Author Archives: MaryAnn Reynolds

About MaryAnn Reynolds

I practice advanced bodywork in Austin, TX, specializing in Craniosacral Biodynamics and TMJ Relief.

Grokking

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My intent while sitting is whole body awareness. Start with body scan of my whole head. Then upper torso and arms, then lower torso and legs. I sense each region as a whole.

Then I bring my awareness to my whole body. And when my attention falters, I bring it back. And bring it back. And bring it back.

I develop my anterior cingulate cortex by doing this, according to Buddha’s Brain.

May my awareness of my whole body be steady.

What’s interesting to note is how wholeness shows up elsewhere in my life.

  • In something as simple as typing a 7-digit number as a whole, all at once, instead of typing the first four digits, and then the last three digits.
  • In something as profound as walking into a room and consciously experiencing it as a full, whole impression.

The first months of meditation were like opening a door to a new space, entering and wandering around, exploring.

Now it’s a little more like holding my attention on one painting.

Grok. I like that word. Take in the whole and be transformed.

From Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein, 1961:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.

I skipped meditating this morning…

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…and I am really feeling it. Skipped my three sun salutations too, although I did bridge in bed.

I feel really tight across the back of my shoulders. My patience and equanimity feel thinner too. I am not liking this at all!

I have been really consistent at getting up early, doing a little yoga, and sitting for 30 minutes for several months now. Especially before work. On weekends I cut myself a little slack and do it later, or sit with my sangha for much longer.

Hmm. Perhaps that was the true purpose of skipping out this morning, so I could really notice the difference that yoga and meditation done early in the day affect the rest of my day.

I’m going to close my office door, roll out my mat, and do those sun salutations right now. And even though I don’t have time to meditate, 5 minutes of breathing with awareness will make a big difference.

Article: Yoga’s Newest Fans, in the New York Times

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Thanks to my fellow yogi Clare Townes for sending me this link. It just made my day. Click the link and read about chair yoga at senior centers, even savasana for the bedridden.

Yoga, which is mostly about breath and awareness as the article states, is for everyone.

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/yogas-newest-fans/?src=me&ref=health

Book review: Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson

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I finally finished reading this book. It’s not long or particularly difficult to read, I just had a lot of other things going on. I started reading it the first week of July, so it’s taken about 3-1/2 weeks to finish. Not bad for nonfiction, in my opinion.

The full title is Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom, by Rich Hanson, Ph.D., with Richard Mendius, MD. Daniel Siegel wrote the foreword, and Jack Kornfeld wrote the preface. Big names in American Buddhism.

I expected something more related to Buddha’s teachings. Instead, it combines neuroscience with meditation and Buddhist practice. The book has a lot of brain science in it, but it’s written at a level that almost anyone who’s had a biology course in college (or a bright high-schooler) can understand. People who don’t like science can skip over those parts and still get a lot out of it.

The book contains four sections, on the causes of suffering, happiness, love, and wisdom. Each chapter has a nice summary of key points.

The book also contains an appendix on nutritional neurochemistry, that is, how you can support your brain’s functioning through skillful nutrition. It was written by Jan Hanson (whom I take to be the author’s wife), L.Ac.

This information has already influenced my diet and supplements.

Some fundamentals that underlie the rest of the book are:

  • The mind depends on the brain. Actually, the mind is what the brain does.
  • The brain evolved to help you survive, but its three primary strategies — separation, stopping change, and grasping pleasure/avoiding pain — make you suffer.
  • The path of awakening is described as uncovering your true nature that was always present, as transforming your mind and body, or as both.
  • Small actions every day add up to large changes over time — you are building new neural structure.
  • Wholesome changes in many brains could tip the world in a better direction.

I learned a lot and recommend this book for anyone interested in the meditating brain and fully awakening their body/mind.

Report on playing The Journey to Wild Divine

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It’s fun! There are various tasks to perform that you control with your state. One task requires you to either breathe quickly or laugh — which raises your heart rate enough to pass to the next task.

I discovered the cable from the fingertip sensors to the blue “stone” wasn’t plugged in all the way, so I don’t have to  use hand lotion to get good skin conductance after all.

I read the user manual and discovered that pressing the “m” key will display a map of the territory.

My favorite task so far is stacking rocks. A rock floats out above another rock, and only being steadily relaxed allows it to lower onto the rock below. When I got distracted, the rock would float up. Good way to learn steadiness of mind.

The task I’ve had the most difficulty with is Zen archery. I can pull the arrow back in the bow but haven’t figured out how to aim at the target. Got lucky once and hit the bull’s eye, but so far haven’t replicated that. You do use the mouse sometimes. I will figure it out with experimentation.

The user manual says there’s about 10 hours of play at a minimum, and then there’s an expansion pack.

It’s pretty exciting to play a video game and know that you are training yourself to achieve and maintain various states of consciousness in order to proceed!

I’m wondering how my 10-year-old granddaughter will like it. She’s used to the fast-paced Nintendo games. I think she’ll like the mythological setting of this game more than Mario Bros., but it may seem really slow to her. This may be more for adults.

The Journey to Wild Divine

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The Journey to Wild Divine is a computer video game. The game basically takes you on the hero’s journey.  Ho hum, right? I’m not much of a video game player.

The novelty of this game, thought, is that it comes with three devices you clip onto the fingertips of your non-mouse hand. The devices read your heartbeat and galvanic skin response (bioelectricity), and you progress through the game by changing your state.

If nothing else, I can learn how to change my state more easily. It promises to make that fun.

http://www.wilddivine.com/servlet/-strse-72/The-Passage-OEM/Detail

I installed it last night. There’s a screen where you can see its readings of your heartbeat. My skin was a little dry. After putting hand lotion on those fingertips and replacing the devices, I got a strong reading.

I started to play the game but got an error, and it was bedtime. Will debug when I have time.

Getting it was a lot of fun! The NLP meetup was Tuesday at Unity Center on Dessau Rd. Unity Center has been sold and will be taken over by a bunch of labyrinth-loving Baptists in September. The bookstore there, Sacred Shelf, is going out of business. The game, which sells for $300, had a sticker for $160. I’d checked my bank balance earlier that day and had the money, so I decided to buy it. It’s been on my wish list for at least a year.

Then I learned at the register that it was marked down 50%, so I got it for $80. I love bargains!

It felt like it was meant to be, me and The Journey to Wild Divine.

New sense of purpose

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I’ve been mostly playing and experimenting with the direction my meditation teacher gave me back in late December, whole body awareness, off and on for this whole year. I’ve tried different approaches. It hasn’t come easily, and I haven’t given up.

Early on, my intuitive way to experience my whole body at once was by using the breath, just attending to the whole body sensations (or as much as I could) of each breath.

I notice how easy it has been for my attention to be drawn to this part or that part, usually because of sensations such as pain or the pleasure of my chakras opening. My attention would flit from body part to body part, switching unbidden into internal dialog and losing all awareness of my body, then deliberately returning it to my body upon becoming aware.

I’ve tried visualizing my whole body, seeing myself sitting from various perspectives and then uniting the visualized self and the felt self by having the image merge into “me.”

I’ve had a sense that “whole body awareness” is always present even if not in the foreground of attention, that it is actually much closer to my consciousness than I would have thought.

I read in Buddha’s Brain that whole body awareness is simply right-brain awareness, which is visual, spatial, and likes gestalt. Well, then, that explains why it seems so close! Duh! It’s just my right brain.

And all these experiments with whole body awareness are nice images, words, sounds, and feelings projected upon the big screen, Awareness. Or maybe it’s all shifting between Big Awareness and small. Everything is awareness!

I’ve had more of a sense of purpose in my meditation lately, more determination to be able to maintain my awareness of my whole body for longer than a few seconds at a time. Once again, breathing helps.

I learned from yoga that each inhalation activates the sympathetic nervous system, and each exhalation activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Inhaling stimulates, exhaling calms. I tune in to my whole body to attempt to discern this.

Not really, not yet, but something is different, and practicing this does hold my attention on my whole body for longer than before.

I’ve also gotten some nice Alex Grey-like images of my nervous system all lit up inside my physical body and energy body, and of sitting inside a sort of bubble of energy or light. If you’re not familiar with the name, you’ve probably seen something like this image: http://webpages.shepherd.edu/fmahooti/IMAGES/AlexGrey.jpg.

My image of myself is kind of like that, only without the grid, mountains, fire. The halo is just part of the bubble. It is from a perspective that seems to combine looking at myself and being in my body, a visual/kinesthetic synesthesia.

I have a hunch that really experiencing whole body awareness and being able to keep my attention there is going to be amazing, and it seems so close, just a tantalizing shift away…a shift I haven’t fully made yet.

Buddha’s Brain says that whole body awareness supports singleness of mind, a state in which all aspects of experience come together as a whole and attention is very steady. This is probably high-frequency  gamma waves.

For once, I know a little something about the direction I’m heading toward. And once on the zafu, I can forget that. Staying open to my actual experience – being present – is still the means.

1,500 views! thank you!

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That’s all. Just noticed, got excited, and wanted to say thanks. Back to regular postings soon.

Wonder/no wonder

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Paraphrasing from the book Buddha’s Brain:

Whole body awareness is right-brain activity. Internal dialog is left-brain activity. You can’t do both at the same time, so awareness of the body suppresses left-brain monkey mind.

When you sense the body as a whole, you further activate the right hemisphere.

Start with the breath. Experience it as a single, unified gestalt of sensations. It will crumble; recreate it.

Expand awareness to include whole body. When it crumbles, restore it.

You’ll get better with practice.

Whole body awareness supports singleness of mind, a meditative state in which all aspects of experience come together as a whole and attention is very steady.

~~

Aha! So this is where Peg is leading me!

Whole body awareness as a mantra

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That was my mantra yesterday morning and this morning. After my body scan, I repeat “whole body awareness” as internal dialogue, losing track of the meaning, letting those repetitive sounds fill me up and flow through my…whole body awareness.

The centered witness. The experiencer and the witness.

“Whole body awareness” may not be part of each moment’s conscious awareness, but it is never far. It comes and goes easily across that threshold of consciousness.

A few moments of great visual clarity – with my eyes closed, especially in my left eye, which can see so clearly, it’s like a telescope and x-ray vision combined. That doesn’t make any sense, but it’s true.

More of a sense of purpose to my daily sittings. So much depends on it… How I change the world, one person at a time, starting with me.