vipassana Archives - Fusion Health and Wellness

The Mind and Why Meditation May be the Ultimate Hack, Pt. 2

In Part One of this post, we discussed the inherent problems involved in having this great little tool we call our mind – namely that it acts largely out of our control. You want to move on from a painful break up, but your mind won’t stop thinking about it. You want to sit down and study, but in a few minutes you find yourself lost in the endless scroll of Facebook. Someone says something and it offends you; instead of being able to move on, you’re left wondering if what they said was true for the rest of the week.

Meditation is a powerful way to bring your mind under your control. In the last post we discussed how there are two main types of meditation – “focused attention”, where you narrow your field of focus to one object or sensation, and “diffused attention”, where you remain passively aware of sensations as they arise.

Focused attention types of meditation have obvious benefits – by being able to strengthen the mind so that you remain aware of one thing to the exclusion of others, you’re able to redirect the mind from negative thoughts and emotions and towards positive ones.

But what about the benefits of diffused attention types of meditation?

Awareness and Phenomena

When it comes down to it, there are two things that make up the experience of your life – your awareness and everything else.

Your awareness is simply that part of you that is conscious, that is aware of what is going on. It has no emotions, has no will of it’s own, it is simply, passively aware. It’s sometimes called “The Knower”.

Everything else, everything that awareness can be aware of, falls into the category of “phenomena”. This is a key point – if you can be aware of it, you can create some “space” so to speak, and step back from it. You can step back from grief, from anger, from boredom, from pain or any other negative emotion or sensation, which greatly reduces it’s influence over you.

The more you are able to operate from that part of you that is pure awareness, the more you are able to find peace. Put another way, the more you practice meditation techniques, which train your awareness and allow you to see things as they really are, the less you’ll be at the mercy of negative emotions.

Watch just the first two minutes of this video for an explanation from none other than Jim Carrey.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI1KKveHFGA

Very closely tied to your awareness is your ego – your will (that which decides what to do), your wants, your desires, your fears. These are so close to your awareness that they can be difficult to see clearly at first – where as something such as the sensation in your foot or even a thought crossing the mind can be easily “seen” by awareness, it’s a bit more difficult to “see” that part of your mind that identifies as “you”.

The next layer of the mind has all your memories, your visualizations, your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, all these things that the mind registers and that is somewhat easy to see as distinct and separate from awareness.

Still further from awareness is the sensations of your body, the sensations coming from all 5 of your senses, and further still is the “exterior world”, which you only interact with through the 5 senses.

All of these come together to form the almost seamless experience of “you” and “your life”. But when it really comes down to it, there’s just awareness, and everything else.

When it comes to meditation, it’s good to be able to split these things up, and it offers a useful paradigm through which you can understand the mind and your experience in the world. Suddenly things aren’t so solid, things aren’t so stiff and inflexible. “You” aren’t angry, there’s just awareness of this certain set of sensations that’s called “anger”. “You” don’t want 3 bowls of ice cream, there’s just awareness of this set of sensations that we call “desire”.

The more you’re able to identify with pure awareness, the less power emotions, desires and fears have over you. This doesn’t mean you’ll become an emotionless robot, it just means that when negative emotions hit with full force, you’re able to take a step back, analyze them and tone the volume down quite a bit. You’re able to view a negative emotion as just one more temporary sensation. Once the emotion is defined, described, measured and observed, it loses almost all of its power over us.

Mindfulness Meditation

To be mindful of something is simply to be aware of it. When practicing mindfulness meditation, the mind remains actively aware of the phenomena in the present moment. You can choose to be aware of your entire field of sensations, including those coming from the 5 senses and those coming from within the body and mind, or you can limit your field of awareness, say to the sensations of walking or the sensations from eating food.

Yup, this can be your meditation practice

Basic Mindfulness Meditation – In it’s most basic form, mindfulness meditation involves simply bringing the mind into present moment awareness. Instead of allowing your mind to wander willy nilly, just gently bring it back to the sensations of the present moment. It can be summed up as “Be Here Now”. If the mind starts thinking about something that happened yesterday, you bring it back to the here and now. If you start wondering what you’ll do tomorrow, you bring the mind back to being aware of the present moment. The mind can switch between being aware of the sensations in the body and being aware of the external world, or even a combination of the two, as long as the mind isn’t daydreaming unchecked.

This has the dual effect of not only strengthening concentration as a “focused attention” type of meditation would, but also allows you to more clearly come to understand your mind and with it, your emotions, desires, fears, etc.

Play around with the following types of meditation and see which kinds you like best.

A nice mindfulness-based practice is called body-sweeping – you slowly sweep your attention from the bottoms of your feet to the top of your head, noticing all the sensations along the way. You may notice that your feet are sore from standing, that there’s tightness in your lower back, that you can actually feel some of what’s going on in the digestive system. You’ll notice your heart pumping, your lungs breathing and you may even feel your pulse in multiple parts of your body. Start from the feet, slowly work your way up to the top of the head, and then back down again, completing as many rounds as time allows.

Conversely, you can sit and just watch as thoughts pop up in your head. Simply remain passively aware of your thoughts and pay special attention to how they show up unannounced, stay briefly and then disappear. Watch as this process happens again and again and again, but don’t interfere with your thoughts. Don’t try to block them, suppress them or encourage them – simply remain aloof and aware. The thought “I wonder what’s for dinner tonight?” pops into your head. Simply watch this process begin, last briefly and end, without continuing to think about dinner.

Mindfulness of Emotions –

By being mindful of things as they are happening, we’re able to notice negative emotions brewing and nip them in the bud, as well as to be aware of our behavior and adjust accordingly.

Further, if we can take a step back and begin to catalogue our emotions, this can lead to some powerful insights. The best way to do this is to describe emotions in as much detail as possible when they arise.

By being mindful, you’re able to notice when any sort of emotion arises. When it does, take a second to really get to know it and map it out.
Let’s say you feel anger. What exactly does anger feel like? Where do you feel it in your body? Is there a sudden tightness in your chest? Are your hands clenching? Has your stomach tightened? Take a minute to notice where anger seems to reside in the body.
How does anger feel mentally? Is your mind suddenly reeling? Has your mind become a bit heavy, or has it become more active? Does the mind feel “hot”?
How has it changed the content of your thoughts, the words and pictures in your mind?
What does the actual emotion of anger feel like? You’ve felt it physically, you’ve noticed it mentally, now try to describe it emotionally. This might be hard to describe verbally, but it’s important to recognize the feeling of anger.
Finally, try to zoom in and dive deep into this emotion. Just become as aware of it in it’s entirety as you possibly can. Recognize it as a certain type of energy within the body and become as aware of it as possible.
Once you’ve looked at it from all these points of view, you’ll realize it doesn’t have as much power over you anymore, and the more you do this, the less power negative emotions will have. It’s suddenly just a well-defined, limited collection of sensations, and further, you’re able to see that it isn’t you, and that it doesn’t last. You’re the calm awareness at the center of the storm, which remains unchanged as different emotions come and go. Remember that.

BONUS TIP – Go do some Shinrin-Yoku, the Japanese word for “forest-bathing”, while practicing mindfulness of just sights, sounds and smells.

“Every study so far conducted has demonstrated reductions in stress, anger, anxiety, depression and sleeplessness amongst the subjects who have participated. In Japan there are now 44 accredited Shinrin Yoku forests.”

Simply go take a walk in a forested area, while being mindful of the sights, sounds and smells of the forest. When the mind wanders, bring it back to present moment awareness of the experience of being in the forest, out in nature.

There are plenty more types of meditations out there, the benefits of which I’ve just barely begun to dive into. Interested in how to use meditation to overcome specific problems in your life? Contact me.

The Mind and Why Meditation May be the Ultimate Hack

The mind is a fickle, ephemeral beast – one minute you sit down to plan out your day, and the next you’re wondering what the hell is wrong with Lady Gaga.

See? That was the first thing my mind thought of.

While we could go down an endlessly fascinating (to me at least) discussion about what the mind is, and whether the mind is “you” or just a part of “you”, we won’t. Rather, let’s look at practical ways to utilize the mind as the powerful tool that it is.

The Problem

Many people are under the false illusion that they are in control of their minds, and by extent, are in control of “themselves”. We are in control of ourselves, but only to an extent. Sure, you can plan in advance what you’re going to wear to a party on Friday night, but how in control are you of your reactions to your angry boss? How in control are you of your fears? When you lose a loved one, how in control of your emotions are you?

All one has to do is sit down to meditate for the first time to become painfully aware of our utter lack of control over our mind. You sit down and say to yourself, “I will focus my attention on the breath.” You do and succeed for the first four seconds, at which the point your mind starts thinking about that party on Friday night, which leads to the conversation you had with your best friend about the party, at which point you start wondering why your friend has seemed a little distant lately. 4 minutes later you realize you’re not focusing on the breath and try once more to focus on it, only to again get whisked away into pointless thought.

At this point, that old adage about a “monkey mind” starts to make a little more sense, only it’s more like a monkey drunk on Jägerbombs in a toy store.

Don't try to play cute, I'm on to you — Don’t try to play cute, I’m on to you mister

Try it! Right now, set a timer for five minutes and see how long you can sustain full attention on just your breath. See how many full in breaths and full out breaths you can last until your mind distracts you with anything but the breath.

And here in lies the problem – our mind, which is our direct interface with ourselves, our emotions, our thoughts and the exterior environment, is largely out of our control.

This leads to three main issues :

You can’t stay focused – you can’t give full attention and energy to tasks, problems, and activities that you find important, because your mind is always bringing up other issues, often pointless and painful issues. This leads to a decrease in performance and general lack of ability to get things done.
The mind ruminates on useless/painful subjects – If you were in complete control of your mind, you wouldn’t be stuck in a mire of painful emotions and thoughts about why you got dumped, or about your dog dying, or why you got fired. Feeling these painful emotions is a necessary part of life, sure, but endless ruminating on them day in and day out is pitiful.
The mind won’t do what you want it to – Be it focusing, ending painful ruminations, solving problems or just trying to stay positive, the mind almost seems to have a mind of its own.

The Fix

Luckily, we have an easy answer to the problems of our Jägerbomb-fueled monkey mind – meditation. Meditation is one of those topics that used to be considered New Agey, “woo-woo” or, at best, fit into the category of pseudo-science.

Not anymore. Meditation has been thoroughly proven to be beneficial, not just for the mind and mental issues, but for everything from boosting the immune system, lengthening life, lowering the perception of pain, boosting brain density and cortical matter, to lowering stress and promoting neuroprotection.

Further there are an enormous variety of meditational styles and techniques to choose from, so finding one to your liking shouldn’t be too hard.

Two Types of Meditation, and How They Improve Your Life

Generally speaking, there are two basic types of meditation. One where your mind focuses on one specific stimuli to the exclusion of all others, and one where your mind remains open and passive yet alert, being aware of sensations just as they are and as they occur. To avoid dogma and any religious connotations, we’ll call these two types “focused attention” and “diffused attention”, respectively.

Most all types of meditation fit loosely into these two categories, though there are also meditations that are more like “thought experiments”, where you pick one topic and analyze certain aspects of it. A good example of this third type would be meditation on death – you’d analyze how everything born eventually dies, how there’s no stopping death, and how you should use this knowledge to motivate yourself to get as much done in this short time you have as possible.

Focused Attention Meditation

This is a pretty straight-forward concept. You pick a sensation, object or mental image, and try to focus your attention on it to the exclusion of all others. It could be a candle flame, a cross, the sensation of the breath, energy points or chakras, a short prayer, a mantra, a deity or image of a holy person, or even an abstract concept.

This has a few main benefits as it relates to your mind.

First, because you’re focusing your attention on just one thing to the exclusion of all others, you’re training your mind to do what you want it to do, to ignore distraction. This has a multitude of benefits – less distraction in your life, more control over your mind, the ability to move your attention away from the unpleasant (whether its negative emotions, negative thought loops or painful physical sensations) and onto the task at hand.

This means that as you gain proficiency in focused attention types of meditation, you gain the ability to consciously choose to remove awareness from negative or distracting stimuli, and instead place it where you want it to be – this has massive implications for students, people in high-pressure jobs, athletes, those with depression or anxiety, those in pain, and the population in general.

Further, this type of meditation is extremely calming. In fact, in Buddhism this type of meditation is called shamatha, which directly translates as “calm abiding”.

The process of Shamatha within Buddhism - note the gradual taming of the monkey and the elephant — The process of Shamatha within Buddhism – note the gradual taming of the monkey and the elephant – at first the black monkey and elephant run away, unruly and untamed. At the end the purified elephant, once the source of much frustration, becomes the vehicle on a flaming rainbow highway to the heavens…

As this study states –

The results of Study 1 show that both focused (Shamatha) and distributed (Vipassana) attention meditations of the Theravada tradition produced enhanced parasympathetic activation indicative of a relaxation response.

The study Self-reported Mindfulness and Cortisol During a Shamatha Meditation Retreat (Jacobs, 2013) reports that

Larger increases in mindfulness were associated with decreases in p.m. cortisol

Remember, cortisol is our primary stress hormone, too much of which leads to irritability, feelings of stress and weight gain. Don’t forget that these benefits are in addition to those listed above – increased grey matter, improved immunity and a lengthening of life due to increased health at the genetic level.

How to perform a “focused attention” type of meditation

Pick any object that resonates with you, either internal or external – it could be an external image of a cross, the word “love” or “God”, any mantra from yoga, anything that has appeal to you. The more appealing, the better. A candle flame in a dim or dark room is a good choice as most people hold a natural fascination with flames. I’ll be using the sensation of the breath at the tip of the nose as an example, as we’re always breathing and thus can do this meditation anywhere.
Set a timer for 10 minutes (as time goes on, gradually increase to at least 20 minutes a day)
Sit in a comfortable position and gently instruct your mind to remain aware of the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nostrils, and tell the mind that it can go about it’s normal ruminations after the session is over.
Then shift your attention to the sensation and feeling of the breath flowing past the nostrils.
Because this is a relatively “light” sensation, it will help in the beginning to either count or pair a word with the in and out breath. Breathe in, noticing the sensation of the breath, breathe out, noticing how that feels slightly different, and mentally say “One”. Repeat up to Four, and then start the cycle over again. Conversely, you can say “In” while you’re breathing in, and “Out” as you breathe out. You can use the mantra “Buddho” (pronounced boo-doh), breathing in with a “Bud” and out with a “Dho”, or, if you’re Christian, you could use Yahweh, in with “Yah” and out with “Weh”.
Your mind WILL become distracted. This is absolutely normal and should not be a source of frustration. Try to notice when the mind slips from it’s object, then gently and non-judgementally return the awareness back to the object of meditation. This will happen again and again and again, and at this beginning stage of meditation the entire name of the game is noticing this happening and returning the awareness back to the object of meditation.
When the timer goes off, sit for a minute or so and relax your mind. Allow it to naturally do whatever it wants. After a minute, get up and reward yourself with a piece of dark chocolate or something similar, and then go about your business.

Cliff notes – 1. Sit. 2. Instruct the mind to gently remain with the object of meditation. 3. Focus on the object of meditation, gently returning the awareness to the object when the mind wanders. 4. Sit for a moment after meditation, relaxing the mind, and then reward yourself with a small treat.

If you get a headache, feel tense or feel frustrated during or after meditation, you’re trying too hard. If, when the timer goes off, you realize you just spent the whole session lost in thought, you’re not trying hard enough. The classic analogy for this sort of problem is how you would string a guitar or other stringed instrument – too tightly and the strings will break. Too loose, and the instrument will be out of tune. You’ve got to find the right balance between sustained effort and relaxed, calm awareness.

Think of returning the mind to the object of meditation as completing reps in a workout. As you continue to bring the mind back to the object, your mind will get “stronger”. As you increase the amount of time you’re able to stay with the object of meditation, it’s like you’re increasing the weight that you’re lifting. In this way, your mind gets stronger and stronger, until you’re able to focus on what needs to be focused on and riding white elephants on rainbows just like in the image above.

Stay tuned for the second part of this post, where I detail how to use “diffused attention” meditations and how they can help you overcome the main sources of frustration and pain in your life.