Week 2

How Meditation Works

Understanding the ‘mechanics’ of meditation allows you to be flexible, adaptable and creative

Rather than blindly following a formula you can develop a style that suits your lifestyle, temperament, the time you have available and your ever changing personal needs and desires.

The “Normal’ Mind

Frequently distracted, fatigued, stressed
Full of worries, concerns, plans, what-ifs, inner fantasies and dialogues. i.e. compulsive thinking.
'worse-case scenario generator"
Creates emotion and tension in the body
Leads to confusion, agitation, depression, exhaustion and illness

The Stress Cycle

In this mode we try to think/intellectualise our way through difficulties
Because stress is amplified by painful emotions we try to avoid feeling
We do this by thinking, keeping busy, working harder or distracting ourselves with food, drugs, entertainment etc.
It might seem logical to try and avoid life’s discomfort, but by failing to accept and experience these painful emotions we trap ourselves in an endless stress cycle.

Thinking: electrical impulse - process many things simultaneously and very rapidly

Feeling: chemical flow within the body - indistinct waves of emotion

Thinking seems rational but is usually driven by some variant of fear, anger or desire

These unacknowledged emotions are usually chronic rather than acute. They sit just beneath our thoughts, sending a continual drip feed of hormones into the body saying "this is no time to relax", "we've got things to do"

In this way our thoughts activate the stress response.

The Meditative Mind

Be present
Engage the senses

To de-stress simply divert the attention away from thinking and into sensing

When we focus on sensory things thoughts drop into the background. They rarely disappear completely, but because they are no longer activating the stress response you'll begin to relax.

[Meditation 1 - Exploring the Senses - Sight, Sound, Touch, Smell, Taste]

Sensing is an instinctive mode of relaxation - meditation just makes the act conscious, deliberate.
When we take an ordinary moment and pay extraordinary attention magic happens.
Interestingly its not what we sense that relaxes us, its just the increased sensory input.
When we sense there’s less energy available from thinking - thinking and sensing are functions that inhibit one another.

	Thinking		Sensing
	is active		is more passive
	involves past and future		is in the present
	is complex and fast		is simpler and slower
	has high emotional charge		has low emotional charge
	is stimulating		is relaxing
	burns energy		conserves energy
	tightens the body		lets the body soften

	Beta Brainwaves (13-40Hz)		Alpha Brainwaves (7-13Hz)

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