When out of Whack, Reboot.
8 Tips to Calm the Mind, Reboot, and Cultivate Meditation Skills.
This month’s blog is all about how to reboot when we are malfunctioning. This full moon follows the winter solstice, an incredibly important day here in Alaska. Today was the first day of the year where the amount of light begins slowly increasing. We are also blessed by a full moon illuminating the snow-covered world and leading us brightly into the full light of summer. The darkness of winter is like a reboot for those of us in a far north. It is time to rest more and we are practically forced to look inward.
According to yogic philosophy, suffering is caused by the five kleshas, or the veils of illusion (obstacles to enlightenment), which are naturally part of the human experience. These obstacles are; ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion, and fear of death.
Sutra 2.11 tells us that when the kleshas are active in our actions and interactions, we can meditate to dissolve them.
T.K.V. Desikachar says that we can
“Advance toward a state of reflection to reduce their impact and prevent them from taking over.”
and
Nischala Joy Devi guides us to use any inward practice.
When the kleshas are active, we are all messed up and caught up in suffering. Just like messed up electronics, our minds and bodies can often be fixed by updating and resetting them.
That’s why we practice. That’s why we mediate. That’s why we come back. To reboot.
Inward practices like asana, journaling, dance, chanting, prayer, art, and immersing in wilderness are practices that update our operating system while our meditation practice is the hard reboot. Being able to rest the mind in meditation, albeit an extremely effective way to overcome suffering, can be quite challenging. Our fidgety or uncomfortable bodies, our chatty minds, and own whimsical emotions can easily bubble up and distract us from meditating making meditation itself feel like suffering.
Learning to meditate can be a lot of time looking for the ‘on/off switch’ and then just about as much time figuring out how to use the dang switch once we find it. Overcoming suffering with meditation can be just about as frustrating as being outsmarted by a machine. When meditation is a challenge, use these
8 tips to calm the mind, reboot, and cultivate meditation.
Practice Yoga
The physical practice of asana (postures) helps build flexibility, strength, and proper posture to be able to sit comfortably for meditation and to allow for complete full breath patterns. When our torso is supported and spacious, the diaphragm and lungs are free to expand and contract smoothly through their entire range. The movement practice creates a clear point of focus, helps increase breath capacity, can become rhythmical meditation, and helps develop our internal awareness and ability to tap into and watch our sensations.
Periods of Mauna or Silence
Deliberating creating periods of silence weans our minds off the cycle of stimulus and reaction. We consciously limit stimulus to give ourselves a fighting chance of not reacting constantly and allowing the mind some rest. If we have less coming in, we have less to deal with. When we choose to practice periods of silence, this includes all forms of communication both outgoing and incoming. This means we choose a period of time where we limit or abstain from verbal and written communications (including journaling), deliberate conscious internal dialogue (such as an imaginary conversation with somebody), gestures, TV, games, internet, interactive activities, listening to music, and reading. It’s almost guaranteed that any conscious silence practice will result in a whole lot of mental chatter for some period of time. We can use one of the practices below to help focus the mind. When we practice periods of silence for extended periods of time in retreat settings or through solo trips, eventually the mind calms from lack of input. Even if we can only practice for an hour, the more often we practice, the easier and more effective it becomes.
Mantra and Affirmations
When we consciously occupy the mind with one thought, it’s much more challenging for the kleshas to arise. We train the mind to focus on one thing. Keeping the mind here, keeps it out of trouble over there; worry, judgement, craving, aversion, and fear. Mantras are a word, phrase, or sound with a specific vibrational quality meant to occupy the mind and help develop a specific state of mind or body. While an affirmation is a positive phrase or statement in the present tense used for self-encouragement. Affirmations help to rewire the brain towards a specific goal or belief. I recently found this great set of chakra affirmations.
Tap into Sensations
Noticing the sights, sounds, smells, taste, and physical feelings of the moment helps keep us in the present tense and develops observation skills helpful in meditation. What sounds can we hear at a distance, closer, farther? Can we hear our own breath or heart beat? If we’re in a public place, we may notice the sounds, smells, and colors around us. When observing our own sensations and the world around us through sensation it is important to avoid analyzing, and only tick off the data receive. What does the chair feel like? Is it cold or soft not cheap or comfortable? The person is walking fast, not the person is in a hurry. Notice the qualities, not the reason for the qualities. Here is a list of words that help us have a vocabulary to express our observations without judgements or conclusions. We’re so trained to interpret our surroundings that we often don’t have the vocabulary to simply describe our experience.
Visualization
In order to reduce suffering we can create some type of visualization to help calm the mind down when are overwhelmed. One technique is to allow the mind to be inhale a color that calms us as and as we exhale, we watch the mind become empty and dark as if it becomes an empty room. In this way, we oscillate between increasing calm and nothingness. Another technique is to imagine the thoughts as petals or glitter in the palm of our hand. We literally bring the palm up to our lips and blow the thoughts off into the world, watching them flutter and dissipate. This visualization can be especially helpful because it allows us to see beauty in our chaos.
Focus on the Benefits of a Disturbed or Wandering Mind
Each time we are disturbed or our mind wanders it gives us an opportunity to practice bringing it back. Each time our mind get rattled is like a set or repetition of weights in training regiments. We are building our calm muscle and rewiring our brain when we consciously bring it back to the present, or when we try to bring it back (some weights are still too heavy for use to lift). As we become more adept at being calm as our mind wanders, the mind still wanders, but we can watch unaffected. It’s the difference between being in the crashing waves near shore or floating easily over the swells further out to sea. We experience the same swell and the same energy, it’s our placement or perspective that has the power to change the experience from a scary near-death washing machine experience to a relaxing experience of playfully floating over a smooth swell. We can suffer through our thoughts or enjoying the benefits, lessons, and perspective of our mental fluctuations. After all, the human mind is an amazingly intriguing and curious place.
Body Scans & Progressive Muscle Relaxation
A body scan surveys the body systematically looking for any and all sensations without attempting to change anything. Progressive muscle relaxation consciously tries to relax each part of the body or contracts and then relaxes each part of the body. With any of these techniques we are increasing our ability to tap into sensations and we are activating the parasympathetic nervous system which tells us physiologically to chill out and relax. We invoke our bodies to tell our mind that everything is alright and everything will be just fine.
Let Go of Multitasking
Do at least one activity a day, a week, a month, an hour, whatever we can manage without multitasking. This means being 100% present in the sensations and experience at hand. This is training our minds to do one thing at a time. (Technically speaking, our minds don’t actually multitask, they just jump back and forth between tasks rapidly).
When we are out of whack, all sorts of self-induced suffering happens. When we are out of whack, we can turn off and back on again to reboot with meditation or add the latest updates with inward practices that lead towards meditation and smoother functioning.
Inward practices help us overcome fluctuations of the mind and the obstacles to our natural state of peace.
Inward practices are a chance for a do over.
What are your thoughts, practices and perspectives on overcoming suffering?