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.

Persistence always beats Talent

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“As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything.”
Angela Duckworth, Grit – The Power of Passion and Perseverance, (2016)

This is a great book, a massive best seller a few years ago (it remained on the New York Times best sellers list for 20 weeks. She also has 18 million hits on her TED talk on this subject.) This is great research on why some people succeed very well and become masters and experts in their field and why others with talent do not.

The key is finding your passion in a a field and then having persistence to keep practicing, learning and correcting (even when you fail or get it wrong) over many years.

Angela has created a grit scale test that can show you or a potential hire if that person will succeed in their field or job. Just having a high test mark from school or University doesn’t correlate with success on the job. But having perseverance and not giving up, does.

In order to not give up you must home in on your passion. The passion will give you the drive to persist, especially through the rough and down periods when things are not going well.

She summarises mastery into two equations:

Talent x Effort = Skill
Skill x Effort = Achievement

The more you practice and don’t give up, the higher the chance of achieving mastery in a field or job. Talent can help but it is the effort that really does it. In fact you can have very little talent up front but with persistent effort become a master in your field.

A lot of experts and geniuses in their fields actually got that way through huge long term effort and yet only had average talent in the beginning, if that.

The same with Mindfulness practice – the more you practice, the more you will learn and correct, and in the long run, mastery will be there.

The balance your body needs in a revved up world

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“in 1990, 49 per cent of Europeans felt their work schedule was too strenuous. By 2000, that had increased to 60 per cent – and those who felt themselves to be rushed were almost twice as likely to complain of classic stress disorders, such as back pain, or tight shoulders and necks.”

Robert Colvile, The Great Acceleration – How the World is Getting Faster, Faster, (2016)

A study was conducted in the early 1990s of 31 countries and then repeated again with the same countries in 2006 to measure the pace of life. What psychologists found was that the pace in 2006 had gone up by 10%. World wide, people were covering the same stretch of ground on the street in 10% less time.

So you are not imagining it when you feel like people are running around faster than ever before. It is actually happening. And more so in the more advanced and industrialised countries.

This type of speed is often good if it helps us get more done in less time, and it is tied into technology advancements. But when we get caught up in it and cannot switch off regularly, is when the body begins to feel the type of stress that can lead to problems. Problems personally and problems with others.

Psychologist Stephanie Brown says ‘for many people, their relationship to technology and speed has become more important than, or even replaced, human relationships.’

A body mindfulness practice can help bring our stress levels back into balance. So you can enjoy the benefits of the speed, (getting more done in less time,) but also enjoy the ability to switch off by choice without getting trapped in that high revved up state.

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.

Taking real control of your health

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“In a meditative state of mind, we can become aware that we are not a body, but rather limitless, non-local awareness animating or residing as a body. Resting in the spacious flow of loving awareness – which some call God – we discover that we already have, right now within us, everything we could possibly be looking for.”

Russell Targ, Limitless Mind, (2004)

How is it that you can be deeply aware of your body in a meditative mindful state? What part of you is watching the different parts of your body? How is it that you can focus on a big toe and feel it from the inside and then easily switch to another part of your body, say a shoulder and, accurately feel what is happening in there?

You can say the brain is receiving signals through the nervous system which the brain then interprets as a sensation. But who receives that information? Where are you in the physical body? Where is this awareness that knows the sensations?

This is the age old question. You’ve probably heard it before, that no surgeon when cutting open a body and looking inside, has yet to find the seat of awareness. And that’s because it isn’t material matter. It is another form of matter, one which (compared to physical matter) is invisible and formless.

How can something be invisible and formless? Microwaves are, X-rays are, Radio waves are, TV broadcasts are, Wifi signals are, sun rays are, electromagnetic waves are, and on the list goes.

We use different machines to receive and read those invisible waves. We use a body mindfulness meditation practice to contact and feel your real invisible aware self, throughout your body and even beyond, outside of your body.

This invisible awareness – the real deeper you – has access to your whole body. So you can visit any part, diseased or healthy and work on repairing it. Work on healing the trauma that damaged the part. You are that powerful. That ability is already there within you.

How much of this real aware you you have access to, shows up in the history and health of your body. Your body is always a walking history of how conscious you are. How embodied and at home the real you is in your body. The more ‘ín’ your body you are, the healthier and more vibrant it will look, feel and be.

One of the most healthy beneficial practices you can do each morning (or any time during the day) is to stop, close your eyes and check in with yourself, and ask the question – how much of me is in my body now? 10%?, 40%?, 60%?

The higher the percentage, the more effective you will be and the more healthier your body will function. There will be fewer parts out lost on their own without proper direction. Fewer parts clashing with one another and fewer parts accumulating more damage.

So scan your body with this non-local, non-material awareness and find areas that you have neglected, breathe into them, reclaim them and allow them to reconnect to your entire body. If there is a lot to clean up, this won’t always initially be a pleasant experience. But it will be worth it.

This to me is the real meaning of the term ‘ taking control of your health.’

HEAL Documentary

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“Your body loves you, it loves you unconditionally, and it’s not letting you down. Have patience and have compassion. Take one day at a time, you’re going to get there. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been sick, you can heal, and always remember that, and never forget it.”

Anthony Williams from the movie documentary, HEAL (2017)

I just finished watching a very good documentary on alternative health titled HEAL. It was released in 2017 and can be currently viewed on Netflix or Youtube (for a fee).

This documentary is very aligned with my experience in my 30 years of private practice with how we heal and why that is. It is an exciting time to be in the health industry as more and more people begin to discover how to really heal themselves.

Doing a mindfulness practice is one of the central components to deep permanent healing of issues and diseases that we once thought needed constant medication (with side effects) just to keep in check.

The power of your (1) inner belief system and (2) your past traumas, are affecting your health way much more than you probably ever realised. By deeply facing past physical trauma and past emotional trauma you can heal a whole battery of illnesses that before were confined to the medical doctors office, medications and hospitals.

Learning to go deeper within your body and mind is one of the biggest roads to better health. Take time to continually learn the language of your body and mind. You have the ability to access it more than ever before. The medical model teaches you to keep it separate from you. But it is not separate from you, unless you deliberately ignore it, which most people have done in the past.

Connecting back with your body gives you aces to deep power to transform and heal any illness. The HEAL documentary is a great step forward in opening up to a deeper real long lasting healthier life.

View the HEAL trailer here:

Healing and Preventing Diseases

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In Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against all Odds (2014), Dr Kelly A.Turner found that there are thousands of cases published in medical journals of people who had healed their cancer after doctors had decided that they were not expected to live.

She decided to interview over one hundred of such cases and analyse over one thousand written cases, to find the factors that led to the ‘miracle’ cure. Those factors were many, about 75, but there were 9 that kept showing up consistently.

So here are the 9 things that you can be doing to radically help reverse cancer or, if you don’t have cancer, to do anyway to prevent it and other diseases in future.

  1. Radically change your diet
  2. Take active control of your health
  3. Follow your intuition
  4. Take herbs and supplements
  5. Release suppressed emotions
  6. Increase positive emotions
  7. Reach out for more social support
  8. Deepen your spiritual connection
  9. Have strong reasons to live

Looking at that list, a body mindfulness practice can help and enhance about 7 of those factors.

That’s one powerful practice.

A quick snapshot of each factor:

  1. To change your diet – cut out sugars, dairy and reduce meat.
  2. Be actively involved in your health (don’t just sit around wishing), be willing to make changes, face your fears and don’t automatically do everything a doctor says you must do.
  3. Your body wisdom knows what’s best for you, listen to it.
  4. Strengthen your immune system with supplements.
  5. Blocked emotions and trauma seriously affect the immune systems ability to heal disease. This factor is massive and often overlooked.
  6. Increase the fun, joy and love in your life. Deepen your inner connection.
  7. Receiving love from others helps the body to heal. Family and friends can provide the love that boosts the body’s healing ability. Doing anything that stops you from feeling alone is what helps.
  8. Connect to the unconditional universal love that we are all part of. Merging with the peace of everything, where you are not separate from the whole. This spiritual energy can significantly help the body to heal. Pray and/or meditate to help quiet the mind noise.
  9. Expand your creativity, believe you will live, that you have a greater purpose and deserve to be fully alive.

Humanity/Healing – compared to – Medical/Medicine.

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“My training as a doctor focused almost exclusively on science, relegating everything else to, at best, second-class status. When treatments didn’t work, instead of recognizing the impact of societal, cultural and systemic factors or limitations of our research and care, we blamed the patient or moved on to a better case.”

(Dr Louise Aronson, Elderhood, 2019)

Dr Aronson is a professor of medicine at the University of California. She has numerous awards including the Gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine.

Her book is another clear case study in the difference between medical medicine and humanity and healing. And the reason I chose her quote today is to help reeducate you further in your own self healing abilities, which you will not readily learn from the established medical norm.

She says, “Like many doctors, I went into medicine because I wanted to help people. And like many medical students, I quickly discovered that medical education is more about chemical structures and biology, diseases and organs, than about humanity and healing.”

Connecting deeper with your humanity is key to deep inner self healing. A Body Mindfulness practice is an avenue to tapping this inner healing ability that you carry around within you every moment of every day. You have the ability to heal remarkable things within you and Dr Aronson is yet another highly respected doctor that verifies this.

Continue to believe that with deep inner focus, you can heal yourself in ways medicine cannot yet comprehend. But you have to do the deeper work and for it to go deep you need to sit with yourself through everything that arises, comfortable or uncomfortable and do it regularly. Even when the results are not yet showing up.

You can do it, I know you can. I’ve seen it time and again with many people.

Staying vital and alive for a lot longer, as you age

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“There’s …a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive – decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility – is no virtue.”

(David A. Sinclair PhD, Lifespan, 2019)

Australian researcher Dr Sinclair has just released a book on his research into extending life and vitality and he has made a few breakthroughs. He says,

“Many of my colleagues agree. There is no biological law that says we must age. Those who say there is, don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Dr Sinclair believes ageing is a disease and not an inevitability, and that he has managed to reverse ageing in mice. He says prolonged vitality will include more active, more healthy and many more happy years and it is coming sooner than most people expect.

I’ve long believed that as time goes by, you have more years to actually get healthier as long as you are doing the biological natural things that create this. With the proof that our brains can continue to grow and evolve indefinitely, we know now that you are not condemned to growing painfully old as was once thought.

Dr Sinclair is applying some of these breakthroughs to himself and says he is now 50 years old and feels like a kid.

Creating good stress in your body helps – intermittent fasting, regular intense exercise and lowering the temperature of the room to make your body work a little harder.
I would add – a good mindfulness practice and regular access to your hidden emotional blocks and traumas that over stress your body (the bad stress) for prolonged periods of time.

Getting Present through your Body

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“As a path to mindfulness, body awareness offers a natural route. This is because, at its core, mindfulness is about living with greater presence, which is a natural state for our bodies, which are moving in the here and now. It is only our thoughts that can drift off into the past or the future.”

(Noa Belling, The Mindful Body, 2018)

Mindfulness is about being fully aware of what is happening in this very moment. As Noa says, the body is one of the best vehicles for doing this. When you look or feel into your body you are noticing what is happening right now in this moment. Your body will also show and feel the history you haven’t let go of from the past, but it will do all that right now in this moment.

If you can observe your body without judgment, analysis or a story, and just feel what’s there right now this moment, you will deepen your capacity to free the load of the past and the worry about the future. This reality check with your body as it is now can help to break the old cycles and programs in your mind that are at the cause of much stress, strain, disease and malfunction.

So what are you noticing in your body right now?

Stop reading right now and just feel down and in – for say 30 seconds or more.

(Pause)……..

What are you noticing in your body now? Feel and tell the truth to yourself……..

Face a bit of what’s there…….

Accept it right now…….

Be with it – right now…….

And watch what happens. What moves by itself?

Keep breathing and allow more of the repair of your body and mind.