MEDITATION: NOT ALL MENTAL MOVIES DO THE TRICK

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In my early – mid 20s I dated a guy who was big into meditation.  When stress hit my life like a tsunami he suggested I give it a try. Unfortunately, I could never manage to quiet what various meditation teachers refer to as the monkey mind.

All the chatter that rears its head when you try to experience a moment of stillness.

I read up on and researched various techniques but nothing ever worked consistently.

That monkey mind never stopped chattering away.

He eventually suggested I just give up since it was frustrating me to no end.  Though disappointed I agreed it was the path of least resistence.

I was stressing myself out about it which more or less defeats the purpose of meditating to relax.

I did have a bit of success in what I call walking meditation but it is kind of cheating since I did not quiet my mind during those winter walks.

I used the time walking those winter nights to sift through my life and see where changes needed to be made.

A break-thru came when I bought Dr. Taub’s Seven Steps to Self-Healing Pack.

I’d never heard of guided meditation but listening to those tapes showed me that even those with chatty minds can meditate.

Silva Icing.

In 2000 I took the Silva Basic Lecture Series from a lovely woman in Akron, OH.

Aaron, who used to listen to the Dr. Taub tapes alongside me at night agreed to go with me.

For years I did a kluged version of guided meditation based on imagery from the tapes as well as whatever I produced on my mental screen during Silva.

Creative Visualization – Not

Starting in 2017 I switched from the scripted meditation I had been using for years to reviewing my novels before bed.  

I had become proficient in creating vivid images while picturing characters, locations, scenes, so it seemed like a good idea.

For the next several years I spent evenings reviewing scenes from various books in my mind and though it generally helped me fall asleep it hid a problem.

It wasn’t having the same beneficial effects as guided meditation!

This might have gone on indefinitely were it not for a series of emails between a friend in Florida and myself.  Rereading my words a few days after I sent them made me see I needed some serious change in my life.

I wrote about this in the Tune the Dial post.

To marry action to intention I began doing my old meditation routine in place of general mental movies.  Immediately, my life began to change.

Especially my health which needed tweaking.

My energy levels went up within days and that led to reguarly engaging in exercise which led to more energy which led to…

You get the idea.

In addition to physical benefits the universe began putting in a helping hand in the form of books coming into my possession at the right time.

I think it was seeing I was serious about improving my life – not just talking about it.

I’ll admit it was tough to get back into the routine of guided meditation, not because I had trouble quitting the review of novel plots before bed but because I was so rusty at the routine I’d done for years.

Persistance Pays Off.

Knowing it would all fall into place if I kept at it I kept at it.

And life continued to improve.

The plan is to keep up routines that help me achieve various health and well-being goals.

Routines that begin with the nightly guided meditation, one that includes prayers of thanksgiving.

The Take-Away?

I learned the hard way not all mental movies achieve a state of relaxation and that guided meditation is as beneficial as TM.

Especially for those of us with chattier minds.

Note:  That Monkey Mind

I long ago earned the distinction of always thinking but there was, I now realize, something else going on; something that interfered with my ability to still my chatty multi-tasking mind.

Birth Control Pills and Copper

Birth control pills have been linked to a buildup of copper.  Excess copper can cause chatty racy mind.

Taking zinc and potassium can help but until and unless there is nutritional balance, it may continue to be a challenge to quiet the mind.

I’m sure other medications can have this as a side effect.

IN THE DARK REACH FOR THE TORCH [OF HOPE & PAST SUCCESS]

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Like so many I was going along merrily when the pandemic knocked me off the path and when I stood up I saw the path was gone.  As someone who remembers the Hong Kong flu and SARS I,  I knew we were in for it.

I was young with the Hong Kong flu but it made quite the impression given both my parents got it and my brother and I were shipped off to grandparents for duration.

I initially channeled the frustration into writing.

I wrote five books in about that many weeks!

After that was done – we were about a year in – I turned back to the washed out path and tried to decide what I was going to do with it. As someone who has had to rebuild my life a number of times when plans went sideways I felt confident I could figure something out. 

That tenacity incidentally is how I figured out the whole EMF Sensitivity fiasco!

The devastation went much further along that path than I imagined.  I did my best to continue focusing on what I could control.

Writing.

It was working and likely would have continued to work had multiple outside stressors not popped up.

Including extended isolation.

Incredibly frustrated I reached out to a friend via email to get his take on turning focus to more positive energies.  He had some good words for me to contemplate but it was in thinking them over later that I found my answer. It wasn’t what he suggested that led me to this place but the idea that I didn’t want to let him down.  I didn’t want to be one of those people who “dumps and runs.”

Tells you every bad thing and then you don’t hear from them again until months or years later when they say “Oh, that?  Oh that’s not a problem anymore…”

It isn’t that I regularly tap him or anyone and in fact my mom and I are both people who deliberately isolate ourselves and don’t communicate when things are rough for the simple fact we don’t want to spread negativity.

I can always tell when things aren’t going well for her because I won’t hear anything.  Ha ha.

For me to have reached out like that meant I was in a pickle in terms of knowing what to do and that he took the time to give me his thoughts on life?  I didn’t want to let him down.

I also didn’t want to spread fake cheer so I resolved not to respond to his email until I had something genuine to report. 

Today was that day.

I’m going to share how I pulled myself out of the funk because it might help others going through tough times.

From the email:

…But – college can’t teach you how to recreate your life when a pandemic wipes out the path you were on.  That has been a lot of the trouble.  Two years in I am beyond fatigued.  Which is why I am determined to create something new.

To that end I gave it a lot of thought and decided a decent place to start was to go back to when I was in a bad spot in my life eons ago and do now what I did then.

Visualization and meditation.

I have a unique way to do meditation because it dovetails prayer of thanks for family, friends, health, etc.  Then moves along a guided path that I had luck with in the mid 90s which were not happy times for me.  

I refer to them as the Corporate Black Hole years.

So far so good and I’m getting some interesting results.  I am having more vivid dreams than I did and I’m definitely sleeping better.

Psychic dreams!

I don’t have an end vision per se but just going through the familiar practice and following where it goes is having a positive impact.  It probably helps that I had a very positive outcome the last time I used this. 

 I really turned my life around.

End of Email Inclusion

I do not have a specific vision that I am moving toward so much as just going through the relaxation/visualization/meditation process I developed years ago.  It’s a kluge of Dr. Taub’s guided meditation script that I’ve modified combined with Silva’s Long Relax, and a bit of Fairlyland City from Robert Stone’s Celestial 911.

This is more or less the same kluge I began in 1996 after stumbling on Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization Workbook.

Which inspired me to follow an internal nudge to go to a different Border’s Books where I found Celestial 911 which listed the Silva Method as a resource which sent me to the BLS in Akron, Ohio, which…

I bought the Dr. Taub health pack at a party hosted by one of my aunts.

I’ve never looked back.  I even have them on Mp3 – they are that helpful!

I’ve loaned the casettes to others over the years when they were going through a rough spot.

Every one of them got good results.

I donated them about a year ago.

Feeling Better

I’m not sure which is responsible for the quick improvement – the process or the fact I had great success with it before.

In the Silva Method we learn to review previous successes as a way to “prime” the unconscious for continued success.

What I do know is that within days of doing this very unique kluge I’m feeling better and more optimistic than a week ago.

And yet nothing in the observable world has changed.

I know my friend is equally frustrated with the way life went sideways so I suggested if there were any old tools in his arsenal – a flashlight to light the way – he repurpose them.

It is advice I’m putting out in general.

Be well!

BRINGING A STORY TO LIFE: SOURCE

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Enjoying a bit of peace and quiet and a much cooler morning.  It got so hot during our heat wave that our food processor bowl melted while in use.  The round area that has the blade come through is now oblong. 

 I loved hearing Aaron say, “Oh, that’s why it sounded so funny.”

I was listening to music through headphones at the time and missed all that audio fun.  Thankfully, we live in a time when you can get replacement parts easily; you don’t have to buy an entirely new appliance.

As I listen to the sounds of the morning which include enough wildlife I sometimes feel I live in a zoo, I’m mentally sorting through projects in the queue.   It isn’t just that there are a number of possibilities it’s the order in which they should be done. 

Temporal Awareness.  At the start of the pandemic shutdown I wrote about what it felt like having my temporal awareness turned on its ear.  

As someone who already worked from home the inability to have any contact with the outside world for months on end was surreal.

I channeled that frustration into writing making it one of the more prolific times of my writing career.

I finished Beacon, Rainmaker, Mirror, and Redemption among other projects in a span of about three months. 

It came at a cost.

Burnout.

I know that work burnout was a common problem during the pandemic.  I read several articles in which people talked about the effects of being shut in or – if they couldn’t work from home – being completely overwhelmed.  And yet I couldn’t relate.

Career burnout wasn’t my burnout.

It took until yesterday to understand that my burnout was related but different.  It wasn’t career burnout so much as life burnout. 

 As someone who has worked from home for twenty-seven years, other than a period of incredible productivity, it wasn’t my career that was impacted.

Outside acknowledging the challenges of going from minimal outside interaction to none, I never considered the impact of total lockdown on my life outside my career.

Work Front and Center.  There was a cost to the constant attention on work from home in our community and in the world.  It hid the impact of what was happening outside that construct.

When you’re so busy focusing on making something work you can miss all the areas of your life that are being starved of critical energy.

 Missing the Signs.  Because my productivity  was not negatively impacted  I missed warning signs that not all was well.  Or, if I did sense something wrong I simply channeled it into my work, exacerbating the problem.

Open Is Closed.  Regardless of the state of the states I still work from home.  Thanks to the delta variant and other unknowns it’s business as usual as far as the pandemic is concerned.

Masks, social distancing, and good health habits.

This lack of real change and the knowledge that it will likely remain so for the foreseeable future had me turning to my de facto approach, writing.

Excuse Me.  An interesting thing happened.  Somehow the message from the nonwork areas of my life that were suffering got to the productivity camp and, as you can predict, everything shut down.

Few things cause panic for an author.  Writer’s block is one of them.

Because my attention was on the impact to my productivity I missed that the symptoms had nothing to do with writing.

There was no writer’s block.

Ignoring the symptoms since I didn’t map them to nonwork issues, I continued focusing on my career.

It never occurred to me it was soul burnout related to the pandemic.

Meet Me Halfway.  Apparently, my higher self has a clue.  It figured out I’m going to double down on the creative outlet as a coping mechanism – something I’ve done my whole life – so it plugged into that part of the energy spectrum.  This led to a series of “coincidences” that got the message through.

That while my body and mind were doing just fine, my spiritual health was in need of some serious TLC.

The Edge of Nowhere.  I decided to work with Event Horizon which does an amazing job of pulling me out of myself so I can solve issues unhindered by “noise.”  Sure enough I started to see where energy blocks were having a negative impact.  As with all Event Horizon sessions, a number of solutions were offered to address the situation.

I Can’t Hear You.  It was during one of the better sessions that I realized that while I gave myself suggestions to address issues I wasn’t following up.  I kept setting the stuff aside for later after which I would go back to writing.  Luckily for me, this time I listened.

One Thing Feeds Another.  As I followed through on the suggestions I was inspired to go back and do another EH session during which more insight was gained and more suggestions given.  This went on for a few days and I noticed those other energy blocks began to dissolve.

In some cases I didn’t even realize there was a block until it was gone.

Helping Hand.  I continued working with Event Horizon and continued to follow through on the suggestions and continued to see improvements including subtle messages from the universe that helped me on my way.  And then a funny thing happened.  The messages became not so subtle.  In fact, they got downright direct.

Read My Lips.  The universe has a fun way of getting the message across and I’ve long known that when we ignore the messages, they get louder. 

This isn’t always a good thing.

In this case the increased volume was relatively harmless.  A book that had appeared in my sphere of awareness months ago reappeared.  This time I paid attention and bought it.  I also got an email from a dear friend, the right words at the right time.  Interestingly, both sources had the same message

Don’t forget the basics!

It was through each of these messages I realized that in all the chaos I had forgotten to nurture my own spirituality.

I was so busy being there for everyone and everything else I forgot to be there for this.

Energy In Bloom.  As I read the book and did the exercises which included relaxation, meditation, visualization, grounding, I found the creative whispering increasing in volume.

The voice of the source – what goes into bringing a story to life.

Bruised But Healing.  When you are a creative, to create is to feed the soul. The worst thing that can happen is to turn off the spigot but just as damaging, as I’ve learned, is to turn it on full blast. I believe my soul understands this now. I recognize the need to find other ways to nurture that soul.  Especially when the avenues open to me are cut off by lockdown.