Mind Calm (13 page)
Mind Calm is not only for when you close your eyes a couple of times a day, but for being consciously aware throughout daily life. It is great, when you finish your Calm Sitting, to immediately engage GAAWO with your eyes open as you begin to get on with your day. This can help to make present moment awareness a habit that is effortless and natural.
One of the great things about Mind Calm is that there are not actually any fixed rules to abide by. On the contrary, Mind Calm offers a range of different ways that you can use it to suit your individual preferences and ever-changing requirements.
Although we have gone through a more traditional Calm Sitting, whereby you use all of the Calm Thoughts
in the order they've been listed above
, you are free to use them in whatever way works best for you. The most common three Calm Sitting options are listed below.
Follow similar instructions to the ones
outlined above
. Set the intention at the beginning of your Calm Sitting to use all ten of your Calm Thoughts. Then close your eyes, engage GAAWO and go! You might think each Calm Thought only once before moving on to the next (good if you don't have much time) or if you want to play more or have a busy mind that day, you might end up using each Calm Thought a few times each before moving on to the next.
Start by considering what you would like to focus on most during the Calm Sitting. Perhaps you want more peace, or maybe you feel you could benefit from being more loving. Or possibly you have noticed that you are lacking clarity so decide to focus on that. When you know which Calm Thought you want to use, close your eyes, engage GAAWO and get going with your focused Calm Sitting.
Begin by considering which of the 10 Calm Thoughts you tend to feel uncomfortable using, or tend to avoid altogether. Any avoidance or discomfort when using specific Calm Thoughts can mean there is a block or resistance and you could benefit from healing your relationship with it. By giving them your time, attention and love you will find that any blocks to using the Calm Thoughts fade away and you may also notice improvements in that area of your life.
Speed up the cultivation of your habit of being inwardly attentive to stillness by using Mind Calm meditation with your eyes open through what I like to call âCalm Moments'. For such moments, choose one of the Calm Thoughts and set the intention at the beginning of the day to think it whenever you remember throughout your day. Then, whenever you remember to do so, engage eyes-open GAAWO, think your Calm Thought and move on with your day until the next time you remember and do it again. By having open-eyed Calm Moments during daily life you can find your results are magnified exponentially.
Thinking too much, getting stressed and missing the present moment during the rush of modern life is a habit. Thankfully, so is enjoying peace with your mind. Mind Calm helps you to make the inner shift from having all of your attention on the content of your life (your ever-changing thoughts, emotions, body and life circumstances) to redirecting your focus to the present moment peace-filled context of life. For the best results I recommend you do two or three Mind Calm sittings every day, each lasting between 10 and 20 minutes. Good times of the day are when you first wake up in the morning, mid-afternoon, before your evening meal and as you go to sleep at night.
Little and often is the best way to optimize the results from Mind Calm, which is great news because everyone has 10â20 minutes to spare here and there throughout their day. On top of your closed-eye Calm Sittings, have regular Calm Moments with your eyes open throughout
your day whenever you remember. For Calm Moments, simply engage eyes-open GAAWO, think a Calm Thought and continue with whatever you are doing, until the next time you remember.
For the most transformative beginning to your Mind Calm practice, do
the 10-part Mind Calm Programme
from Part II of this book.
You now know a meditation technique and have been given a number of different ways to bring it into your day. However, let's be honest, meditation only works if you do it. I'm very aware that you might already have a busy life and I'm suggesting you add something new to your perhaps already full schedule. So to encourage you to commit to a regular Mind Calm routine, this is a good time to remind yourself of your heart's highest hope, which you clarified in
Chapter 3
. Not only will this help you to get going, but it can also keep you going during times when you experience the diverse range of happenings that can occur when meditating.
INTRIGUING MEDITATION HAPPENINGS
Intriguing things happen when sitting still during meditation, which makes this chapter perhaps one of the most important in the book. Although a lot of the time you are likely to enjoy Mind Calm, there are some things that may happen that it's worth knowing about in advance. If you are not aware of what might happen when meditating, and why, then there's a very big chance that you will think you're doing it wrong, it's not working and, most tragic of all, quit before enjoying the big benefits possible.
Knowing the common meditation
happenings helps you to continue with
confidence that Mind Calm is working.
Proceeding unaware of these meditation happenings, there's also a high chance you might become frustrated and resist what happens. Such an attitude makes meditations unnecessarily uncomfortable. So please take
heed of what I'm about to share - it can be the difference between Mind Calm being the meditation technique that you've been looking for versus feeling let down by a practice that offered so much but failed to deliver the results you thought you wanted.
Earlier in the book I mentioned that it is the mind's natural tendency to want to be happy. When it comes to your body, it has the natural predisposition to heal anytime it is given the opportunity. Mind Calm offers it this chance. When you close your eyes, engage GAAWO and start playing with your Calm Thoughts, you will find that your body gets to enjoy a great deal of rest.
When the body rests it heals.
Healing is an active process: stored stresses from the past day, week, year or decade are released by the body while maintenance and repair projects are also undertaken by your incredible inner intelligence. Due to the scientifically proven mind-body connection, all of this very natural and positive healing activity in your body is reflected in your mind - with things moving in there, too.
During your lifetime your body has picked up stress. You may have had a difficult childhood, experienced some trauma, gone through difficult relationship splits, and/or simply dealt with a range of pressures relating to your family, finances, work, home and so on. For some people, there simply aren't enough hours in the night to get enough sleep to release all of the stresses that have been
gathered over the previous day, week, years or decades. So when you sit down to meditate, it is very common for the body to immediately want to set about releasing the accumulated stress. This movement in your body can be witnessed within the mind in a number of different ways, with the top eight common meditation happenings shared now.
Happening 1: Memories
While your mind does its best to make sense of stress-releasing activity occurring in the body, you may notice memories crop up. These could be memories from what happened earlier that day or relate to events that happened much earlier in your life. If they are âpositive', you can end up falling into a mind trap of giving them too much attention. If you do, you will leave the present moment, no longer be consciously aware and end up lost in reminiscent thinking. Albeit nice for a while, positive memories are dead when compared to the awe-inspiring aliveness of the here and now - so let them go.
At the other end of the memory spectrum are those you'd rather forget for good. Whenever negative memories come to mind it is common to want to drop into analysing them or feel compelled to push them away:
Why am I remembering this old memory? I thought I'd dealt with that memory in therapy years ago. I guess that was another waste of money then!
No, not at all, as I'm sure the therapy did provide benefit. However, what you are witnessing during your Mind Calm sitting is your body
finally getting around to releasing it. This is a very positive thing! You want to let the memory pass freely through your awareness and let it go. Remember, you become attached to what you resist. Pushing negative memories away gives them unwarranted power and is counterproductive, as resistance causes more stress. The best thing to do whenever you notice negative memories in your mind is to engage GAAWO. Yes, your mind might immediately want to grab your attention back again by recalling the memory. If that happens, be courageous by rising above judging and resisting the memory thought by again letting it go with the help of GAAWO. After a while, you will find the memory fades away as you stop giving any of your attention to it.
For more stubborn negative memories, which you find yourself compelled to think at length about, check out the
Peace with Mind Protocol in Chapter 10
for a highly effective non-therapeutic way to get peace with the more intense memories that don't want to budge.
Multiple stresses being released simultaneously from your body can show up in your mind as abstract dream-like images. Dreams are one of the ways your mind makes sense of a group of stresses releasing at the same time, which helps to explain why you tend to dream most at night when your body reaches its deepest levels of rest.
Although it is common to want to analyse your dreams, perhaps with the positive intention of finding out what they can teach you, this can also be a mind trap.
Dream interpretation justifies lots of thinking and again acts as a distraction from present moment awareness. Despite some dreams being fascinating, not to mention funny, let them go as fast as they appear by returning to GAAWO and continuing with your Calm Sitting. Doing so will allow the body to heal more quickly and lead to more Mind Calm in the long run.
Every so often you will have an absolutely amazing meditation when your body releases a huge amount of stress and undertakes multiple healing and repair projects simultaneously. The only problem with these meditations is that you might not feel that they are amazing - mainly because all the healing activity in your body can appear in your mind as millions of thoughts!
During busy Calm Sittings like these, it is common for the commentator in your mind to pipe up unhelpfully:
This isn't working
or
I think I will stop for now and try again later
. If you aren't careful you can let your mind stop you from benefiting from a highly healing meditation. It is vitally important to be clear that Mind Calm is about enjoying peace of mind sometimes and peace with mind the rest of the time. Busy Calm Sittings are great opportunities for you to practise being at peace with your thoughts. Let them come and go, while remembering they do so within the context of calm conscious awareness. If you try to avoid busy Calm
Sittings or resist them when they happen, then you will never enjoy the inner freedom and fearlessness that peace with mind provides.
The sky doesn't care how many birds are
flying through it or if they are black birds
or white turtledoves. Similarly, conscious
awareness does not care about the quality or
quantity of thoughts happening within it.
Only your mind cares about how many thoughts happen or whether they are pretty thoughts or ugly. Whenever you are having what feel like millions of thoughts, then engage GAAWO and play with seeing the thoughts instead of being the thoughts.
Upon noticing lots of thoughts happening, it is common for the mind to produce thoughts about the thoughts. In cases like these, you are essentially having thoughts about thoughts, which is quite funny if you think about it! Your mind will want to judge the amount or content of the thoughts happening. If you don't see the judgement thoughts about your thoughts then you will suffer from resisting their existence and risk ending your Calm Sitting prematurely. Trust me, thinking about thinking is perhaps one of the most pointless kinds of thinking, so remember:
Lots of thoughts when meditating
equals lots of healing!
Do you want to know one of the funniest things about meditation and the mind? The purpose of meditating regularly is not to change your mind but, instead, to rest in conscious awareness and thus change your relationship with your mind. This means that if you leave present moment awareness to check in with the mind to ask it how you're getting on, it will more often than not say that nothing has changed. And it could be right. Nothing might have changed when it comes to the content of the mind. The same old thought patterns may continue. However, despite this, if you ask the people in your life how you're getting on, they will often tell you that you are consistently more calm, kinder and happier.