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How do I start meditating?
Ariel asks…
“How do I start meditating?”
Meditation is a very simple thing. It’s about choosing attention and being aware, and the simple practice centers you in your true self so that you don’t get lost in identification with thoughts.
There’s lots of different methods for meditation but the one I recommend is to “listen.” All you do is listen for the next thought, that is all. Try it now for 5 seconds and you’ll see that with enough intensity of focus, thoughts stop.
So that is all you need to do. The more you do it, the better you get and the more rooted in your center. Finding 30 minutes a day to sit and be quiet and listen is optimal. Doing this will rapidly disentangle you from habitual mind-chatter and identification with all that noise… Read more
Confused about happiness
© Lauren Rushing
It’s so easy these days to drown in the ocean of conflicting and misleading health information.
It’s so easy to be confused about happiness and lose sight of the BIG stuff.
But health and happiness is about a FEW ideas pursued with dogged persistence…
Those few ideas are the six lifestyle elements in Habit Guide. These are the things, that unless you are CONSCIOUS of them, and make them habits, will be missing in your life and that’s going to have a negative drip, drip effect on your health and happiness… Read more
How to overcome addiction to negative thinking and the habit of association
Peter asks…
“Almost all my life I’ve been addicted to negative thinking and I’ve been diagnosed with the possibility of OCD. I have a few problems that I’m working on — the most annoying is this one:
My mind somehow got in the habit of bringing back experiences that I hate from the past, and attaching them to the things or activities that I do like — it sounds weird but I’ll give an example:
If I’m cutting some paper — some decoration, and I hear a name of someone that I hate on the radio, my mind digs the old bad experiences up — and tries to attach it to the cutting. So next time when I do a similar cutting, my mind will probably pick that emotion and I will go through it again.
I’m trying to manage this by focusing on something else. But the problem is that when I try to hide that memory which was just brought to me, I can’t simply think of something positive, because I’m afraid the bad memory will get associated with it.
I was reading an article about this:
….”Letting go” of something that is bothering you means refusing to dwell on it, obsess over it, focus on it, worry about it, fume over it, and so on. Instead, you simply set it aside and turn your attention to other tasks that don’t upset you….
This is exactly what’s almost impossible for me, because the positive things get associated with the negative ones… sometimes I’m even scared to talk with some people on some days (the days I wanna do something that I like), as those people might mention the names of people that I hated.
I’m afraid the few things that I enjoy will get corrupted by association with bad memories.
By the way, I have no other problems with moods etc.
I think that first: my mind is addicted to a negative thinking. At least one negative thought at the time must be worked on in my head (since I was a little – old bad habit). And also I think that my mind should just get a little bit stupider, in order to not be that attentive/watchful to every little thing. I sometimes cant believe how quickly it can bring up some memory once it’s triggered by something… and that thing just runs though my head in a few seconds and starts to bother me.
Why does my mind just try to destroy everything I like?
That’s what I don’t understand… normal regular people — when something bad happens or when something they hate is recalled in their heads — they simply focus on things they like and bad things are gone… not in my case. I’m even afraid to do anything like that because bad thoughts could be brought next time along with it.
This habit of associating is kind of a new thing — last 2-3 years.
Any ideas what I can do / practice etc?
Thank you in advance.”
© Rob Beyer
OK, let’s start with the big stuff… the very big info you need for a new mindset and understanding about how your brain works. When you have a better understanding of how it works, you’ll be able to get your mind to work for you.
The big stuff is this: Attention is the volume control for thoughts.
Factors feeding attention in your case are meaning and habit…
An idea you give meaning to has a certain QUALITY, and that quality determines how it affects you subconsciously. For example, you have fear attached to some of these ideas and so you mind will play patterns designed to protect you from real life dangers such as lions. The way your mind responds is the same and can include a fight or flight response (anxiety) plus lots of attention plus very easily made ASSOCIATIONS… Read more
