Category Archives: books

About Effortless Wellbeing

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Note: Earlier this post mistakenly called this book Effortless Meditation. The actual name of the book is Effortless Wellbeing.

Elephantjournal.com posted this article a day or two ago. Being someone who appreciates simplicity and elegance, I found it very worth sharing. Read the article here.

A man named Evan Finer has written a little book called Effortless Wellbeing. The author of the post, Bob Weisenberg, writes that in his effort to boil meditation down to its essentials, Finer came up with three key skills:

  1. Relaxing the body.
  2. Learning to breathe smoothly and naturally.
  3. Calming the mind by learning to focus.

Notice you don’t have to be sitting on a zafu with your eyes closed to use these skills!

Weisenberg states,

…there are few things in life which cannot be enhanced by relaxing your body, breathing more naturally, and gently focusing your mind.

Weisenberg goes on to list nine techniques for focusing the mind.

Body awareness is one of them, although it doesn’t mention whole body awareness. I really enjoyed getting perspective about my meditation technique, that it’s one of nine ways to focus the mind. Whole body awareness, preceded by a body scan, is working for me very well.

Comments?

Trauma release heavy heart

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Someone found this blog using those search words.

No doubt they found my post on trauma releasing exercises, from David Berceli’s book The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process. That post did not specifically address a heavy heart. I’m not sure if the exercises would help. They are designed more to help you heal from a terrifying fight-flight-or-freeze situation, and from chronic stress and deep patterns of holding tension in the body. But I don’t know.

If you find me again, this is for you. Heartbreak can feel traumatic. I know. I’ve been there several times.

In my experience, heavy hearts take time to heal. Give yourself time and be as kind to yourself as possible. Let trusted others know your heart feels heavy and allow them to be kind to you too.

A heavy heart led me to meditation. I tried to avoid the pain. It didn’t work. What was left was facing it. Because when your heart is really heavy, you want to feel some emotional movement. Heaviness has tremendous gravity. You don’t want to feel stuck with a heavy heart.

I don’t know, but I suspect you will move through this. You are resourceful enough to be looking for help, looking for change.

When I sat with my heavy heart and just faced it — noticed where in my body I felt it, qualities of the feeling, finding words to describe it — I noticed there was more to me than just my heavy heart. That lightened the load, began to put some space around my heavy heart.

Here are some other suggestions:

You can be just a little bit grateful that you are feeling this because it means you have an active, alive heart center. Some people don’t. You are responsive to life, which is sometimes heartbreaking.

You are also not alone. At any given moment, a million people and more in this world have heavy hearts. Even if every single one of them has retreated into their bedroom, you have a lot of company! Connect with them psychically. Be curious about them.

You can google and learn how to do EFT. You can take the homeopathic remedy Ignatia Amara. You can watch sad movies and cry, or just cry — tears are healing.

There is no instant cure. It takes time.

You can make a plan to do one kind thing for another person. Help a single mom have some private time by taking the kids out to a park. Help a homebound senior with groceries or cooking. There are thousands of nonprofits who need volunteers — in prisons, homeless shelters, food banks, children — there is simply no end to it, unfortunately.

And I don’t think it would hurt to do the trauma releasing exercises.

Cleansing the colon, liver, and gallbladder

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I’m in the last week of a 27-day colon/parasite cleanse, which I do spring and fall. My dear acupuncturist tells me that it’s not a question of whether you have parasites, it’s what to do about them.

This cleanse isn’t difficult. Morning and night mix 2 T of psyllium husks and 1/2 t. of bentonite clay into a half cup of water or fruit juice/water mix, stir well, and throw it down the hatch. You must follow with a large glass of water. Do this every day for the entire 27 days.

Mid-morning and mid-afternoon, take 3 capsules of Paratosin from Premier Research Labs (a herbal blend that will have you burping cloves) on an empty stomach.

Do this every day until the whole bottle of Paratosin is gone (10 days). Continue to take the psyllium and bentonite twice daily but take no Paratosin for 7 days.

On day 18, start taking a second bottle of Paratosin as directed above to rid yourself of any parasites that have hatched since the first bottle.

After 27 days, your gastrointestinal system (especially your colon walls) will be cleaned out by the psyllium husks, toxins pulled from the walls by the bentonite clay, and your liver, gallbladder, spleen, and pancreas will be clear of parasites for a while (you can get them from drinking tap water) — and then you repeat in the spring, or the next fall.

I follow this cleanse with a liver/gallbladder flush, which is much more involved. I’ve done the cleanse and the flush back to back in the spring and fall for the past three years, and I believe they play an important role in my vitality and well-being.

I’m not going to include directions here because I don’t know the contraindications — i.e., when someone shouldn’t do this. I’m just a blogger sharing a personal health practice. If you’re interested, please consult your alternative medical practitioner first.

You can also find instructions in Jack Tips’ book, The Healing Triad: Your Liver…Your Lifeline. Tips says this flush has been done since antiquity, with variations. Basically you consume certain foods to cause the liver and gallbladder to empty their contents for elimination. This flush rids both these organs of old, hardened bile pieces. They look like green stones when you pass them but float because they are made of fat.

Compared to the colon/parasite cleanse, this flush involves more prep work (eating more veggies and using pH test strips to be sure you’re alkaline, and consuming apples or apple juice or malic acid to soften the hardened bile). It’s also trickier. There may be some discomfort involved, but it is only temporary. I’ve felt great afterwards.

(By the way, anything fried in cooked vegetable seed oils contributes to the formation of hardened bile. Now, I love chips and salsa and fried okra. It’s my birthright as a Texan! Doing this flush twice a year helps me stay healthy.)

You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Well, to keep your organs healthy! We often have an attitude of denial in this culture about our internal organs until something goes wrong. They have vital functions that contribute to our health. Taking good care of one’s organs translates into better functioning of your body — which of course cannot be isolated from the mind, heart, and spirit.

The large intestine, liver, and gallbladder have associated meridians in traditional Chinese medicine. That means these organs have energies associated with them. The colon is associated with the emotion of grief. The liver and gallbladder are associated with the emotion of anger.

Flushing them can result in a surge of positive energy — more happiness. Can you use some of that? I sure can!

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.

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.

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.

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!

Craniosacral therapy, brain waves

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Confession: I am a brain geek. I’ve been lucky enough in this lifetime to have worked for 3 years with Nina Davis, craniosacral therapist extraordinaire, and I can’t thank her enough for sharing her work with me.

CST is usually subtle. The one time it wasn’t subtle was when she worked on my locus ceruleus, a “blue spot” in the brain stem that is affected by trauma. When it opened up or unfroze or however it changed, I experienced profound, deep relaxation with no internal images or dialog. Just deep black restful awareness. It was like bliss.

I recommend CST for all trauma survivors. Trauma rewires the brain in a dysfunctional way, and your full recovery depends on you (with whatever help you can get) rewiring it back to a healthy state.

(Besides this, Nina has shown me how acutely a person can develop her sensory acuity, to the point where she’s aware of tiny structures and processes inside her own brain and body and in mine as well, using her fingertips and awareness. She’s just brilliant, like a Bene Gesserit from Dune. I have some perception of my energy body and can feel shifts, but she’s got the detailed inner anatomy down.)

I’ve read articles about scientific studies of long-time meditators that concluded that  meditation affects your brain waves in a positive way. I  believe it, based on 6 months of daily meditation. I experience my energy field differently, although my physical body is feeling pretty good too these days. It’s as if my brain waves are oscillating in more synchrony than before, which is pleasant and self-reinforcing.

I am very curious about brain waves. They are bioelectricity, and there are machines that give you visual feedback of your brain activity. Here’s what I know (from reading A Symphony in the Brain and Wikipedia):

  • Brain waves correspond to mental states, and we usually experience a mixture of states.
  • Delta waves predominate when you’re asleep. They’re at the lowest hertz, 0-4.
  • Next higher, theta waves occur in the hypnogogic state, when you’re falling asleep or waking and your mind feels pleasantly fuzzy and untethered to waking life. When you visualize something, and when you inhibit/repress, you’re in the theta wave range, 4-7 hertz. Associated with relaxed, meditative, creative states. Healing of trauma occurs in this state, where you unrepress traumatic memories by reimagining the trauma as a witness, not a participant, which makes it safe(r).
  • Alpha waves, 8-12 hertz, were discovered first, thus alpha. You can access the alpha state by imagining space inside your body, such as the space between your eyes, or bringing your attention to how your body feels. Occurs with relaxation. More accessible with your eyes closed; opening your eyes can bring you out of it.
  • Beta state, 13-30 hertz, is often referred to as normal waking consciousness. These waves anre active when you are mentally aroused, or having a conversation, or feeling anxious. Ask someone to solve a math problem, and they’ll be experiencing beta waves (so will you, probably). Interestingly, people with ADHD have too much theta in proportion to the amount of beta waves that they have. Retraining consists of lowering theta and raising beta from 9:1 to 3:1. Body movement usually takes you out of beta.
  • The new kid on the brain wave block, gamma waves (25-100 hertz), weren’t measured until people began using digital rather than analog EEG equipment to read brain waves. Studies of Tibetan monks with over 10,000 hours of meditation experience conclude that gamma waves correlate to transcendental meditative states. Also occurs during synesthesia (feeling a color, seeing a sound, etc.). Gamma may signify “binding” of neurons into a network. (Hmm, I’ve heard  that neurons that fire together, wire together. Could gamma be where they wire together? If so, it’s prime territory for learning.)

I would love to have a portable EEG machine and electrodes like Ken Wilber uses in the YouTube video where he shuts down his brain waves. It would be fun to play with and learn from. One researcher claims that each hertz is associated with specific mental activity. That would be fun to experiment with!

I wonder what we would see if both Nina and I were hooked up to EEG machines when we were doing craniosacral therapy. What happens when I’m doing yoga, meditating, drawing, petting my cat — what states occur?

I’ve also learned that you can get a “brain tune-up”. A company called Brain States Technology (with three affiliates in Austin at present) uses a new strategy for working with EEG readouts and improving brain functioning. Rather than using a medical model (specifically retraining the brain not to have epileptic seizures or ADHD), they simply show you how to optimize your brain waves, right to left and front to back. So, for instance, you might have less delta and theta when awake, and more beta in the left hemisphere and more alpha in the right.

I’m gathering information and considering doing it.

I’m interested in increasing my gamma waves, which may signify a mental state called “unity of consciousness.” The jury is still out on this (and scientific juries take a notoriously long time to agree on things).

In the meantime, the man who brought us the Delta Sleep System CD has now created one to optimize gamma waves, Gamma Meditation System. I’m ordering it.

Book: Buddha’s Brain

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I’m reading the book Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom by Rick Hanson PhD and Richard Mendius MD and can’t resist sharing something I just read. It’s about how meditation affects the body/mind. It cites studies (which I won’t do here) showing that meditation does the following:

  • Increases gray matter in the insula, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.
  • Reduces cortical thinning due to aging in prefrontal regions strengthened by meditation.
  • Improves psychological functions associated with these regions, including attention, compassion, and empathy.
  • Increases activation of left prefrontal regions, which lifts mood.
  • Increases gamma-range brainwaves (above beta, optimal cognitive functioning) in experienced meditators.
  • Decreases stress-related cortisol.
  • Strengthens the immune system.
  • Helps a variety of medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease, asthma, type II diabetes, PMS, and chronic pain.
  • Helps numerous psychological conditions, including insomnia, anxiety, phobias, and eating disorders.

The key is to develop a regular daily practice, no matter how brief. Even one minute before sleep makes a difference, if done consistently.

The Buddhist precepts

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I’m taking a class at Appamada Zen Center on the Buddhist precepts. Yes, I know I’m overextended — full time job, yoga teacher training, NLP activity, this blog — but it meets only once a month on a Sunday evening.

A precept is a commandment, instruction, or order. The Buddhist precepts come from the monastic tradition and have been adapted for laypeople. We use the book Waking Up to What You Do, by Diane Esshin Rizzetto. Here’s a link to it on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Waking-What-You-Intelligence-Compassion/dp/1590301811

Rizzetto presents the precepts as aspirations: “I take up the way of speaking truthfully,” for example.

I view the precepts as an invitation to increased mindfulness. A teacher, a book, and classmates make it a connecting, learning, growing experience.

In class, we’ll be covering one precept from the book per month. We journal at least weekly and assess ourselves periodically. I will be including my journaling here on this blog.