Other Methods for Training The Brain
Guided Meditations for Sleeping, Driving, Muscle Pain & More
Evolution has also done a good job of providing us with physical methods for restoring balance. Crying and laughing, for example, are good ways to discharge energy and are the body’s way of naturally restoring peace, calmness and balance so if those are available to you, allow them. Exercise can also have this kind of a physiological impact.
Sleep is a funny thing. It is only when we let go of needing to fall asleep and thinking about sleep that we can fall asleep. But when we most want sleep is when we can't stop thinking about it. These meditations will help get around this paradox, help shift your state of consciousness, and put you back in charge of your bedtime self.
Ready to reduce your allergy symptoms? Try these guided self-therapy sessions in a podcast format.
Is your commute getting you down? Or does driving generally make you feel stressed or tired out? Try one of these drive-time meditations to convert the pain of driving into a practice of advancing on the path to a better life!
Take advantage of the unique language of the body to release tight and painful muscles with these targeted guided meditations.
Listen to nature sounds from some of the most beautiful and surprising places on the planet.
Listen to George Falcon guide you through a series of guided meditations.
What not to do?
Do not explain, rationalize or justify your emotions. Why? The part of you that does those things doesn’t create emotions. It doesn’t know why the emotions are there. It is like someone in the accounting department getting a complaint about the company’s product. They don’t know what the problem is or how to fix it, because they have nothing to do with manufacturing. The conscious mind really doesn’t know why the subconscious mind created the emotion so don't use the wrong department to solve the issue. Unfortunately, this is exactly what people do most of the time!
What to do?
The training techniques on this website are a start. From the ancient Egyptian "spells" in the Book of the Dead to the Huna folklore of the Hawaiian islands, humans have developed untold many methods to master the emotional self that are not covered on this website. Some of the most common ones include prayer, martial arts, and yoga. Prayer can be left to the religious experts but a few words on yoga and martial arts follow.
Yoga
There are innumerable studios and books and online resources (such as these apps) for you to learn yoga techniques so there is no need to describe the various traditions and movements here. Instead it is worth recalling why people originally developed yoga so that you can bring a new mindset to your current practice or, if you don't yet practice yoga and are inspired to do so, you can begin with a grounding in its basic meaning and origins.
The root of the word yoga is “yuj” which means to yoke or to join. In the case of yoga, the idea of this yuj was union with god (or "source" if that goes down easier for you). This classical understanding helps remind us that yoga is a method to connect you with your source, to remind you of that connection. Yoga is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your union with universal power.
So the original intention of yoga was not about toning the body, reducing stress, or stretching the limbs. The intention was to develop your intuitive faculties so that you could access your source (or "god" if you prefer that term). You need to develop this faculty if you are ever going to remember your true nature. The intellect will never do that job for you. And the intellect has been trained for your entire life, first as a child in the home and then at school and this continued throughout adulthood. After all that training, the intellectual part of our selves is dominant to the point where our intuition, our connection to our source, can scarcely be heard.
Yoga, then, is about quieting the emotional and intellectual parts of ourselves enough that our intuitive voice can be noticed. Originally there were only three postures: mountain, lotus and corpse. What do each of those have in common? Not moving. You’re doing nothing. So technically speaking, you shouldn’t be practicing or doing yoga. There is no one to do yoga. So then who is demonstrating? No one. So is there anything called demonstration? Under certain conditions if you believe there is a self then there appears to be what we could call demonstration. The illusion of the self is the pivotal thing. Until you see it as a mental construct, you won’t see all these other discrepancies and errors of comprehending reality.
The self is trying to sell itself to you as a doer. But first it must sell you on the fact that there is something that needs to be done and how important getting it done is. And you have bought the story! Your self is so insidious. As an example relevant for those on the spiritual path, just ask yourself: "should I become enlightened?" The self says "Yes, great idea! And I will help you find and overcome all the things you have to do to get there." And you have just let the Trojan horse into the encampment and you can kiss enlightenment goodbye. So when you practice yoga, keep reminding yourself that the purpose of the techniques is to diminish those loud elements of your ego sufficiently enough that you can hear and follow the quiet voice of intuition.
Martial Arts
Another example of training oneself in healthy behavior is illustrated in the four principles in martial arts.
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The first principal is: don’t be there. You might reasonably ask how you know to avoid a situation or a place and “not be there”? Intuition or being able to hear the “soft, still voice” talked about in The Old Testament (e.g. 1 Kings 19:12). If you are unable to tune in to your intuition enough and you find yourself "there" in the conflict, you go to the second principle.
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The second principle is: should you find yourself there – heal the situation. You can only heal it if you can generate the right energy, come from the right frequency, and have the right power to influence the situation in a healthy way.
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If you can’t do that, you can go straight to the third principle: run!
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And finally, if you can’t run away fast enough, you go to the fourth principle: fight and make sure your training is sufficient that you will win.
Unfortunately in the West we are impatient so most of martial arts training in this part of the world is spent on the fourth principle and the first three are largely ignored. So take this and try it in your life. Imagine dealing with life with intuition as your main faculty – not thinking or feeling. Thinking is dominated by parietal lobes in the neo-cortex. Until you move dominance in the brain from parietal to frontal lobes, your ability to access intuitive or inspirational information won’t be present and you will fail in your attempts to follow the first two martial arts principles. The training and meditation techniques on this website, if practiced often enough and for long enough, will help you shift to frontal lobe dominance.
