Mastering Emotions with Meditation

I don’t know about you, but the ability to stay calm, cool and collected at work (amongst other places) is quite high on my list of things to perfect. It is even more frustrating to be stuck on this and know that who I am is something that can change – my diving taught that irrevocably. Who I was when I started diving and who I am now are so different I can hardly recognise myself in the girl who was soo scared of the world she took three years to even join the underwater club to learn diving.
If you have tried to change your reactions you will know how hard it is. I guess 30 or so years of unconscious practice can be blamed for that, which begs the question, how do you change your wiring ? Because if you take a stroll down the EQ shelves you will quickly discover that your emotions are chemical reactions and that these are patterned into our brains -the pattern being reinforced every time we experience the trigger and reaction. This in effect means that you can re-pattern you brain and so your reactions, the question is how ?

 

Meditation seems to be a valid answer and one that even the guru of EQ, Daniel Goleman has explored. Here are some interesting facts and conclusions that I took from his book, The Meditative Mind.

 

The Basic Premise

•  One’s thoughts create one’s emotions. To change the way you react you need to be able to manage the unconscious thoughts that then create the emotional hijack that then ruins your day.
• Meditation works directly with your thoughts and the pattern of your thoughts by retraining your attention, which in turn gives you the mental space to make another choice and practice something else.
• Meditation fosters concentration. This means instead of the normal random and scattered thought stream you actively work on focusing your thoughts by fixing your mind on a single object (the meditation topic) or by practicing detachment from thoughts (mindfulness meditation).
• Meditation is different from other ways of relaxing because it trains and improves you capacity to pay attention (as opposed to letting the mind wander as it will).
• The effects of meditation last beyond the meditation session, making it a highly efficacious method for improving your mental health

 

Medical Reasons Why you Should Meditate

 

1) Reduce anxiety and stress

Meditation has been shown to reduce the effects of anxiety and stress (and who doesn’t need that). When you suffer from high anxiety your body fails to stop reacting when the problem is over. This means that you react to ‘normal’ events as if they were crisis.

   Each minor happening increases your tension which in turn magnifies the next ordinary event (a deadline, an interview, a doctor’s appointment), into a threat. Because the anxious person’s body stays permanently mobilized it has a lower threat threshold for the next event.

 

2) Change the Bodies Physiology

Meditation is also beneficial for heart disease and diabetes, lower cholesterol as well as having a positive effect on asthma sufferers.

 

3) Improve EQ & Communication

Meditation improves empathy, communication skills, listening and social awareness. This improvement is based in the improvement in attention which means that you are better ability to pick up on subtle perceptual cues in the environment and to pay attention to what is going.

 

A supporting experiment

Two groups of volunteers came into Goleman’s physiology lab. One group comprised meditation teachers who had been meditating for at least 2 years. The other group who were interested in meditation, but how had never practiced it.

   The volunteers were then split into two groups, one of which was told to relax for 20 minutes, the other to meditate for 20 min. When a non- meditator was in the ‘meditate’ group, they were given instruction on how.

   Ater twenty minutes both groups were shown a short film depicting a series of bloody accidents among workers in a woodworking shop - a standard way of inducing stress for lab studies.

   The study found that the meditators (whether or not they were new or experienced) had a unique pattern of reaction to the film. As they watched the film, their systems prepared for the accidents they were about to witness and then, as soon as the accident was over, they recovered more quickly than those of non-meditators. After the film, they were also more relaxed than the non-meditators who still showed signs of tension.

   From this (and other experiments) it can be concluded that meditators handle stress in a way that breaks the threat-arousal-threat spiral.

 

How to Meditate

There are numerous ways to meditate, but they can be broken into two primary themes – you are either focusing on something or you are being mindful.

 

1) Using Focus to meditate

By focusing on a specific object and practicing holding your attention there, returning to that object when focus is lost the meditator makes the habit of repetition stronger than the his other mental habits. This enables him to then use this ability to focus on a specific thing to focus and practice behavior that he chooses and that will support his goals in an interaction.

  

The focus can be :

• The breath
• A chant which can be the repetition of a name. mantra or phrase, spoken. It can be silent verbalisation or mental or out-loud.
• An object, picture or specific point in space

2) Mindfulness meditation.

 

In this meditation practice the meditator is not focusing on something, instead he practices adopting a neutral stance toward whatever comes and goes in his stream of awareness, placing an equal value on whatever arises. He is in effect practicing being an observer rather than being ‘in the action’. The meditator’s reaction is simply to register whatever he observes. If any further comment, judgment or reflection arises in the meditators mind, these are themselves made the focus of ‘bare attention. They are neither repudiated nor pursued, but simply dismissed after being noted.

 

Practically Applying Meditation

There are two parts to a meditation practice, the first is to introduce it regularly into your day (even if it is for only 15 minutes). The second is to practice using meditation to detach yourself you’re your normal reactions in difficult situations. I have found that a simple mantra (I am calm) works really well at work. When I feel myself starting to react I immediately repeat that to myself, remembering what calm feels like and returning to that state. If that does not work I revert to the traditional meditation of noticing the breath. Does it work, yes, if I remember! So I often start my mantra as I walk in, rather than hoping I remember in the heat of the moment.

   Suprisingly, I actually used meditation to overcome my intense fear when diving! Not that I called it meditation. I found that by repeating over and over the Buddhist mantra Ohm Mane Padme Hung, before and during my dive I was able to distract my brain and stay outside of the panic and fear it was experiencing and so get on with the job of diving.

 

Meditation is not a quick fix, but it is a scientifically proven mechanism that changes the way your brain fires and that affects your emotional response habits. All it takes is 15 minutes a day!

Life Lessons from a Record - Turning Hope into Reality

We fall in love with hope, hope that promises us that there is a way out of our lives. There is! But it is not easy or something that can be given to you. It takes courage - the courage to start asking yourself hard questions.

• Who am I being ?
• What am I creating ?
• What am I afraid of ?
• How would I like it to be ?
• What do I need to start thinking, saying and doing to start creating THAT INSTEAD!

How many of you are prepared to start finding those answer ?
Yes it is easier to sit and wait for someone else to notice you and create it for you...but having done that for years diving I know from some very bitter experience that the only way to make your life happen is to be your own master!
ONLY YOU CAN MAKE YOUR LIFE HAPPEN! And if you are not taking ownership of it, you are relying on blind luck and the good will of others to create it for you.
That is the lesson behind any accomplishment!
That is the lesson behind my world record!
When will you start ?

When is Enough, Enough ?

We all have a sentence that drives us, for some it is, ‘I am not enough!’ I know it is one of mine, a fear that sits there, eating away inside me. What if everyone finds out ? I could not bear the humiliation, the laughter and of course, the rejection. For a while I spent hours trying to find out where and how I started to believe this. Focusing on why, trying to find someone to blame let me off the hook. I didn’t have to dive into that blackhole and see if it was true. Then one day I just stopped and instead asked myself a different question. I replaced why with when, when will I be enough ? After four decades of trying and improving and giving and sacrificing, when would I be enough ? When would it let go of me ? When could I finally stop, breathe and rest ?

When I got a world record, then I would be enough ? Wait, I have one of those!

When I got married, the I would be enough ? Yes, have that checkboxed checked as well.

When I finally made it in the business world, then I would be enough ?

Or maybe if I climbed Everest, deepest and highest, then I would be enough ?

Or maybe…. Maybe  if I went deeper, maybe the problem was that I had not gone deep enough, I was only the deepest woman, not the deepest ever, the men were 100 meters below me, then I would be enough ?

What will it take for you to stop and rethink how you are living your life and what is driving you ? When will you be enough ?

Making it Hapen - An alternative take on an old recipe for Dream Making

How do you fundamentally change your life ? How do you find a new job or even a new relationship ? What is it you should be doing ? What is it you should not ? If anything is the Holy Grail in life it would be the ability to manifest what you want. Avid readers will have their well thumbed copy of “The Secret” and know all about using vision to create the future, the problem comes in the practice. Somehow, our interpretation and who we are gets in the way and instead of creating something new and exciting what we create is an obsession revolving around the absence of our hearts desire. We have not learnt to let go and let God. We have not learnt to step through our fear, into our souls and so into limitless being. I managed it once, in diving and have been chasing it ever since. Here are some things I have learnt along the way.

It is an uncomfortable feeling to let go and let God. It is even more uncomfortable if you don’t have a relationship with God and can not even acknowledge that word (been there, done that). But whether you call that ultimate force God or the divine or the universe, the ability to let go and trust in something that is outside of yourself is, whether you like it or not, part of the process. We have been taught to put our destiny in our own hands and we have been taught that to do that we need to be doing to be always doing and moving and controlling. Trusting that the universe will present opportunities is not something we have learnt, besides, God helps those who help themselves, which is something the sceptics will be quick to point out.

So what do you do when you have a clear vision of what you want, but it does not seem to be getting closer ? The first thing is challenge that vision.

1) How open is your vision ? If you are looking for a new job, have you decided that the only success scenario is this specific job in this specific company ?

2) What are you focusing on now ? Are you obsessing about doing ? Are you worried about what will happen if things don’t go according to your exact plan ?

Most of us create tightly focused visions with one and only one success scenario and most of us stress ourselves stukkend (for non- South African readers, stress ourselves silly) by focusing on the complete absence of our goal while throwing ourselves into a frenzy of activity. In my experience this predisposes you to failure not to mention the fact that other opportunities float straight by as you single mindedly pursue the one and only one answer.

The trick is in changing the recipe, without changing a thing!

Step 1 : Create a vision, but instead of focusing on exactly what you physical want (this job, in this company, a man who looks like this and works here and drives that), focus on how your new job (or relationship) will make you feel. This allows the universe to present you with things you have not even thought and that are often not even close to what you would have chased.

Step 2 : Bring the Future into the Present. This is probably the hardest part, allowing the universe to create your vision by refusing to focus on the absence of your hearts desire! Simply stop stressing about it! Simpler to say than do, but also a strong choice you need to make for a number of practically reasons outside of manifestation. If you are obsessed about the outcome and desperate then the chances are the way you are engaging with people is not going to be conducive to a successful outcome. Most of us have been in the situation where, when we are looking for a job we just can’t find one and then when we have one, we ace the interviews and get job offers we don’t need (or finally get into a good relationship and find ourselves surrounded by nice, available, interested men when a few weeks back you could not even find one). Consciously spend time just imagining how you will feel when your dream comes true and carry those feelings through into your day, actively and consciously replacing all thoughts that revolve around “what if it all does not pan out”. So what if it doesn’t ! By just doing this one step you will have had fun trying and probably found out a whole lot more about what it is you really want.

Step 3 : When you have done everything, do the one thing you have been avoiding. Yes, you did not want to hear it but you are going to have to actively step out of your comfort zone. When I look back on how I managed to get an impossible world record this is the step that always jumps out for me. I never knew about either of the previous steps, so did it the hard way and trust me when I tell you, it was the hard way. When we are trying to create impossible dreams we tend to do so without wanting it to be hard or uncomfortable - which means what we do is normally within our confident zone. And that is the problem.

Who you are and what is comfortable for you created where you are now. If you want to create a new experience with new possibilities you are going to need new behaviour and that is not going to be comfortable. You are going to need new behaviour, behaviour that is natural your dream. Think about it, if I were born a natural world record holder I would not have ended up stuck for almost 5 years trying to get there. I would have had a more Nuno Gomes experience (the world’s deepest man and scuba diving colleague) just got on with it. Instead, I got very, very stuck trying to hold onto me (think victim, insecure, afraid) but at the same time doing something that naturally required me to be brave, self confident and thick skinned.

You have to do the things that feel awkward, the things that are ‘not you’!! Yes, I use the words ‘have to’ with intent, because of all the steps, the ability to act outside of your comfort zone and do the one thing you are hoping NOT to have to do, is probably going to be the only thing that gets you toward your goal. Mine was letting go of waiting for Nuno to give me the answers and help me get my world record and instead stand alone, all self conscious and do it myself, without proof or permission. I spent two years avoiding that, hoping, no wishing that something would happen and my path to my dream would not be so hard. Guess what, the path to your dream sometimes is hard! And the way I did it was born out of sheer desperation, I discovered Step 1, I started to behave as a world record holder would even though I did not have a record yet.
If you think that you have done everything ask youreself this, If I stop now, will I regret not trying harder ? If the answer is a niggling yes, then there is something you are avoiding and you will avoid it until you no longer have any other option but give up or step through your fear. (by the way, that is the hard way)
Step 4 : Practice relaxing! We are borne to micro manage, thinking somehow that if we stop stressing and obsessing, our dream will never arrive. Which means we try and force it, making it fit it into our schedules and time lines. Well, how is that working for you ? What about practicing relaxing, letting go and letting God. No, that does not mean wishing and not doing. You can’t sit on your couch and expect the universe to dump your dream into your lap. You have to keep doing and trying new options, but in doing so, let go of the outcome, relax. Remember step 2 and practice bringing the future into the present. You can’t make people support you ….all you can do is give as many people as possible the opportunity to do so and keep doing that until you arrive where you want to be. Don’t get stuck trying to convince people - move on! Keep searching for people who want to make your dream happen. They are there, waiting to be found all you have to do is stop trying to drag those who don’t want it along with you.

No-one said being a dream maker would be easy, but the moment you let go of the fact that who you are is set in stone and instead accept that you have a choice and that you can change how you behave and align that to what you really want, is the moment you start to live limitless being.

It is a process, a journey of discovery, so DON’T THROW IN THE TOWEL TOO EARLY!!! Get creative when the easy options fail, experiment with new ways of getting there and being outside of your comfort zone, practice until you get it right and above all, be kind to yourself! No-one every gets ‘there’ without some detours and mishaps – they are all part of the process.

How to Get What You Want! By Giving!

How to Get What You Want! By Giving!

This is still an incomplete thought, the edge of an idea if you will. All along my journey has been this rather oblique statement that to get you have to give. I have never really understood it!

And then I tried to use the power of intention to sell my house. 5 months in and …nothing! I was feeling worne down (which is not the right feeling to allow the universe to fulfil your dreams, it meant I was focusing more on NOT having sold my house then getting the damn thing sold). So I took some time to rethink my intention, trying to find a wording that would get me what I want, but that felt right. All of a sudden I realised I did not want to ‘sell’ my house, I wanted to find someone to ‘give’ my house to (for a stated amount of money of course). Just that shift in thinking from me getting money for my house, to me giving my beloved house to someone else seemed to shift everything and literally within 2 weeks the new owner walked in.

Had I used the power of giving to get what I wanted ? That experience sat with me, niggling as they sometimes do. So I started to think about other areas of my life where I want to receive ‘stuff’ (oh ok, yes money, money, money…who doesn’t need some more to do those extra things with). What if I stopped focusing on what I was going to get and instead focused on what I was giving in the exchange ? Could I create a writing career by changing my focus on what I was giving to my readers rather than focusing on the all too obvious book sales ? Suddenly one of my biggest goals, getting out of the corporate world and into the ‘real’ world where I can be a guide, showing people how to step into their power, came into focus.

So this is my challenge to you, how can you turn around what you want into an exchange where you still get that house or car or job, but where the way you ask is focused on what you are giving ? Try it and see how different it feels when you are no longer just focusing on what you are taking. Trust that the universe has your back and that in your giving you will get everything you need and want.

Fear is

Fear is…


   Fear is a coward!

     Fear is a liar!

         Fear is a bad habit!!

Why do you have to be worse than me for me to be better ?

Why do you have to be worse than me for me to be better ?

Actually I could not work out a title for this one. It seemed that years of lessons suddenly came into sharp focus and all it took was a walk with my dogs and two nieces. Along the way they started their usual ‘picking’ at each other – a bad habit that involves each one telling me what the other one does wrong and is bad at and a habit that evokes a rather immediate mini lecture along the lines of,

“I hear enough about how bad I am at things and how bad everyone else is at work, I don’t need to hear that at home”.

And it is true! I have finally become aware of how continuous and prevalent the negative judgements aimed at me and others is. The most consistent feedback we either receive or give is about what we are bad at and what we are not doing.  It is draining not to mention demoralising and demotivating.

To give my niece her due, she immediately stopped telling me what her sister was bad at and instead started to tell me what she was good at…the problem was the wording.

“She is much better at Afrikaans than I am”. I was immediately struck by the comparison and how she had not really changed her thinking. Before she was making her sister wrong and so making herself right and in the process better than her sister. Now she was making her sister right at the exact same time as she made herself smaller and ‘less than’.

Do we really do that ? Do we really only know how to compliment and encourage people by making ourselves ‘less than’ and smaller ? Do our minds really work in such a black and white way  ? For someone else to be good requires everyone else to be bad ?

Think about how you word your day ? How many times do you compare yourself to other people and come to the conclusion that you are lacking ? How many times do  you do the reverse, make them lacking and congratulate yourself on being better ?

All of a sardine the concept that there is enough for everyone started to come into focus. Why does someone else have to loose for someone to win ? Why do you have to be worse than me for me to be better ?

For this month my focus is going to be on creating a win-win, rather than the standard win - loose. For August I am going to allow myself to be awesome at exactly the same time I allow everyone else to be. I am going to practice changing my thinking so that I am never comparing anyone to anyone or anything.

Imagine how awesome it would be if we lived in a world where your greatness was the focus of the day ? Now imagine how you can create that! And go!