How to Go Beyond the ‘Story-Telling’ Habit
Comment: "An area of my ongoing 'work' is to watch my reactions to the happenings that come my way. There are never ending opportunities to be alert and especially so in relationships. To reduce unnecessary suffering to oneself and others, one must be aware of one's habit to add 'mental stories' to explain away what is happening. It seems so hard to stay close to the unfolding life, in the present moment. It seems there is an irritation with 'what is' happening, we want to fight it, and it arises because we want/expect things to be different! It seems the best we can do is to accept it ain't going to be how we want it, then to drop our story telling habit - and this is all one can do and needs to do to go beyond it."
It is a good ability to be able to see one's own story-telling mode when it arises - it takes a lot of awareness to see it, to know it's happening when it does and to recognize it. It takes even more awareness to be able to truly let it go and drop it because one has to be willing to not want to do it. I also agree with you that relationships provide such a fertile growing opportunity, and especially when there is conflict. I grew a lot from such a situation a few years ago. (I'm not saying you have conflict...)
I remember questioning the phenomena of 'story-mode' itself as a whole, I wrote a sequence of articles on it, Why these persistent internal dialogs? (These articles are on my website). What was interesting to me, is I knew this talking was nonsense and defensive as I could see that when I looked at the content, it was totally ridiculous stuff and often not very nice to myself or others.
Also I noticed that when it went on too long unchecked, then it would effect my emotional state, stress built up, I would get all wound up, likely would get sick and then was more likely to react at anything with all the force of the built up energy - with my ego. I saw it later as me allowing personality to activate - to get strong, and then after this would happen, there was nothing more to do, then do more meditations and wait until this state de-energized. Depending on how far I let it go on, it could take from 3 days to a week to de-energize. So I am sure you know all this too, having observed it.
For me I was doing the same, noticing it and setting it aside, and thinking it was enough if I just did this, yet doing this often it still wasn't changing, it was still happening - so persistent. I could even go to sleep at night after meditation and wake up in the morning, talking away. So curious how it was, like it had a wheel of it's own, driving all by itself. I felt I needed to know something else about it in a more general sense to be able to get a stronger control over it. Why did I still do this - get sucked in - even though I knew the harm it caused me and others when I did it, it all reduced to the question of:
"What benefit do 'I' get out of it by doing it?"
I realized that one does a habit or behaves in a way, because by doing so, one gets something out of it. To drop a habit, we have to know what we get out of it by doing it, and only then when we see that, will we be ready to make a clear decision to be able to drop being in that way. One adopts a habit at a point in one's life, because it was helpful for oneself at the time one adopted it. The habit we are talking about is one that has been with humans for a long, long, time, so also why it's so hard to change/transmute/drop.
To change any habit, one must see clear what benefit it gives you to do it. Once one sees the benefit one gets - one can only 'observe this' while/when it happens to receive this understanding, it can't be understood intellectually - then one will have a new 'self-knowledge' about one's conditioned habit/aspect in a general way - what we call an 'aha' or leap in understanding.
Once we have that piece of information, then our willingness to drop it will increase and as we practice doing that more, then also we start to spend progressively more time in quiet than in talking, and our perception and ability to be present will be enhanced along with our doing this. Our growing awareness will start to pick up significantly after that - as moments of quiet time increases...
Hint: One must be willing to enter into a totally unknown, still and quiet field of being. At first this is very scary, because one has never encountered it before or been like this before, so being unknown it will take much courage to enter into this darkness.
Betsy
Showing posts with label present moment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label present moment. Show all posts
Monday, November 3, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
What is Meditation & What are the Benefits?
Meditation is Great for Releasing Stress
I have a friend who has been meditating for 50 years, and he now calls meditation -> "Stress Release Exercise". So you see, the practice of meditation reduces and relieves stress, rather than builds it up. Meditation is basically the practice of resting your thinking, You can try it for free, and make your own decision if it helps or not. The best is you do it each day, twice a day, for around 30 minutes each time and do it for at least 3 weeks straight to be able to see a result. Then if you decide you get a benefit, then you can make it part of your daily life, just like you brush your teeth every day. It's much like that, a preventative mental, physical and emotional health routine which you do every day.
How to Do Meditation
To do it, find a quiet place free of distractions, then get comfortable and close your eyes, the most important is your body is relaxed, not so much that you try to keep a certain body posture like many recommend. Then just put your attention on FEELING your breath move in and out of your body, which can be anywhere along the path of the breath. Re, you can notice the feeling of air coming in and out of your nose or into your lungs, or into your diaphragm. The important thing is you just are feeling the breathing happen, you don't have to breath in any certain way. Breathing happens all by itself, you don't have to 'do breathing' or think about breathing, you have nothing to do here except FEEL your breath move in and out. As you practice this, you will notice that you lose contact with the attention you had on feeling your breathing, what has happened is the thinking has started up. Don't worry about the thoughts or what the content of them are, just make a mental note - I was thinking - then refocus on feeling the breathing. If you try to examine your thoughts, then it will trigger more thinking and before you know it you will be only thinking. So for meditation time, it's good to have a reminder: this is not the time that I need to think. I can think later if I need too... This interruption of thinking happening and losing contact with simple feeling of breath will repeat over and over, this is totally normal. As you proceed in meditation practice it will become easier to feel the breath, and become more aware of when thinking has become predominant.
Why does Meditation reduce Stress?
The reason this practice reduces stress is because stress is caused by thinking. It's like you think all these things - re: all you have to do, and you don't have time to do it, then there's a conflict, the muscles hold tension and you have stress. Thinking goes a lot faster then what you can physically do, so the more you think things should be different than what they are, which is most of the time with thoughts, then the more stress you build up. As you learn to become more aware of thinking and breathing from continued daily practice of meditation, as you get better at tuning into what happening inside you, you will start to learn more about your basic make-up, personality, awareness and body and how all of you works. This is known as 'self-knowledge', which will allow you to take steps in your awareness levels. Eventually you get better at accepting what is happening 'right now' and learning to respond to it as needed, versus spending so much time thinking you can do more than is truly possible. So you see, if you continue you will stop building up stress in the first place, you will be able to catch that over active thinking pattern when it happens and be able to 'set it aside' and simply breath - even during the day - thus you become more in control of everything that you experience.
It's a very important life skill to learn how to control the reactions of thinking and emotions and physical actions. All that a human can do, the first thing that always happens is thought, this precedes all else, so becoming aware of thinking is paramount to have true will power and focus and control of yourself. When one's thinking is overactive, usually certain thoughts are repeating or a certain nature, which create an emotional energy in the body according to the underlying nature or tone of the thoughts. Thinking is part of the nervous system and is what allows us to act, so just prior to a movement in body, energy is built up in the appropriate muscles as an electric charge to allow us that movement. So think, emotion, then act. When one is thinking, one is building emotional energy in the muscles, if one doesn't act upon that which is set up, then this is 'stress'. Basically charges are in the muscles, but it is not released through action. By learning to only think when needed - when one needs to take an action, then one becomes more energy efficient, not building up unnecessary energy in the body when it's not needed.
Betsy
I have a friend who has been meditating for 50 years, and he now calls meditation -> "Stress Release Exercise". So you see, the practice of meditation reduces and relieves stress, rather than builds it up. Meditation is basically the practice of resting your thinking, You can try it for free, and make your own decision if it helps or not. The best is you do it each day, twice a day, for around 30 minutes each time and do it for at least 3 weeks straight to be able to see a result. Then if you decide you get a benefit, then you can make it part of your daily life, just like you brush your teeth every day. It's much like that, a preventative mental, physical and emotional health routine which you do every day.
How to Do Meditation
To do it, find a quiet place free of distractions, then get comfortable and close your eyes, the most important is your body is relaxed, not so much that you try to keep a certain body posture like many recommend. Then just put your attention on FEELING your breath move in and out of your body, which can be anywhere along the path of the breath. Re, you can notice the feeling of air coming in and out of your nose or into your lungs, or into your diaphragm. The important thing is you just are feeling the breathing happen, you don't have to breath in any certain way. Breathing happens all by itself, you don't have to 'do breathing' or think about breathing, you have nothing to do here except FEEL your breath move in and out. As you practice this, you will notice that you lose contact with the attention you had on feeling your breathing, what has happened is the thinking has started up. Don't worry about the thoughts or what the content of them are, just make a mental note - I was thinking - then refocus on feeling the breathing. If you try to examine your thoughts, then it will trigger more thinking and before you know it you will be only thinking. So for meditation time, it's good to have a reminder: this is not the time that I need to think. I can think later if I need too... This interruption of thinking happening and losing contact with simple feeling of breath will repeat over and over, this is totally normal. As you proceed in meditation practice it will become easier to feel the breath, and become more aware of when thinking has become predominant.
Why does Meditation reduce Stress?
The reason this practice reduces stress is because stress is caused by thinking. It's like you think all these things - re: all you have to do, and you don't have time to do it, then there's a conflict, the muscles hold tension and you have stress. Thinking goes a lot faster then what you can physically do, so the more you think things should be different than what they are, which is most of the time with thoughts, then the more stress you build up. As you learn to become more aware of thinking and breathing from continued daily practice of meditation, as you get better at tuning into what happening inside you, you will start to learn more about your basic make-up, personality, awareness and body and how all of you works. This is known as 'self-knowledge', which will allow you to take steps in your awareness levels. Eventually you get better at accepting what is happening 'right now' and learning to respond to it as needed, versus spending so much time thinking you can do more than is truly possible. So you see, if you continue you will stop building up stress in the first place, you will be able to catch that over active thinking pattern when it happens and be able to 'set it aside' and simply breath - even during the day - thus you become more in control of everything that you experience.
It's a very important life skill to learn how to control the reactions of thinking and emotions and physical actions. All that a human can do, the first thing that always happens is thought, this precedes all else, so becoming aware of thinking is paramount to have true will power and focus and control of yourself. When one's thinking is overactive, usually certain thoughts are repeating or a certain nature, which create an emotional energy in the body according to the underlying nature or tone of the thoughts. Thinking is part of the nervous system and is what allows us to act, so just prior to a movement in body, energy is built up in the appropriate muscles as an electric charge to allow us that movement. So think, emotion, then act. When one is thinking, one is building emotional energy in the muscles, if one doesn't act upon that which is set up, then this is 'stress'. Basically charges are in the muscles, but it is not released through action. By learning to only think when needed - when one needs to take an action, then one becomes more energy efficient, not building up unnecessary energy in the body when it's not needed.
Betsy
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