Exploring Mind - Body - Spirit

Topics Covered

• Patience
• Reducing hurry

Topics Covered

• Gratitude for Our Body
• Paying Attention to What is Helpful
• Can't vs Won't, Need vs Want, and Responsibility
• Why meditate?

Topics covered:

• Experiencing comfort with the breath
• Generalizing that comfort throughout the body
• Applying this to dealing with physical discomfort
• Extending comfort to others

Topics covered:

• What if one feels nothing in the heart center. Does that mean one doesn't have a heart?
• Does compassion really occur in the heart, or is it in the brain?
• How is compassion different from an emotion?
• Shifting awareness and shifting form

Topics covered

• Anger is different from rage
• Releasing rage
• Dealing with anger
• Reducing anger

Topics covered:

• Brief Practice (again)
• Posture
• Empathy during conflict

Topics Covered

• What is brief practice?
• Why is brief practice important?
• How do I do brief practice?

What is brief practice?

Briefly, brief practice involves doing a short meditation technique (2 min or less) with as little break from the daily rhythm as possible. For example, if you are driving you can focus on your breath when you are stopped at red lights. You can also focus on your breath before you start driving and after you finish driving.  If you make a habit of this then every time you drive you will have at least two short meditation sessions, and more if you get stopped by red lights.

Why is brief practice important?

Brief practice teaches us several things. First we learn to focus our awareness and attention quickly. Our mind learns that it may not have 15 minutes to focus. So it learns to do so quickly. Second, we learn to apply meditation in real life situations. If we only practice in settings where it is quiet and calm, then we will not learn how to use meditation when the environment is noisy or stressful. Those are the times we really need meditation so it is important to practice in those settings. Finally, because there are many more settings in which we can use brief practices we can create many more meditation techniques. This teaches our mind how to create techniques which develops our ability more than just practicing techniques we have been taught.

How do I do brief practice?

First start by thinking about the "between times" in your day. These are the times when your attention does not need to be focused on what you are doing. For example, walking from one room to another; using the bathroom; washing your hands; ... .

Next find a short meditation technique, or create a short version of an extended technique that you know of.

Then create a way of reminding yourself to do that technique in the "between times" throughout the day.

One of my favorite short techniques is "grounding." Grounding requires you to simply notice how your weight is supported by something. You bring your attention to the part of your body that your weight is resting upon, then you let your weight sink into that support. Grounding can be done anywhere as long as you are not in free fall. If you are standing you ground by being aware of the soles of your feet. If you are walking then you ground by being aware of one sole after another. Grounding helps you relax while staying present. Its excellent for learning to be calm under pressure.

Light and Spirit

Logistic Note

Topics covered

• Does Quieting the Mind Also Quiet the Body?
• Eyes Open vs Eyes Closed Meditation Techniques
• Meditation and Conserving "Energy"
• Prayer and Requests
• Reminding Oneself "I am Loved"
• Is War Justified?

• How long should I meditate for?
• Using short meditation sessions
• Divine Light Prayer wording
• Avoiding hurry
• What if we don't visualize anything when we connect with Spirit?

The discussion ranged widely last week. Each topic got a bit of discussion and there wasn't time to go into any one in depth.

• Spiritual qualities as angels
• Form, emptiness and infinity
• Meditation on form vs formlessness
• Are good and evil relative? Light vs. dark?
• Dealing with anger, anger is different from rage.

There were some excellent questions on emptiness as well as practical questions about quieting the mind.

Topics covered:

• emptiness within form
• quieting the mind
• expressing a spiritual quality in the physical world

Several people had a close friend die last week and the issue of death came up. The intention of these techniques it to experience a connection with the presence of a being who is no longer alive. I will explain the instructions for a person who has died, but the techniques can be used for an animal as well.

These notes briefly describe some complex meditation techniques which are accompanied by a lot of verbal explanations. I cannot put all those here, but if you have questions please post them as comments.

Topics covered

• Principles of praying with the dead
• Techniques for praying with the dead

Deep breathing using the lower lungs.

Most people take a deep breath by lifting their chest and shoulders. This actually pulls air into the upper lobes of the lungs and while it is a big breath, it is not really a deep one. To breathe deeply we need to allow air to fall into the lower lobes of the lungs. Those lungs contain more blood-flow than the upper lobes and so we will get more oxygen.

Start by feeling your ribs and find the lower edge of your rib cage. As you feel along the sides and back, notice that the ribs go down quite a ways. Notice how the ribs go down more in the back than in the front. Your lungs will go down almost as far as your ribs.

To allow air to fall into the lower lobes of the lungs we will create a space there by expanding the lower ribs as we breathe in. We then allow the lower ribs to contract as we breathe out. Notice that most of the expansion will be to the sides and back, not the front.

Follow along with the instructions here

Download | Duration: 00:03:10

Key Elements of Mind-Body Techniques

Each mind-body technique is characterized by three attributes:

• Purpose
• Awareness
• Attention

Purpose

Ourpurpose is what we hope to achieve by using the mind-body technique;our desired result. This result may be immediate, like relaxing, or inthe future, like lowering our blood-pressure. If we remind ourselves ofour purpose as we start the technique, then our mind is less likely towander, and we can increase our motivation. We just have to make surewe do not obsess about our purpose and evaluate our resultsjudgmentally.

Awareness

Awarenessrefers to the types of phenomena we are going to focus our mind on.These could be sensations, or thoughts, or images. Awareness can alsobe more specific such as sounds, or tactile sensations. We can alsotune our awareness to a combination of phenomena such as tactilesensations and specific thoughts.

If you think of the mind like a camera, then awareness

Attention

Attention refers to what we are focusing our mind on specifically, and how tight our loose that focus will be.

Ifyou think of the mind like a camera, then awareness would correspond towhat you can see through the viewfinder. Attention would correspond towhat is in the center of the picture, and how tightly you have focusedon that.

Here are links to some self-healing techniques. The focus of attention in each is different and so you get different results.

• Breathing for Relaxation: Calm-Relaxed
• Lower-Lung Breathing
• Breathing, Sore Throats, and Upper Respiratory Infections

  
  

We can use awareness of the breath to help reduce the symptoms of an upper respiratory infection and protect ourselves from getting them

One way mind-body techniques affect our health comes from fact that the body changes its blood-flow based on what we focus our attention on. If we imagine our hands being in warm water, then blood flow in the veins under the skin of the hands will tend to increase.

We can use this fact to increase blood flow to the membranes of our upper respiratory tract, our throat, Eustachian tubes which connect the throat with the middle ear, our nose, and our sinuses. In this technique we pay attention to the sensations of warmth, moistness and comfort that naturally occur in our throat as we breathe out, and we use our imagination to increase those sensations and spread them into our nose, Eustachian tubes and sinuses. This causes the body to respond by increasing blood flow to those areas which helps us fight off upper respiratory infections more effectively.

Three notes:

• This technique is better used before we get sick then after.
• I do not think this technique will help for a lower respiratory infection like bronchitis or pneumonia.
• This technique is not a substitute for standard medical care. It will augment care, but if you are running a fever or the symptoms are lasting more than a few days, call your doctor.

You can listen to the instructions for this here

Download | Duration: 00:03:12