When intense situations arise our emotions take over and act for us. But we can take a moment to breathe and separate ourselves from these situations. We can look at ourselves as an outside observer and realize that we are having a moment of anger, instead of looking at ourselves as angry.
We can train ourselves to slow down and then respond to any given moment rather than react. When we react we can get into fights, or turn to hurtful gossip.
I’m not the hippy/spiritual type but I read a book called Becoming Supernatural by Joe Dispenza. I don’t agree with everything that’s been said in his book but Joe does bring up many important points.
Biologically our bodies produce peptides which are chemicals that cause feelings in our body. Usually they occur due to environmental stimuli.
Example: Let’s say you were having a bad day at work and you missed a deadline. Your boss may have asked to see you privately in their office to discuss why you missed the deadline again. Right away you could be flooded with anxiety because your body has just released matching chemicals. This has happened for good reason – you could be about to lose your job!
Thankfully, nothing bad happened and your boss just told you not to miss any more deadlines. No harm done! But now because of that negative experience you associate deadlines with disappointing your boss and now those same chemicals flood your body all over again. This causes you to miss the deadline yet again and you really disappoint your boss.
There was no real external stimuli to cause you to miss the deadline this time, it was simply a consistent reminder of your negative past experience with disappointing your boss. Your brain recalled past emotions connected with previous experiences pulling you back into a previous state you had before.
Keeping you in an endless cycle where nothing new happens and you keep feeling the same feelings because your environment acts like a memory bank for your past.
Because of this we end up thinking the same thoughts, which cause us to feel the same emotions that cause the same actions and make the same choices that produce the same results. Every single time. Our self doesn’t like change and so this is what we call behaviour.
The Unofficial Definition of Insanity
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
Essentially, our future becomes a re-run of the past just like old TV shows.
Our control-freak brains are primed to gravitate to the familiar and that means patterns. It prefers this over the uncertainty of the unknown. So we unconsciously choose the same things no matter how much we don’t want to. This is why it is so hard for us to break out of any negative cycle!
How to Break the Endless Cycle
Joe Dispenza suggested meditating as a solution to this problem.
There are many ways to meditate and these practices have been around forever.
There are guided meditations, silent meditations, intention based meditations where you focus on specific feelings and walking meditations. The list goes on but these are some that I will mention.
To put meditation in the simplest way I know how is to say you basically lie or sit and do nothing. You think about nothing and do nothing. You just breathe and focus on the feeling of your breath. You will have thoughts that come to mind and when they do, let them pass and go back to focusing on your breath. Whatever thoughts that come don’t mean anything to you in that moment. You’re meditating so nothing matters but your breathing.
To be honest, at first it’s a very weird feeling. Everything in you wants to do something! It doesn’t want to sit still and do nothing because for our entire lives we’ve been taught to be busy always doing something. Our brain doesn’t like this!
Sometimes I’ve felt a weird “pressure” in my head as if I’m holding back a tidal wave of thought like a dam does to flowing water. I’ve looked into this and some people go into weird spiritual stories of the 3rd eye opening and other potential nonsense. I look at all of this from a strictly scientific, logical, evidence, or experience based perspective. So I can only go by my own experiences when there is a lot of mis-information out there and often you don’t know what is true and what isn’t.
Our minds naturally like to wander. We have something like 70,000 thoughts that go through our head every single day. Often they are the same as the thoughts we had the day before.
Many of us are bombarded with ideas that never stop coming from social media, the television, podcasts, videos etc. It never ends!
It’s modern day brainwashing if you ask me, because whether you want to accept it or not these forms of media are conditioning you to think, feel, view and believe things a certain way.
Meditation puts an end to this.
This is because meditation is a tool that interrupts your mental cycle or program.
You begin to shift your focus away from the outside stimuli which could be your present struggles and worries and take it internal where you have complete control over you. This means your actions, your thoughts, and your beliefs. You are the only thing that you can control. And so when you change the way you view the world around you – the world around you changes.
During your meditations Joe recommends to focus on creating and feeling emotions of what it would feel like to already have the things you want before they happen. This is kind of working backwards here like an engineer would reverse engineer something to figure out how it works.
It’s important to feel feelings like gratitude, inspiration, joy, excitement, happiness, or peace here.
If the external environment causes us to feel chemical emotions, then surely if we feel these emotions first they will cause us to create the external environment that matches the feeling. Then we begin to act in a manner or become the person that gets us X.
After all, I’ve mentioned in a previous article that feelings cause actions, and these actions create results. That is why it is so important to try to feel good and avoid wallowing in negative emotions. When we feel bad or negative, it causes us to act in a manner that is counter productive to our goals. Others may not like how we treat them and so they may not be as willing to work with us and opportunities may be lost.
Nobody wants to be around an Negative Nathan all the time, because the truth is, it’s exhausting.
Visualize your end goal or result daily for as long as it takes. You want to see, hear, taste, touch, smell and feel as much as you can to emulate your desire. This is no different than reading a novel and imagining the scene play out in your mind. It’s the exact same idea here.
When you do this you are training yourself to become someone else. A new you that breaks the endless cycle of habit. The more you do this the weaker your old self becomes and the stronger your new self becomes.
If you go about your day and don’t know what to do, think about what the new version of you would do and act accordingly. And go live your life as a new you!
My Experience With Meditation
Right away after meditating for one hour per day in just 2-3 days the results I got shocked me! The thousands of thoughts that floated through my head daily became completely quiet. My mind was clear and empty.
Only the thoughts I needed entered my mind and they were usually related to the specific task at hand. I noticed the overwhelming flow of thoughts that occasionally caused me uneasiness when I just wanted to relax – were gone!
I began to notice I no longer had racing thoughts running through my mind all day and I began to react in a different way than I normally would when facing an aggravating situation. I could very easily pause and think about how I wanted to respond instead of being reactive. It’s like I was literally training myself how to respond in moments of aggravation.
I found that meditation can train us to slow down and temporarily separate ourselves from our emotions. This causes clearer thinking because we are no longer bombarded by negative thoughts or mind chatter allowing us a chance to press pause.
I can clearly see how valuable this is for people who struggle with anger and impulsiveness. I think more people can benefit from meditation practices then they know.
Growing up I was taught meditation was forbidden for religious reasons. Lots of people have different views on meditation, some praise it and others demonize it. However there seems to be scientific evidence of the benefits.
So to avoid any negative stigma let’s just call it being “mindful”.
Mindfulness is essentially when you stop whatever you’re doing and take yourself back to the present moment. Just breathe and realize where you really are.
You are here and not in your head of thoughts.
Your friend,
Jamie
