Category Archives: Stillness

The two core health essentials during a lockdown for your mental health.

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Exercise (Movement) and Meditation (Stillness)
The two core health essentials during a lockdown for your mental health.

Today’s message is a simple way of maintaining a good habit for your mental health through lockdowns and other trauma effects of Covid19.

Exercise and meditation go together.

If you do one but not the other, you are losing a lot of benefit that you could be receiving for your mental and physical health.

I notice many people often do one of the two really well and neglect the other. There are the people who exercise a lot and are physically fit and energised, but are anxious and cannot sit still in a room. Then there are the people who meditate really well and deep but are depressed and slow moving, finding it hard to act when needed in the world, hiding from the world.

Those who exercise a lot, tend to be the extroverts in the world, and those who meditate a lot, tend to be the introverts in the world. This is their super power.

With Covid right now, both of those super powers are very much needed – together. Doing both is very beneficial and will help greatly in keeping you mentally stable and healthy through these lockdowns and world covid trauma.

So it is good to ask the two most basic questions each day –

Q1. Have I exercised/moved enough?
Q2. Have I meditated/centered myself enough?

Doing both, you are helping reduce any excess anxiety and any excess depression brought on by the ongoing effects of Covid19.

One, helps reduce the trauma effects of the fight/flight response. The other the trauma effects of the freeze response. One connects you to the world, the other, connects you to yourself.
One helps you go in, one helps you come out. Both of the in-and-out movements are necessary for a healthy stable mind in times of trauma, instability and change.

So which one were you missing today?

Always make time for both each day.

The big value of Stillness

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“True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.”

Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks (2003)

Those still moments in your day are very precious. It is very important to have time in each day where you have that quiet stillness in your body and your mind.

In those moments you will think clearer and be closer to the real solution to issues and problems that you have to solve.

Rather than thinking through everything. You stop, be still, be blank, allow space and time for things to reveal themselves in a new way. It is a reset of your normal habitual pathways and programmed thinking.

By allowing stillness you affirm that there is an intelligence far greater than thinking thoughts which also exists. If you don’t believe this, you will highly likely never allow your mind to be still.

But this stillness time is vital to your health, productivity and fulfillment in life.

So, have you taken time out today to be still? If not, plan it in, make it important. You will progress much more smoother in life with such a practice.

If you are not used to it, stillness may initially look and feel like staring blankly into thin air or out of a window. If you haven’t practiced stillness much in the past you may find yourself drifting off. Your mental mind has been so over used with little pause, that it is exhausted when you stop and not think.

You haven’t used the pause button for so long that when you do, you feel the tiredness and habit of wanting to sleep or just staring blankly. That’s not quality stillness. That’s your body wanting to catch up, rest and recharge. So you may need to rest for a while before the quality returns and benefits are there. Although the resting will also be beneficial to your brain.

NEWS
For people in Melbourne, I will be appearing on a new TV show that started three weeks ago on Channel 31 titled Health, Wellbeing and Lifestyle.
It will air every Tuesday 12pm and repeat Thursdays 9am and Fridays 8.30pm.

I will appear in the following episodes (2019) and the topic:
Dec 24th Episode 5 – How we Heal
Dec 31st Episode 6 – Trauma (Biggest block to healing)
Jan 14th Episode 8 – Anxiety (Hyper Arousal)
Feb 4th Episode 11 – Depression (Hypo Arousal)
Feb 11th Episode 12 – Full Presence and Spirit

Each of my segments runs for around eight minutes. The show runs for 30 minutes. If you are not in Melbourne, the program will be streamed live and you can watch it here from Channel 31’s website.

Eventually these episodes will appear in my youtube channel.

Mastering Stillness and Speed

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“Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections. It slows the ball down so that we might hit it. It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, make space for gratitude and wonder. Stillness allows us to persevere. To succeed.”

Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key, (2019)

Stillness is vastly underrated. Although with mindfulness this is now slowly changing.

There is an amount of speed that is optimal when doing and working that allows us to get a lot done without too much stress. At some point additional speed doesn’t help to get more done. That’s where more mistakes creep in, thinking jumbles, creates drama and the effort creates more costly maintenance and wastes time.

Conversely, there is an optimal stillness level. Where things slow down, get into focus, thinking clears, more intelligence and creativity are freed up and new ideas and solutions are hatched. At some point any additional stillness creates complacency, laziness, disengagement, over drifting and stuckness as momentum grounds to a halt and direction is lost.

How do you make sure you stay in that optimum range? Also how do you make sure you don’t stay stuck in speed or stillness too long? You need the alternating flow of both, in that optimum range for the best productivity and best use of your time and energy.

We have been culturally stuck in that high gear speed for too long and not nearly spending enough time cultivating the power of stillness.

Stillness allows you access to your depth and to more time in the present moment, within which everything gets done.

It is very important to make some stillness a priority in your day. It will sharpen your mind and help focus more of your doing and its speed.

The Stress and Trauma of Modern Times

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“Mindfulness involves paying attention to something, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally….You actually have to tell your brain that is your intention. It won’t know what you’re doing, and it will priorities its activities based on your emotions or your mental energy or your physical needs.”

Stan Rodski, The Neuroscience of Mindfulness, (2019)

Another good book released earlier this year on mindfulness. A psychologist/cognitive neuroscientist, talks about the basics of mindfulness.

Unless you take control of your thinking mind, it will run you. Your conscious awareness needs to direct your thinking mind to stop. It doesn’t need to stop for long to de stress your over cluttered thinking thoughts. But stop it must.

Without conscious attention to stopping, your brain will run on auto-pilot and continue to rehash all the unresolved traumatic events of your past.

This fast paced period of time in our history is stressing your fight/flight emergency system out. Most of our stress is from past traumas where our nervous system has not fully come down from the high alert state, created by one event or the high level of continued pressure from many events, in our current environment.

TV news is traumatic to your body. Video and satellite crosses and instant transfer of bad news from any part of the globe was never there one hundred years ago. Now it is on tap, through TV, social media, radio, newspapers etc. And your body responds as if it is a secondary traumatic event happening to you now.

Witnessing a traumatic event can be just as traumatic to your body as actually being in the event.

So it is very important to consciously each day have the awareness to switch off and stop at some point, or at a number of points.

De stressing daily is vital to your health.

The importance of Space and Stillness each Day

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“When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.”
(Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now, 2004)

Fifteen years on and this book is still a timeless classic, as readable today as it was when it was first published. It still remains the number one book on my bedside table.

Body mindfulness meditation helps to create that space to make room for new solutions, new connections in your brain which otherwise could not be created. Downtime is critical to growing and repairing your brain functions.

Some space and stillness time is very important to have at some point in your day. It is critical to your growth and a healthy mind and body. It also doesn’t feel good to be on the go all day long without pause. Constant stress on your body leads to inflammation internally, which leads to some of the leading causes of disease, ageing and death around the world.

It is that important, to create space.

So why don’t we do it naturally? Because the old habits of western society say that doing more is better. Your intellect wants to do do do and go go go. Accomplish more, fill all idle time, no blank spaces. Somehow this has become ingrained in our culture, become the norm.

Our thinking minds constantly overrule the needs of our body, our heart and our spirit. What these parts of us need and want sadly don’t get much of a look in, until it is serious or they break down.

Often when a mediation practice takes a back seat it is being overruled by a very convincing mind program that says ‘doing more is more important then being right now’. And so your being doesn’t get a chance to properly correct your doing. Left too long, is when people begin to report drops in productivity, feeling lost, or unfulfilled or stuck in a rat race. Left further unchecked, leads to disease and breaks in body function.

Left to its own devices, the intellect sees no value in space and stillness. Because it means the intellect gets turned down even switched off for a period. The intellect wants to always remain in power, in total control, so switching off is not an option.

So it takes some doing initially, to take the time each day to switch it off, stop the rampant thinking and just be and be still, for a little while, coming more back into your body. Even if your eyes remain open. This stillness time will help re organise your thinking processes and allow much more efficient use of your time and energy, reducing stress and improving health.

Connecting Deeper and Lowering Suicide Rates

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I was alarmed by the figures of youth suicide reported in the paper in Melbourne today. 3,128 (aged 15-44) died by suicide in a single year. This is almost three times the amount of deaths from car accidents each year. Every day, there are about 8 suicides and 180 attempts. So that means that there are 68,620 suicide attempts each year. That is a lot of pain and angst that people have within them which they do not know how to resolve and heal in a healthy way.

Such pain points to a massive disconnect within themselves and with those around them. This leads to a lot of trapped emotion in the body. If this build up isn’t released in a healthy way, the pain can reach levels where the only way out logically seems to be to kill oneself.

What’s also concerning is that many times, families and work colleagues do not see it coming. So what can you do?
Internally – a mindfulness practice is critical to connect you within yourself to create an outlet for this trapped emotional pain.
Externally – making more meaningful connections with your loved ones is critical. Don’t always assume they are okay just because they are not saying anything. One way to facilitate this is to ask people you care about meaningful questions and ask them often.

I’ll give some examples here but what is important to note is the state you are in when you ask them. You slow down, become mindful, connect within yourself first, and then ask the questions slowly, with a lot of care and then wait, giving the person a lot of time and space to answer. The person must feel safe to go a little deeper than normal. Going deeper requires more time otherwise you’ll just get a shallow response.

Questions:
What’s been on your mind that you think would be difficult to talk about?
What makes you sad about yourself? Sad about the world?
What do you wish you were able to do better, if it were possible?
What makes you angry about yourself? About the world?
When was the last time you got scared or a big fright?
What scares you about yourself? About the world?

Enter The Quiet that is already there

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In my research travels I came across a quote recently that is worth noting here.

“Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there – buried under 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day”.
Deepak Chopra

This is very true in my experience. Underneath you are already whole, complete and perfect as a being. It’s all there, buried under years of built up traumas, negative experiences, well meaning parents, misdirection, unconscious friends and relatives etc.

Mindfulness meditation work redirects you to develop better habits with what’s most important – the real you. The free, alive, healthy, embodied you. And it is all there within you. The gold is sitting there inside. But you have to go in to free it.

The Self Healing Mindfulness Meditation classes I regularly run aim for just that, to build the time you spend where it really counts – within your inner body. Accessing more of who you really are, clearing out more of the old outdated unfinished patterns and emotions and giving more freedom to your cells to do the work they know how to do, but can’t because your thinking mind gets in the way.
That quote by Deepak is a nice reminder of who you really are. The more reminders we have each day, the easier it is to change old outdated habits we have been brought up with.

Talking about reminders, Eckhart Tolle is coming to Melbourne Australia November 18th this year. For a one evening talk. I highly recommend attending! Tickets through Ticketmaster.

You do not need Thoughts to Think, you need Silence

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“Do you have the patience to wait
until your mud settles & the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
until the right action arises by itself?”
Lao Tzu

This is a great quote for describing aspects of Mindfulness Meditation – especially for self healing.

The inner you (subconscious) needs time, space and usually a slowing down of the mind to connect and do its job properly, for you to heal and move closer to your goals.

This stillness time is crucial to have each day, if you want to work more effectively and have more control over your self healing. Then once things are still and clear and settled, you then need patience to allow the next movement to happen spontaneously in your body and in your mind.

I do this everyday to some extent with each and every client that I work with. There is always some time for stillness, quiet, silence.

This quote also applies very well to solving problems and making decisions when you are stuck.

Just stop, relax, calm down, settle, allow some time, then wait in stillness, silence, until the answer (the next right action) spontaneously, automatically ‘pops’ into your head.

Why does this work so well? Because when you do this, you are accessing MORE of your whole being to solving the problem. You are not limiting the answer to the narrow range of your intellect.

This taps into the common saying that “we only use 5-10% of our mind’s full potential”. In this stillness, this silence, you will find more of the other 90%.

This also ties in with my standard quote at the foot of all my Mindfulness Meditation emails…

” You do not need Thoughts to Think, you need Silence”

Joseph Campbell – That ‘still’ place

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I was reading a little of Joseph Campbell recently. For those who don’t know, Campbell was a very highly regarded American Professor and writer who specialised in the fields of comparative mythology and religion. A brilliant man and observer of life.

From his book ‘The Hero’s Journey’ Joseph Campbell talking about his early years as a very good fast track and field runner says:

“There has got to be a still place in there and the movement has to take place around it. I lost two races that were very important to me because I lost the still place. The race was so important that I put myself out there to win the race instead of to run the race. And the whole thing got thrown off.”

This is such a great explanation of what often happens when you lose that still centered place within your body and you allow life and thoughts to take over. Whenever you work ahead of yourself, (already at the destination in your head) that you lose sight of the present moment in your body now, things don’t work as well. You lose clear creative thinking and the quality of your decision making drops. Why? Because you are not operating in true present reality and you are not operating from the still quiet place within you and your body.

MIndfulness Mediation and Body Psychotherapy work helps to change this.

For when you run the race mindfully (staying and responding to your body in the present moment along the way,) it increases your chances, that by the finish line, you’ll be up front and in the winning position