect the health of the individual (self navigating ability with their decisions/actions regarding diet and exercise). E.g. a person will see that their body craves pizza and chips, but they see that the internal mechanism which is causing that desire is not constructive in the current context, and therefore the enlightened individual can choose to eat something more constructive for their physical health.

Mental health could be defined in a similar fashion – the ability of an individual to generatively be aware of and make consistent constructive decisions/actions with respect to activities that will affect the mental health of the individual (self navigating ability with their decisions/actions regarding beliefs).  Eg. A person will see that their body craves anxious and depressed thoughts, but they see that the internal mechanism which is causing that desire is not constructive in the current context, and can believe something which is more constructive for their mental health.

A detailed discussion on these physical and mental mechanisms is for another place/time.  The physical mechanisms were perhaps useful and necessary and there to serve us at some point in our evolution.  E.g. a possible explanation is that the humans who craved high density foods, survived better in the environment we evolved from, and as a result we still crave high density food which in western society today, is in abundance.  Therefore this physical mechanism which has served us at some point in the past is now outdated, and if left unchecked, will cause a host of physical diseases in our bodies. The reason for the disease according to contemporary biology, is due to the lack of adaptive ability – the fact that our bodies change very slowly, or that genetic mutation is rare, and the fact that our environment has changed so quickly in such a short time. i.e. from 100% organic natural food and physical labour to crispy crème and desk jobs.

The mental mechanisms were perhaps useful and necessary and there to serve us at some point in our evolution.  E.g. a possible explanation is that the humans that were more anxious avoided dangerous situations and survived better in the environment we evolved from, and as a result we still become anxious in social situations which in western society today, is in abundance.  Therefore this mental mechanism which has served us at some point in the past is now outdated, and if left unchecked, will cause a host of mental diseases in our bodies.  The reason for the disease according to contemporary psychology is……the fact that our environment has changed so quickly in such a short time. i.e. from living in small groups of 150 people or less, to living in cities with millions of people in intricate webs of social networks.

In any life venture we are always carrying ‘ourselves‘on the journey.  The only thing that we can’t escape from, and which affects all perceptions, interactions and experiences is us!!  This begs the metaphysical question – what is ‘ourself’?, yet for the purposes of this discussion, which is not intended to be a discussion in metaphysics, I will refer to ‘ourselves’ as simply a bundle of physical and mental ‘stuff’ which interacts and seems to ‘go along with’ what we refer to as ourselves.

If we are carrying the previously mentioned ‘bundle’ with us wherever we go, with our own underlying assumptions, beliefs, preconceived ideas, etc. then what we perceive of any situation is to a large extent what we are bringing to the situation (out flow = inflow). Our experiences are filtered through our personal bundle, and therefore, we see not necessarily what we want to see, but what we are conditioned to seeing, and what we are conditioned to believe.  Our belief of what is possible, and what is probable, creates the world we experience.  We are responsible for our own reality.  Whether we take responsibility, or whether we play the victim in any situation, we are the creators of our own worlds.

If the previous is true, and we have the power to create our own reality, then what is preventing us from having a pleasant or interesting, or any reality we so choose?  The first requirement is that we understand that we shape our own reality, and see how our belief systems are shaping our perceptions.  Awareness is the first step towards competency with self navigating ability (or learning anything for that matter).

–  A model I find quite helpful is the 4 quadrants of competency, starting with unconscious incompetence, where one has no clue that they are incompetent (this is the state of the average person in our society, with respect to self navigating ability).  The second phase is conscious incompetence.  This is the phase where although the individual is incompetent with the task, there is an awareness and understanding of their own lack of competence.  The next stage is conscious competence, where the individual succeeds in competency, followed by unconscious competence, where the individual is so practiced at completing the task competently that the competency becomes automatic (like driving a car for most people).

So to continue our example, the stage of conscious competence would be where one recognizes where a person is consciously shifting their belief system to produce a more desirable outcome.  And the unconscious competence is where the competency has been practiced so much that the person is automatically ‘catching’ and correcting themselves, whenever a limiting belief arises within them.

Using the aforementioned definitions of health, gaining health could be considered as gaining insight into our physical and mental mechanisms and being able to reprogram ourselves through practice, to take more ownership and control of our lives thereby improving the quality of our lives.

Meditation Self Development

Mindfulness

Posted on September 14, 2016

“Know Thyself”

 – Ancient Greek aphorism –

Socrates and many other philosophers in Ancient Greece stressed the importance of knowing the self.  It was thought ridiculous to do study anything obscure without first understanding how you operate.  Without understanding how your own body and mind functions, how can you get the most out of yourself and your life?  If you don’t know yourself, you will be reacting robotically to any events that occur and victim of your own biases.

Have you ever:

  • Been convinced that you are right, only to find out later that you were wrong?
  • Witnessed someone interpret the same situation completely differently from you?
  • Changed your beliefs over time?

We all have our own upbringing, education, experiences, social groups, etc., which contribute to our values and belief systems. We all have a unique world view or ‘frame’ with which we see the world and process information from the environment.  Our ‘frames’ are like filters which takes the raw data from the world and interpret it to make meaning.

As we grow up, we develop our frames, but we also develop patterns of thinking and emotion.  These patterns of emotion are what psychoanalysts might call a ‘complex’. They are learned mental and emotional habits which are largely unconscious.  These complexes will take raw information and connect it to other thoughts and emotions, but in a misleading or distorted way.

Have you ever:

  • Found yourself angry or emotional and you can’t even remember why any more?
  • Had one thought ‘set you off’ and completely shift your mood
  • Had thoughts that trigger an emotional state?

Emotional states are perhaps the most neglected and unconscious part of human experience.   Our emotional states are affected by everything that happens to us and are in a constant state of flux.  One way to think about our emotions is to see them as the body’s warning signs, which tell us whether something is a good or bad idea, whether to be cautious, where our boundaries are etc. Often we have triggers which could come in the form of words or actions which ‘set us off’ on a particular emotional or mental path. If we are unaware of our own complexes and triggers, then they can take us on an emotional roller coaster ride to somewhere we may not want to go.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate

– Carl Jung –

Learning to understand yourself is never a completed task, as there is infinite complexity to every person.  However, as you develop the skill of mindfulness, you can  bring more awareness into your life and gain more and more control over your reactions to life events.   This is not about punishing yourself for having feelings, or striving to have no emotions. It is about preventing yourself from being governed by misguided patterns of thinking and feeling.

Through mindfulness we can be less attached to our frames and complexes, understand ourselves better and ultimately make better decisions and life choices.

Meditation Spirituality

Screw the Rules! – Do it your way

Posted on August 27, 2016

You don’t have to go to a posh studio, wear lulu lemon, or have your yoga postures approved by a ‘guru’ to be spiritual. You don’t have to sit cross legged in the lotus position and chant Sanskrit either!  There is benefit in having experienced teachers set up a framework to help you get engaged in a practice, but teachers and methods will only take you so far. Ultimately spiritual journeys are a personal process, and too much structure could actually interfere.  This principle can also be extended to any other activity. Whether we are riding a wave, meditating, playing chess, or playing with our child, it is that space of attentiveness and engagement that will dictate the quality of the experience.

“If you become too attached to the method, you become disengaged from the actual experience”

Whether it be transcendental meditation, hot yoga, or qi gong, any particular disciplines you use are simply techniques that serve as vehicles which can take us to the destination and set up the right conditions. You still have to get out of the vehicle and explore, to have the experience for yourself. The vehicle you use isn’t important, it is what you do when you get out of it, which determines your experience.  The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon!  Technique is just the finger. Your willingness, openness, curiosity and awareness are what allow you see the moon.

“When a wise man points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger”

 – Confucius –

Have you ever wondered things like:

  • “How do I do meditation right”
  • “Am I doing this yoga pose wrong”
  • “Am I ruining it by overthinking”
  • “What is spirituality”

These typical thoughts are testament to the misconception that there is a right and wrong way to have any spiritual experience. Any technique that has ever been invented is just there to help you get into a good space for yourself. So there’s no need to get wrapped up in thinking that you need to do things a certain way, or that if your experience is not what yourself or others expected, that you are doing it wrong! The only way of doing it wrong is to be too scared to explore and try things.  Naturally, the more you can allow yourself to roam freely, the more interesting your expedition is likely to become.

Truth is a pathless land

– Jiddu Krishnamurti –

If we get too caught up and attached to any one method of doing something and gain a sense of authority or competition, like “we’re doing it the right way” and “they are doing it the wrong way” then the activity has become an ego trap, and the antithesis of a spiritual practice.  To insist on a particular method or tell another person what experience they ‘should be having’, is to misunderstand the nature of spirituality.

“The technique or activity type is not that important. It is the attitude and intention you bring to your activities which dictates the level of engagement and quality of experience.”

I encourage you to try many different classes and find out what suits you, but what I think is most important is that you are willing to explore for yourself, and that once you have competency, you make the practice your own. Screw the rules! lets have fun, get into it, wake up, and explore our experiences!

Meditation

Meditation for Anxiety/Stress reduction

Posted on August 7, 2015

 

So what’s the difference between anxiety and stress?  One good way of conceptualizing it is that anxiety is when you are fretting about something that has happened in the past or something that is going to happen in the future, whereas stress is the current physical result on the body that can be caused  by any stimulus whether physical, mental or emotional.  Like all mental states, levels of anxiety fall somewhere on a spectrum, and everyone experiences it to varying degrees.  With our hectic lifestyles and so many competing demands and distractions it is no wonder that our brains are having a hard time coping! From what I know about anxiety, it is basically when you don’t feel ‘ok’ with the current state you are in.  Whether it is physical feelings, thoughts or emotions which are contributing to the state, there is usually an overwhelming feeling that whatever is happening is not alright!

There is nothing wrong with stress in itself!  There is a type of stress called ‘eustress’ which is a beneficial type of stress.  An example would be when we go to the gym and we exert ourselves. This is a form of stress, but it only lasts a short time, and this is actually good for you.  The problem arises when you have more constant stresses, perhaps more subtle, but persistent and/or frequent. This type of stress builds up and contributes to your ‘allostatic load’ which causes wear and tear on the body.  Once your allostatic load is too high it causes many detrimental changes in the body including impaired immunity, atherosclerosis, metabolic syndrome, bone demineralization, accelerated aging, to name just a few.  The most concerning of all to me though, is the affect that a high allostatic load has on your brain.  The nerve cells of your brain actually atrophy and die! All of the ‘exectuive functioning’ of the brain including problem solving, analytical thinking, planning, reasoning ability, working memory, is done largely in these areas of the brain! This means that our thinking is severely compromised when you are in a state of stress and if you stay stressed it is doing damage to the most complex parts of your brains.  To top it off, there is phenomena known as ‘amygdala hijack’ which occurs under stress, where this small area of the brain (responsible for fear) actually grows.  The principle is similar to building up the muscles in your body – the more you use them the more activated they become and the more they grow.  So if you have high stress you are actually training your brain to become more responsive to fear situations and less able to do complex thinking.

And now the good news! much of this damage caused by stress or high allostatic load is reversible!!  With Meditation you can bring the focus towards the current situation and come to the realization that everything actually is ok! By acknowledging and accepting your thoughts and feelings without trying to push them away, the anxiety often loses its grip and the stress reduces naturally, allowing you to break out of the ‘mind prison’ and start enjoying your life!

Meditation

Mental Health and Anxiety

Posted on August 5, 2015

From what I understand about anxiety, it can be a state where you feel like a prisoner to your own worry, stuck, stressed and unable to change.  Like anything in mental health, every state we feel is somewhere on a spectrum.  We all feel stress and anxiety sometimes! It’s just that some get it more often than others and some get it more severely.  If you have a severe case of anxiety, then maybe taking medication or obtaining clinical psychological interventions will be useful, but what about the rest of us who are not ‘mentally ill’, but still want to improve our mental health and don’t like the idea of taking pharmaceuticals or seeing a shrink?  Are you supposed to suffer in silence, accepting anxiety as something you will just have to put up with, ignore, and try to force away, only to have it do its damage and detract from the fullness of your life?

The closest thing I have seen to an accessible and effective way of treating anxiety for people who are ok, but still deal with anxiety, is meditation.  The practice of meditation is not as mysterious as it may seem, if you are a beginner. I like to describe meditation as any activity which increases your level of focus or awareness with what is going on in the present moment.  This is effective in reducing stress because most of the ‘sharks’ in our lives which seem dangerous and scary, are just in our minds! simply projections or ruminations about what might be in the future, or in some way how what has happened in the past is not ok.  If you take a step back and look at your current situation, in 99% of circumstances you will realize that there is no serious threat.  You might be in an office chair, or even in your soft warm bed, yet your mind puts your into a state where your sympathetic nervous system is activated in the same way as if a real shark was there! And now your body has released fight or flight chemicals which have nowhere to go and nothing to do except float around your body as you lay in bed.

Anxiety involves not being ok with the current moment.  It may seem contradictory, but if you can be ok with the feeling of not being ok, then your feelings of anxiety have less resistance and a chance to process.  Meditation helps you though raising your awareness of the present moment allows us to attend to what is going on in your body and mind and draws you into the reality that everything is actually ok!  Even if a feeling comes up that seems unpleasant, acknowledging and accepting the feeling without trying to push it away, will help to reduce it’s power over you a little more with each practice.

It’s not your fault!  Our bodies are not really adapted to our hectic lifestyles today either physically or mentally.  The result of this discrepancy between what our bodies have evolved for, and the typical lifestyle in 2015, is obesity, anxiety,…….. etc.  Many people take health into their own hands by being conscious of eating the right types of foods and spending countless hours in the gym, but forget about their mental health.  The human body is an integrated and dynamic organism, so trying to obtain optimum physical health without considering the mind, is like trying to bake a cake with only half the ingredients.  Lets use all the ingredients that mother nature gave us, so we have the fullest lives and better tasting cakes!!

Meditation

What is Meditation?

Posted on July 7, 2015

Who can meditate?

I’m sure that you know that meditation requires hard work, patience and years of discipline, not to mention a conducive tranquil environment in order to be practicing properly. Wrong!! Despite what the stereotypical images of meditation might suggest, one does not have to be in the lotus position on a beach in order to be doing meditation.  Meditation can be done by anyone, anywhere, any time, under any conditions, regardless of your temperament or level of experience.

 

Defining meditation

Meditation can be difficult to define, perhaps due to the fact that there are so many different types and methods of meditation, which make it harder to pin down.  There is no right or wrong definition of meditation! As meditation is a personal practice, every person is entitled to their own interpretation and can choose whichever practices they find most useful, interesting, calming, challenging etc.  One definition I like to use is that meditation is any activity where the participant aims to have (or where the result is) increased focus or awareness of the present moment. Rather than projecting into the future or past, meditation increases our focus or awareness of the current experience in one way or another.  Whether the focus is on physical points in our bodies, our emotional states, thoughts we are having, or anything else, we are guiding our attention towards something that is happening in that moment. Our mind may stray into the past or future, but the ultimate result or aim of the practice is to spend more time in the unfolding experience.

 

Some current scientific perspectives on meditation

The book ‘flow’ by positive psychologist – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains that the state of happiness or fulfillment is obtained when we are engaged in whatever activity we are doing i.e. when we are in ‘flow’, and not by acquiring material possessions. Whether we are playing chess, conducting heart surgery or sweeping the floor, it seems that the link between our behaviour and our happiness is the extent to which we can become truly involved in the activities or moments in our lives.  According to experts in mindfulness such as Dr. Craig Hassed, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. People experiencing these states of flow describe the activity as being completely absorbed or ‘clear minded’.  According to our above definition of meditation as something that increases our awareness or focus on the present – any activity which increases our engagement could be seen as a form of meditation. When a musician is deeply involved in playing guitar, or when a football player is evading a tackle, they have clean focus and engagement on the activity that they are doing, and thus by our definition practicing a form of meditation. The typical forms of meditation, where the object of the practice is to become more focused and aware of the present, and is not merely a byproduct of an activity which creates ‘flow’, is what I might call ‘formal meditation’.

 

What is meditation

Everyone can meditate! Meditation techniques can be extremely varied and individual experiences can also be extremely varied within each technique.  Defining meditation can be difficult because of these variations, but one way to define meditation is – ‘any practice which increases focus or awareness in the present experience’. According to this definition, any activity where we are in ‘flow’ could classify as meditation, whether it be playing chess or chanting ‘ohm’ in the lotus position.  Whether ‘formal meditations’ involve body scanning, sound, visualizations, etc. the object or result of the practice is to become more aware and focused on the present moment, rather than a byproduct of a flow experience.  Remember that this is just one definition of meditation, and rather than becoming hung up on what meditation is, and therefore whether you are doing it ‘correctly’, I encourage you to explore meditation with an open and curious mind, and ultimately develop your own understanding and definition for yourself! Have fun with it!