Postcards from the Funny Farm

I am fortunate to once again have Dorian from “Buddha of Hollywood” as a guestblogger here today.  This is the second half of his thoughts on Relaxation Meditation.  Many thanks to Dorian for the 2 guest blogs here at Postcards from the Funny Farm.

I wish I could come up with another word for meditation since what we are going to learn and practice has a lot more to offer than the classical meditation techniques.  Let’s say that we are going to learn how to use our mind, brain if you want to call it so, at a higher level and capacity. We are currently using only about 10% of our mental capacity. That means that using 20% will double your brain output. Can you imagine what would be like to function at 100% mental ability?

The problem we are facing as human beings is not that we are not equipped to deal with our daily problems or that modern life has become unmanageable and our brains can not keep up with it. Our problem is that we are running our brain with both the acceleration and the brake pedals to the floor at the same time. The gains in performance and improvements that I’m taking about achieving are not some miracle supernatural voodoo trick. You are not going to gain anything that you already don’t have, just the knowledge and ability of mastering your own mind.

We will start today with the first step, the “Relaxation Meditation” After mastering this technique we will go to the second step the ”Contemplation Meditation” and finally we will master the “Guided Meditation” Each step is essential in mastering the following and I urge, especially the people that have already some experience and practice in meditation to practice diligently, don’t take any short cuts and don’t take anything for granted.

What is “Relaxation Meditation” Well it is just that. Relaxing your mind in a controlled, voluntary fashion. Sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of people that don’t make a difference between physical and psychical relaxation, there are a lot of people that just don’t know how to control and relax the brain.

Every one of us has experienced this relaxation. It is built in our being as a protective mechanism and it kicks in involuntarily when the brain needs time off. Have you ever work on a project so difficult so demanding that sitting in front of your computer screen or a piece of paper your brain just spaces out and you find yourself starring at the screen with your mind completely empty? Well, “Relaxation Meditation” is just that – spacing out in a voluntarily controlled fashion. To accomplish that we will use a defocusing technique called the OM chant. There are several defocusing techniques used for meditation like starring at a candle flame, breathing techniques, rhythmic body movement, even some unconventional activities like netting or watching TV fall in the same category.

The basic principle of the defocusing is that we brake the conscious train of thoughts by focusing at a mindless, random or repetitive stimulus. I have chosen the use of the OM chant for several reasons. It is very effective, it can be practiced any where, it doesn’t need any devices and the most important; it bridges seamlessly into the next meditation levels. There is a lot of metaphysical writings about the origin and significance of the OM chant but all that is more or less folklore. For those of you more scholarly inclined I suggest a visit to the local library or book store for more details. For the practice of relaxation meditation I believe that is enough information.

Proper position. Some sects or schools have strict codes in the practice of meditation. Some preach the sitting meditation, others the walking meditation. Laying down or standing on your head it doesn’t matter much. The important thing is to find a position that is comfortable to you. You can then proceed to practice the meditation wherever you are, office, home or in a plane – of course not if you are piloting the plane.
Time of practice. We will have at least 1 mandatory practice daily at a preset time, preferable before going to bed or first thing in the morning. That will be a 15 minute meditation. We can also practice it any time we feel like we need a brake or a boost in our mental stamina.

Proper practice. Remember the purpose of this stage of meditation is a blank mind. You start the meditation in a comfortable position, closing your eyes and focusing on the OM sound. If you have a partner or you are in a public place, like an office, I recommend you use a pair of headphones. The way the Buddhist monks chant OM is in a deeper register. I had a female student telling me “I can’t do it. My voice doesn’t go that deep.”

The way you chant is by finding a harmonic to the sound rather than copying the sound. So experiment a little bit with different tonalities until you find a relaxing comfortable harmony. Use the chant only to brake the train of thoughts. When the train of thoughts is broken do the chant only in your mind. The perfect state of relaxation meditation is achieved when even that stops and you are just contemplating the chant with your mind completely inactive, completely relaxed. That kind of mastering will come in time by practicing your meditation everyday.

Benefits. Even if you practice only this simple form of meditation the benefits you will incur are tremendous. From dealing with the daily stress to improve brain function to improved immune system, this meditation is essential in your mental and physical well being. The simple benefits like improved sleeping and improved energy will be apparent very soon after you start your practice. The more profound changes will take a longer practice time but your rewards will be worth the time and effort.

That title is a quote from Michael Stipe of the band REM in the song, Finest Worksong. Got two days off (post weekend) and I was thrilled about it.  I figured, here’s an eternity of time to get everything I need to get done, done!  Well, after the first day it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

A reminder that life is longer than we think sometimes.

I’ve done a lot today but a few things I did were really important and restorative.  Let me take you through them in hopes you find parallels for your next short time off:

Got up about 6am with the crying baby and the edgy 3 year old.  Took care of their needs.  Bottle, changed diapers, feed the older one, put their channel on.  The girls really wore me out this morning.  In searching for my “center” I found myself very distracted with their needs.  Not complaining mind you, just explaining that we can’t always get that time we have “off.”  I thought, maybe it is better to spend time with my girls that it is to space out in front of the computer all day.  So that wasn’t all bad.  Meanwhile, my 10 year old was sleeping in (LUCKY DOG!)

The rest of the day consisted in cleaning and preparing: preparing for lunch, dinner and cleaning the kitchen and TV room.  There is so much joy in a clean room.  All this stuff was like therapy for me.  Later on we went out by the pool and I pulled all the strange things out of the skimmer.  I came inside, had some pizza and watched a few shows on Rome.  Typical time at home eh?  I am sure it all was therapeutic, but my head still felt thick.  I knew my therapy needed one more step: relaxation.  I’d cleaned, prepared, read stories, made bottles, and much more but I hadn’t yet been able to JUST RELAX.  Do you ever have trouble just relaxing?  Well if that’s the case, remember to relax before it’s too late.  How did I relax?  I took a hot shower.  It revived my spirits.  When I got dried off I asked my wife to go out for dinner tonight … just us!  We spent all Sunday and Monday in the day with our kids and I figured we both deserved a break.

Point? My relaxing shower was great, but only after I had done the cleaning and preparation of the day.  I think one of the single most powerful tools of inspiration is cleaning.  Having said that, it should always be tempered with relaxation.  So what is your “thing” you can do today to relax your body and awaken your creativity?  Make sure you do that thing in concert with the other stuf “you know you gotta do.”  When you have that breakthrough, let us know!

When I ran across Dorian’s Blog “Buddha of Hollywood,” I was instantly curious.  Since I live so close to Hollywood and know a few “oddballs” that have come out of that town, I figured I had a tiger by the tail with this blogger.  Since then we have exchanged emails a few times and I have learned of his interest in meditation.  While I meditate and practice TM as well as the Relaxation Response in my life, I found out his knowledge was in some different aspects.  I was pleased when he agreed to 2 part guestblog on meditation.  I hope you enjoy his writing as much as I do.

When my friend Damien asked me to guestblog on self improvement, the first thing I did was to go to my book shelf and pull out my old psychology books. I ended up with a pile that would take me a year to research and I thought to myself “Well, this is not going to work.”  I’m not going to be able to train somebody to do psychoanalysis and therapy by writing blog posts.

Considering that 90% of the daily psychological bruises we are facing are small incidents, stuff not worthy taking it to a therapist.  (You wouldn’t go to a surgeon to put a band aid on your finger cut, would you?) Then only about 10% of our problems are of that magnitude that requires professional help.

Instead of getting too deep into the academic aspect of psychology, I thought that I could come up with something more practical.

The following posts are going to give you a series of tools to deal with the small stressors of the daily life. They will teach you how to be more relaxed, give you more energy, prop up your self confidence and optimism, and make you fell better and more enthusiastic about your life. Watch for the posts in this series, I hope they will benefit you.

Part I – The Concept of Relaxation Meditation

I wish I could come up with another word for meditation since what we are going to learn and practice has a lot more to offer than the classical meditation techniques.
Let’s say that we are going to learn how to use our mind, brain if you want to call it so, at a higher level and capacity. We are currently using only about 10% of our mental capacity. That means that using just 20% would double your brain output. Can you imagine what it would be like to function at 100% mental ability?
The problem we are facing as human beings is not that we are not equipped to deal with our daily problems or that modern life has become unmanageable and our brains can not keep up with it. Our problem is that we are running our brain with both the acceleration and the brake pedals to the floor at the same time. The gains in performance and improvements that I’m taking about achieving are not some miracle supernatural voodoo trick but they can be made.

You are not going to gain anything that you already don’t have, just the knowledge and ability of mastering your own mind.

We will start understanding the “Relaxation Meditation” in this post by examining the concept.

RM is relaxing your mind in a controlled, voluntary fashion. Sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of people in the field who don’t distinguish between physical and psychical relaxation, this is an important point to make.  RM means relaxing the mind as well as the body.

Have you ever worked on a project so difficult and so demanding that sitting in front of your computer screen or a piece of paper your brain just spaces out and you find yourself staring at the screen with your mind completely empty?  As I close this post, consider the benefits to RM:

Benefits. Even if you practice only this simple form of meditation the benefits you will incur are tremendous. From dealing with the daily stress to improve brain function to improved immune system, this meditation is essential in your mental and physical well being. The simple benefits like improved sleeping and improved energy will be apparent very soon after you start your practice. The more profound changes will take a longer practice time but your rewards will be worth the time and effort.  In my next guestpost here at Postcards from the Funny Farm I will dive right in and show the practice of RM.  So watch for it here next week!

Ok, so you’re stressed out … what do you do to get over it? More importantly, if you have lost your creativity and innovation, how do you get it back again? One way is through what I call “water everyman therapy.” Getting into a jacuzzi, even when it’s freezing outside, can work wonders for you. In the summer and other warm months, going into the ocean can have a profound effect on your psychology. I once took a marine biology class where the professor told us the sea water was exactly the same chemical combination as the amniotic sac fluid. I suppoe whe was inferring that going in the salt water at the beach was akin to retuning to the womb.

If you haven’t a jacuzzi or access to the beach, think about the healing powers of a good hot shower. Now that I “bic” my head and I am not sporting a goatee, I spend a long time in the shower shaving. It is great for my sense of peace and I get a lot of good ideas there in that time. Then, there is always the mystic bath. You can enjoy a good bath squirting a little shampoo in there for scent and bubbles. You can also go as crazy as you want at a store like “Bath and Body Works” where they sell all manner of soaps and crystals for your bath, not mention candles … but candle therapy is yet another post.

I have to share with you: the recent heavy topics here like bipolar and setting serious goals have been taking a toll on me.  From time to time I like to take a sideline from those highly important yet highly taxing posts.  Today I want to tell you about a furniture store online: Legacy Classic Furniture.  Now before you go running off to find another blog to read, hear me out because I just spent about an hour browsing this place and it is a really good bookmark.  If you’re like me, we are sort of “perpetually” organizing and decorating our kids’ rooms.  Our room looked oretty good when we moved in, but theirs have been works in progress for sure.  In clicking around this site my wife and I (yes I had to share the wealth with her) purchased most of the final touches on our 2 girls room (ages 3 and 1).  If your house needs furniture of any type, this is the place to bookmark, this is the place to spend some time browsing.  I feel so inspired now from buying furniture.  It goes to show you that sometimes spontanaeity works better than goals … sometimes ;)

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School pioneered the relaxation response, a term he coined in the 1970s. Part of this method is to “maintain a passive attitude.” His method is centered on practice and learned behavior. When you can concentrate on a word, phrase, visual, or body movement, you are able to escape the overpowering worries of the day.

Through this method, theoretically you should be able to move in and out of a relaxed state by using a single item to concentrate on, such as a word or phrase. As I have said before, there is great power in focusing on just one thing at a time. You can actually be more productive in doing so than you would be focusing on more than your stress threshold can handle. I guess I should define that: I mean the threshold between normal physical functioning (ie; blood pressure 120/80 or lower) and abnormal functioning (ie; excessive sweating, breathing problems, discomfort etc.). Let’s examine what a passive attitude sounds like through five sentences. Perhaps you could add a few of your own.

1. Oh well.
2. I’m over it.
3. That’s one way to look at it.
4. Is that so?
5. I see.

Now let’s contrast them with some unhealthy, stress inducing responses:

1. Oh my God, what will I do?
2. You don’t understand! This is awful.
3. Are you trying to be a jerk or something?
4. Well great, I guess I was totally wrong.
5. Screw you.

Now some may laugh at those, but they aren’t funny. Eckhart Tolle says in his bestselling book The New Earth that “resentment is the result of an illusion we choose to believe.” Isn’t every negative reaction really the result of an illusion we choose to believe in? My wife tells me I am like Winnie the Pooh sometimes when I am overly passive about bills, work, struggles, etc. That may be true because my dad is like that too. However, some of that is my attempt to invoke the relaxation response.

Another way I get into that passive “place” is to imagine myself going under a wave and doing a somersault underwater at the beach. That is something that relaxes me in real life. Visualizing it during times of trouble or fatigue helps me maintain a passive attitude, but this is visualization which we have already covered. I could also say a term like “wave somersault” repeatedly to summon the same effect. What could be your word or phrase to maintain a passive attitude?

“Ninety percent of metabolic oxygen comes from breathing. Ten percent
comes from food.”
- Gabriel Cousens, M.D.

When I was a kid I swam on the swim team in our small city. I remember one of the favorite antics for us kids was to see how many laps one could swim without taking a breath. Ugh, what damage must have been done. Luckily people are born with more brain cells than they need.

Breathing is involuntary but we have the ability to breathe deeply. When we breathe deeply we take control of our life and absorb (literally) more of life. As the quote above attests, breathing deeply accounts for most of the oxygen feeding our body and brain. When we take shallow breaths, we starve our mind, body, and inspiration. If I am not feeling inspired or if I have a lot of huge troubles hanging over my head, that is expecially the time to try and find inspiration by deep breathing.

We need to schedule one or two focused breathing times each day. These should be in realistic scenarios like for instance, breathing deeply until the first commercial on your favorite television show, or taking a walk past three mailboxes until you resume normal, involuntary breathing.

Dunn wrote in a comment today how it is hard to relax when you have troubles in your life. That is very true. But I will say that when I mediate on the mountaintop, I don’t have to be on the mountaintop. I can meditate from the valley looking up and marveling at the mountaintop. Either way, relaxation techniques and the practice of daily deep breathing twice a day will replenish our cells and feed our inspiration to take on whatever troubles might be crouching at our front door. How can you practice daily deep breathing?

I hope you benefited from reading this. Next: The passive attitude …

Have you ever tried visualization to reduce anxiety and relax? It’s really not too difficult. The steps are something like this:

1) Put some music or nature sounds on your CD player and close your eyes. Then
2) visualize yourself in nature.
3) Imagine your favorite wild animals all around you and yet it feels totally safe.
4) In your mind go under waterfalls, take drinks from mountain streams, feel the wet cold granite flats under your bare feet.
5) Last, make sure to breathe deeply as you visualize all this stuff. It will calm your body down and put you in a trance-like state so your fear can subside and you can get a clear perspective again.

Any visualization will work. You can get in the mood for sex, for example, by picturing your wife in a variety of babydolls and you don’t have to spend a dime! The mind is powerful.
It sounds a little out there I know, but if you give yourself over to it your creative mind truly comes alive. That is the part of our psyche we need to solve the problems that cause us to stress. I have used this method for close to 15 years and found it to be very helpful and rejuvenating.

This method and many others can be found in a profound little book called “the Relaxation Response.” You might want to pick up a copy. Stay tuned to this series I’m starting entitled “How to Relax,” it’s key to keeping our minds open to the possibilities that lay before us. I hope you’ll join with me as we explore this. Do you know how to relax?

My mom and I have been talking a lot lately about the book A New Earth. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you soon will. Oprah has fully endorsed its author, Eckhart Tolle, and we all know that what Oprah endorses, sells like crazy. But Tolle is a very humble guy. He claims his ideas were all around him and that he didn’t invent them. Pretty humble for a guy who’s probably going to become the next psychology writer billionairre. More and more people I talk to about the book tell me they have either read it, or want to read it. But this guy isn’t hype, he has great vision in his book. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.

I remember getting a similar feeling about a book when I read M. Scott Peck’s psychology book: The Road Less Traveled. ” When I read great books like these, so full of truth and help, it’s like relaxation comes from he page, into my eyes and throughout my body spreading calm and joy. I’m still on chapter one of A New Earth, but what I have read so far is pure genius. My goal is to write a review of it very soon, so stay tuned to Postcards from the Funny Farm for that. I want to do this to spread the news about this amazing little book. Tolle’s insights on spiritual meaning in the world around us are really revolutionary and life-changing. Whether you are going through something as simple as trying to experience life more or something as serious as working through drug rehab and the like, this book brings out a strength you didn’t know you had.

At any rate, my mom told me a story from his book the other day that really intrigued me. She also watches the author every Monday she can on Oprah’s website where he does a regular video “town hall” style class where people can participate and ask questions. She gave me some good advice from him regarding negative people. Lately I’ve been getting some bad energy from people in all areas of my life and it’s beginning to worry me. Why am I attracting this sort of energy? Is it the way I talk? Is it the things I say? How do you deal with negative people anyway? We’re supposed to stay positive ourselves but what about when we can’t control bad energy around us. As I’ve speculated on here in the past, we should ignore it but as some of you commented, that isn’t always the best option. There is an alternative to ignoring Tolle offers that I prefer. It’s a phrase to have waiting in your back pocket. When negative people spout all sorts of negative things, just tell them this:

Is that so?

You can respond without reacting. Reacting is the “ego” as Tolle calls it. Responding is more of the being who you are inside coming out. There are so many good energies in my life these days now too, but why is it that I allow the bad ones to bring me down? It isn’t even rational to pay the most attention to negativisim. Another book by Tolle is called simply: “Stillness Speaks.” I would agree with that, wouldn’t you?

Anyone coming into your emotional space and saying “blah blah blah (something negative - you fill in the blank here)” should never take your good energy. Simply nod your head and say “is that so?” I love this mantra and I intend to use it from now on. If you tell me the sky is falling, I can say calmly “is that so?” If you tell me something is impossible I will say “WHY?’ Then, if you tell me why I will say: “is that so?” If you make a point on a forum I don’t agree with, there is no need to argue or even debate. All I need to do is consider what you have said and then say: “is that so?” Think about it, for real life or even social internet connections, it’s a pretty good mantra! Revolutionary thoughts like these take meditation. Here is a video I ran across of Tolle talking about getting that into our daily lives.

How are you reacting to bad energy in your life?