Category Archives: meditation

Everything Flows, And Nothing Stays

We are all in a constant process of change. How you choose to adapt and evolve is largely down to you as an individual.

Your thoughts and feelings are probably very different to those of 20 years ago. Or 10 years ago. Or one year ago. And even less.

In the time that you click onto this page and read up to this point, your brain has inputted, stored and refreshed this information and it will keep happening every 15 seconds of your life. This continuity field allows the brain to call upon past experiences, snapshots and perceptions and use it in present situations. And because the brain is constantly collecting this information and storing it, we adapt our beliefs, thoughts and feelings along with it.

Once we know and understand this, the quote by Soren Kierkegaard starts to make sense…

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

The brain is constantly traveling back in time to recall each moment that is relevant for the present experience of the individual. Collecting stored data to form appropriate actions. This is how we are able to scan words when we read.

But, despite these most amazing things happening to our brains, we are the director of change and evolution. This is how habits can be broken and how past experiences can be used for strength, positivity and future happiness.

Heraclitus said…

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

What did he mean? My interpretation of this is that once you step into a river the water is displaced with new water and the nature of the river is changed permanently. You are also changing.

Just because you have experienced a moment in your life does not mean that you must replay it. It just needs a little rethink, or in the case of your brain, a rewire. We can train our brain to do as we want. We can change what we don’t like, but your brain needs new material to process.

Neuroplasticity is the term used to describe the brain’s ability to adapt to different circumstances throughout your life. Affirmations, which is a technique to instill a positive mindset through repeated words and sentences, is the most popular way of achieving this brain rewire.

Affirmations are often short sentences that can be easily remembered and stored in your brain. And as we have discovered, once your brain has inputted this into its system, it will roll it out when needed.

Governments and ad companies use them too! So it’s not some hocus pocus stuff that some people want to believe.

I’m lovin’ it. Just do it. Get Brexit done. Build a wall. These are just a few examples of successful catchy earworms that are/were repeated to us constantly but there are actually thousands and thousands of other examples of clever affirmations that are instilled into our brain in order for us to act how that particular campaign wants us to act. Well, the good news is that it is actually YOU in control as long as you can counter the influences from around us.

You just need to keep telling yourself and reminding yourself of your aspirations, needs and life goals. If a burger company can make us keep going back to eat burgers with the same texture of cardboard and a government can instruct a whole nation to strip themselves of their rights and leave the EU whilst they titter all the way to their offshore accounts, then I’m sure that we can all manipulate our brains with our own affirmations. Positive affirmations.

When you stand in the river, it changes. Make sure that you change what you want to change too by giving your brain positive things to process. Because when it comes to it, your brain will be using this information to enable you to make those changes.

Continue to remind yourself who and what gets you out of bed each morning. Keep telling yourself how well you could do the new job that you have applied for and repeatedly remind yourself of your health and fitness goals. Write stuff down. Put it on a white board or on the fridge door. Keep your favourite affirmation as a screen saver. Anything at all to allow your brain to compute those words and keep them.

Everything keeps changing. You don’t have to be the one thing that doesn’t.

Komorebi

The next time you get a moment (and you should make sure that you do) just close your eyes and visualise yourself in an environment that you consider the most calming, tranquil place in the universe.

It could be standing by the sea or on a mountain top. You could imagine yourself sitting on a cloud or even a star. You could be in a safe place with a loved one. Anywhere at all.

And then breathe these images from your mind deeply into your lungs. Let them fill your body right down to your toes.

This is a form of meditation. So many people tell me that they can’t meditate or don’t know how to. Perhaps for some they might feel a bit silly. They think of sitting cross legged, humming, chanting and emptying your mind or turning off your senses. And yet it doesn’t have to be that at all. It’s just about taking a moment.

My favourite images when I close my eyes are of the sun’s rays shining through the branches of a tree. The rays gently dance around as the dappled light warms my thoughts.

The scientific term for this light is called Crepuscular rays and the Japanese call it Komorebi, which is made up of the Kanji characters for tree, shine through and sun.

I like the Japanese description, but many great poets have attempted to describe this beautiful pure and spontaneous natural pleasure. Gerard Manley Hopkins called it Shivelight and wrote about…”the lances of sunlight that pierce the canopy of a wood.”

CS Lewis wrote…”Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy.”

I agree.

And as wonderful as it is to see this in real life, it also exists in my head. Just by closing my eyes and taking a step back from the 100 miles an hour daily life, I can be anywhere and see anything that I like.

Now take a moment. Close your eyes. Breath. And discover what you can find.

A New Project

Perhaps there is a shift happening in the UK regarding attitudes towards mental health, mindfulness and our well being. Only today I heard a report saying that more employers are offering their staff the opportunity to participate in yoga sessions during working hours. It is found that destressing in this way can make for better production of the work force.

Those opposing such a scheme say that it is time and money consuming and it is pandering to the ‘woke briggade’ (whatever that is).

Yet we were all fine with cigarette breaks and, in fact, these breaks were often seen as our right to a quick ciggy if we were stressed. People also commented on how productive a group of colleagues were during their cig breaks and how they would bond. Funny, cig breaks that I remember would be a time for people to slag somebody off behind their back.

It is hard to criticize yoga. I practice it a bit at home with the kids but, I must admit, I’m no expert. Meditation, however, is a passion. And this should also be something considered in the workplace.

How can working on our breathing to calming music be a detriment to an employee? How can focussing on positive thoughts and visualising happy outcomes not help an employee in their work life, thus making them a very productive team member?

Depending on where you are reading this, there will be something unsettling going on in your town, city or country. Whether it be war, political divide, Covid or, as it is currently in the UK, a real concern about the cost of living and energy bills. Perhaps since most of us were restricted in who we could see and limited in how long we could be out of our homes for during the pandemic, we have become a little bit more angry or disillusioned at life. The figures suggest that we are. Depression is at an all time high in the UK. For one reason or another, we are just not coping. And if the adults aren’t, I can bet the children aren’t either.

And this is where my wife and I felt that we could help. It’s a small way but we aim to make this work and hopefully grow when we receive our feedback. Our new project will be to provide schools with mindfulness and meditation sessions to their children. Indeed, schools are already finding that children’s mental well-being is becoming a priority. As I mentioned in my example of an adult’s productivity, a child too can thrive in their development if they are shown how to be more mindful.

I’ve been preoccupied recently, which in part is the reason for me writing less blogs. My wife and I have been arranging meetings, developing session plans and meditation scripts. Along with our regular work, it has become quite a commitment. But one worth making.

Soon we will be conducting two focus groups so that we can test our work so far with a view to begin in our first school in January. We want to be in every school in Scarborough within two years.

School and education is important, just like the workplace and production. But if we don’t respond to our future worker’s needs now then how productive will our society be?

Meditation Script For Children

Our two boys, aged 6 and 8, like so many other children will have been affected in some way or another by the impact of the past few years.

As much as we try to limit what the news channels and breaking news stories tell us in front of our children, they catch on very quickly to what is going on around them in their world.

Children should know what’s happening, of course, but perhaps it is best for my wife and I to discuss events with them rather than the more detailed accounts of the headline news.

Our eldest, Jonas, particularly gets anxious about world events. We have found, just like for many adults, that meditation works for him. For the past week he has specifically asked for a meditation before going to sleep.

Here’s an example of a ten minute meditation for children…

Get comfortable, settle and relax your mind. When you are ready you can close your eyes.

Pause

Now notice your breathing. Breathe in deeply….and slowly release your breath. Again, breathe in deeply…and release. Notice your tummy rise as you breathe in and your tummy go down as you exhale.

Pause

Now imagine your most favourite place. This could be somewhere that you know well, or somewhere that you have visited, or it could be somewhere that you haven’t yet been to. This is your special place. It keeps you warm, relaxed, happy and at peace. Take a moment to see, smell and listen to your surroundings. Think about all that is around you.

Pause

Now you see a comforting bright light shining from above. You walk towards it knowing it’s positivity that it brings. You step into the light. The strength, calmness, joy and peace shine into your body and into your heart. Everything that the light has to offer is now a part of you. Notice how good this feels as the light continues to share its love.

Pause

Soon you will have to leave this special place, but you are comforted in knowing that you take its special powers with you. You will keep this all through the night and into tomorrow. You are safe.

Pause

Now I will count down from 5 to 1 and you will be ready to have a very peaceful sleep.

5

4 feeling sleepy

3

2 settled and sleepy

1

Why I Had To Become A Meditation Tutor

Maybe I was meditating as a kid when I didn’t even realise what it was. Did you ever get a telling off from your teacher for gazing out of the class window instead of paying attention to the lesson? Perhaps, in some way, me drifting away from the noise and busyness of the class room during mathematics to focus on cloud formations was my first experience with meditation.

To meditate, you don’t need to sit a certain way or to think about anything in particular. You don’t need to be spiritual and you don’t need to repeat ‘ommm’ if you don’t want to. Adults tell children to stop day dreaming, but maybe that is just their brains trying to get a time out. I think we all need to day dream a little bit.

My practical exam was to guide my wife’s meditation

My first official experience with meditation was about 7 years ago. My wife had postnatal depression after giving birth to our second child and her doctor prescribed medication. But this wasn’t a route that she wanted to take. There must be an alternative to tablets.

We got in touch with a local meditation tutor who did guides on a 1-1 basis. My wife started to attend the meditation guides for one hour a week. She also began practicing on her own and this is when I would join her. This later led me to attending guided meditation too. I was hooked.

The misconception of meditation is that it is an opportunity to clear your head. Yet it is quite the opposite. You fill it will good stuff. Positive thoughts, visualization of a particular journey or of your dreams, ambitions and goals. It is true it is a chance to declutter your head, but it will be replaced with something much more worthy of your thoughts.

As I gazed out of the class room window looking at the clouds as a kid, I was creating shapes with these clouds of me scoring a goal or getting a hug from my mum. Wouldn’t anybody, at any age, want to have a moment of a much more innocent time? That didn’t seem like a waste of time to me then and it doesn’t seem like a waste of time to me now.

We all have goals that we want to achieve in life, but to get through the difficult moments or the sticky patches how are we to actually get them? Do we ever stop to think about a pathway to achieving them? As I say, that’s not to say that you have to sit and chant or be a Buddhist to do it. Having 10 minutes to focus on your breathing and taking charge of your energy each day should be a minimum requirement in achieving your goals.

If I am to assist my Personal Training clients in getting their goals then a part of that process must be for me to enable them to accept themselves as who they currently are. There are lots of ways to do this but by far the easiest way to self discovery is through meditation. That is why I felt so strongly about becoming a meditation tutor. How can we tell the body what to do if our minds are constantly on high alert?

So maybe you should be gazing into space sometimes and having a little daydream. Put the breaks on. Take a few deep breaths. Ground yourself. That maths equation will still be there when you have finished but it might be a bit easier to solve.