Articles

Training aspects of your mind

Understanding and using your mind to its greater extent

Life in today’s world often poses significant challenges. We live in an era where there is a constant demand on our time and on our attention resources. In our personal and our professional lives, we have to cope with an overload of information that requires us to constantly engage and respond to people and to situations outside of ourselves. We are often left feeling overwhelmed with stress and strain.

As a result, more and more people are turning to alternative and complementary health practices to support their mental, emotional and spiritual health. According to a recent US National Health Statistics Report published in 2015, about 21 million adults in the US practice yoga while about 18 million adults practice some form of meditation as alternative and complementary practices to aid their health.

Baridu provides opportunities to learn mental and spiritual skills that can serve as complementary health practices to increase our effectiveness in our day-to-day doings, to improve our ability to cope with the stresses and emotions of daily life, and to expand our spiritual awareness. One way to improve our engagement with life in the modern world is to become aware of the power of mind. It is with our minds that we think, organize ourselves, make decisions, observe, interact with and otherwise organize our reality.

But what is mind? Conventional scientific thinking equates mind with the conscious processes occurring in the physical brain. Although the brain is almost certainly the most complex organ in the physical body, is the mind really in the brain? Psychologists further complicate the notion of mind by classifying mind into conscious, subconscious and unconscious components all of which play different roles.

Then there are those spiritually oriented thinkers who not only refute the notion of mind limited to the brain but actually consider the brain as merely a “switch box” for the real mind. To them, the real mind is actually a field of energy existing around and interpenetrating the physical body. These spiritually oriented thinkers liken the brain to a radio, with the real mind sending “waves” to the brain. In this analogy, the voices coming out of the radio are not native to the radio but are rather transmitted to it.

Suffice to say, the notion of mind is complex. In this brief article and the next few to follow, I will not settle on any specific notion or definition of mind. Rather, I will focus on some practical ways we can train certain aspects of mind as earlier discussed to improve our personal and professional lives.

I will introduce 10 short practices which can help you engage more with your conscious mind. These practices can help you gain greater control and use of this aspect of your mind.

These are not practices I created. Rather they derive from established spiritual traditions I have encountered over the past fifteen years of my own mental and spiritual training and development.

I have personally benefited from using each of these practices. In coming communications, I shall expound upon each one of these 10 short practices in greater detail. I shall make connections with the traditions the practices derive from. I shall explain how they have been beneficial to me and how they may be beneficial to you. The 10 short practices are listed below. Stay tuned for more on these!

Observing thoughts

Controlling thoughts

Contemplation

Concentration

Meditation

Structured thinking

Visualization

Memory

Breathing

Soul mirror

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Decision making and plannning

Managing time and activities in order to have a better life

Today, I want to share some simple decision making and time management tips that have helped me in my own life. I gleaned these tips from an “old school” self-help book dating back to 1973 that I learned from in the past. The book is entitled How to Organize Your Time and Your Life, written by Alan Lakein. Alan was a bit of a time management self-help mentor in his own time.

Alan reminds us that we all come into the world with a finite amount of time. Time is the basic resource we all start with. As we proceed through life, we then make hundreds of decisions throughout the hours and minutes of each day. The results of these decisions determine the course of our lives. As our lives get more complicated, we may feel overwhelmed by the demands we put on ourselves or that others put on us. We often hear ourselves and others say that we do not have time. “I don’t have time!” Such a common utterance. I am sure that each one of us has uttered it at one point or another. We also undoubtedly know at least one other person who has.

But do we really never have time? Alan thinks not. According to him, we all have all the time we need. We merely need to know how to manage our time better. Better time management is important because it means we can free ourselves to do other things that are important to us in life. Better time management frees us to enjoy life more, to get more out of what we do.

In order to better manage our time, it helps to learn how to get better at planning and decision making. Engaging in planning is engaging in decision making. In my opinion, this is the essential message in the book.

Planning and decision making are interrelated. According to Alan, planning is a key activity because it enables us determine the future in the present. Alan’s recommendation is all kinds of planning (short, medium and long term) all involve two activities: making a list and setting priorities among the items in your list.

Making your list can be simple. Your list consists of the items you intend to accomplish in your plan for the day. Prioritizing items in your list means you assign different degrees of importance or urgency to the tasks you need to accomplish. Alan recommends using an “ABC” system. The ABCs represent a hierarchy of importance in the priorities assigned to items in the list. In other words, items assigned a priority A are of a higher priority than those assigned priority B, which are in turn higher than those assigned priority C. Alan further explains that if there is more than one item assigned to priority A, the items can be further prioritized as A1, A2, A3 and so on. In other words, a task assigned to priority A1 will be done before one assigned to A2. The same can be done for priorities B and C.

What about when we want to have more substantial plans for the short, medium or long term beyond a single day? Alan still suggests that making a list can be helpful. For more substantial plans, Alan suggests identifying goals relevant to the plan and thinking about concrete activities that can bring those goals into fruition. So it is important to have some idea of the distinction between an overarching goal and a concrete activity. The overarching goal is what you want to achieve. The concrete activity (and a goal can be associated with more than one concrete activity) is something you do that contributes to achieving your goal. For example, your goal could be to become more adept at meditation. A concrete activity then could be spending 10 – 20 minutes, 3 times a week, practicing meditation.

Alan’s method for planning and decision making can be summarized as follows:

i) Identify the goals important to you for short, medium or long term

ii) Classify those goals based on their priorities as seen as the present time (A, B, C or even A1, A2, etc.)

iii) First come up with concrete activities for those goals classified under priority A

iv) Classify those concrete activities based on their priorities as seen at the present time

v) Schedule your plan with the highest priority goals and their highest priority activities taking precedence

vi) Execute your plan, and revisit it frequently, to inform it and to make changes

I use these ideas in the work I do for my own life. I found that for me, it helps to include feedback into the final step of Alan’s method. He simply says “do them as scheduled”. I think the doing is the most important part, however I also think it is important to interact with your plan, in order to update and to amend it. Just remember that the plan is there to help you accomplish things. It is better to avoid indulging too much in amending your plan, and focusing on doing.

The plans we have been discussing in this article are the personal kind, meant to help you become more effective in managing the time and the activities of your life. You can give some of the ideas a try to discover if they work for you. Ultimately having a plan of some kind can help us achieve what we set out to achieve in our lives.

Different kinds of meditation

Sitting, moving, mindful, spiritual

When we think about meditation, we might imagine monks sitting with eyes closed and with palms on knees sitting in a lotus position. Alternatively, we might imagine adherents or devotees praying diligently at a holy place, quiet, deep and devoted.

But is meditation limited to only these forms of expressions? Beyond these perhaps stereotypical images of people engaging in meditation, we may wonder what forms meditation actually take in the modern world. Before we even delve into what these forms are, I think it would be helpful for me to share my notion of what meditation is.

What is meditation? Meditation is characterized by a state where the mind is calm and still. The mind is neither engaged in internal thoughts, nor is it focused on absorbed by external events. Rather, in the state of meditation, the mind is calm, clear of thoughts but aware.

The US National Health Statistics Report (a national study of adults in the US on their use of complementary health practices) which was published in 2015 classified meditation into three main categories based on what people practice in the US. These categories are mantra meditation, mindfulness meditation and spiritual meditation. For mantra meditation they included transcendental meditation (TM), relaxation response and clinically standard meditation. For Mindfulness meditation, they included Vipassana (a kind of Buddhist meditation practice), Zen Buddhist meditation, mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR), and mindfulness based cognitive practice (MBCP). For spiritual meditation, their categories were centering prayer and contemplative meditation. In addition to these three main categories, the report also acknowledged and included meditation used as part of other practices, such as yoga, tai chi and qigong.

Depending on your prior experience, you may or may not know some of the traditions associated with the three broad categories of meditation. Overall, according to this report, in 2012 8.4% of adults in the US engaged in one practice or another that can be associated with meditation while 10.1% engaged in practices associated with yoga, tai chi and qigong, a percentage which has steadily increased over the three years (2002, 2007, and 2012) that the study surveyed participants.

In my opinion the three categories the report gave for meditation maybe misleading when the subcategories are taken into account. For example, transcendental meditation is not all about using mantras. Mantras may be used in Zen Buddhist practice, although Zen Buddhist meditation may have a larger dose of mindfulness meditation practices. Vipassana meditation, classified under mindfulness meditation, can have a significant component of contemplative practice, which is associated with spiritual meditation. The fourth category, “meditation used as part of other practices”, seems a bit vague.

These categories given in the report are however helpful in giving us an idea of perhaps the kinds of things that meditation can be associated with. Mantras can help focus or clear the mind during meditation. Mindfulness meditation may deal more with the experiences of the here and now, such as anxiety, stress and gaining greater awareness of mind and body. Spiritual meditation extends beyond the here and now into the realm of spirit. The stereotypical image of meditation I shared at the beginning of this post of monks and adherents meditating and praying perhaps speaks more to mindfulness and spiritual meditation than to mantra meditation.

I would like to offer an alternative categorization that is not a scheme I came up with but that comes from the ancients. I offer to categorize meditative practices instead as stillness based and movement based. For stillness meditation, you can imagine all those practices where the practitioner is seated still, perhaps in a lotus pose or on a chair. So examples of stillness based meditation are MBCP, MBSR, TM, Vipassana, and Yoga. Examples of movement based meditation practices are qigong, tai chi and perhaps the dance of the dervishes. In fact, other movement based practices found in shamanic traditions that involve drumming and dancing and that can get practitioners into an altered state of mind can arguably be termed movement based practices. Both stillness and/or movement based practices can have mindfulness and spiritual components, depending on what the practitioner’s intent is. Classifying practices that use meditation may not be so simple after all.