How to raise your awareness?

How to raise your awareness? I came across a very interesting idea recently: if you understand less, you feel more and your subconscious mind is therefore more involved. When you consciously concentrate on listening to your feelings, you actually bring more awareness into them and you become conscious of them. You therefore slowly expand your consciousness over your subconsciousness.

But listening to your feelings, when you have a very rational mind like mine, and come from a very rational family where emotions aren’t shared, can be a serious challenge. A big change came from one of my readings: it said to pay attention to our vocabulary. I realized that I was always saying: “I think this…” or “I think that…” and I tried changing it for: “I feel this…” and “I feel that…” This trick was really helpful as it forced my subconscious to say what it felt instead of what it thought! Over the years, I slowly realized that I had “forbidden” emotions such as sadness and sorrow. I would never say that I was sad, even when I was. After I started to be more genuine with sadness, I realized that there was also repressed anger under the sadness. Today I’m a lot more confident in expressing anger as well. You can read my article on letting anger out if you’d like.

Once you start letting your emotions flow freely, it will become easier to detach from them too. That’s when the real benefits begin. Meditation has helped me a lot to reduce the mental activity, to pay closer attention to my feelings and to finally return to a normal flow of emotions. Finally, as you detach from your emotions, you increase your awareness over what happens to you and you detach yourself even more. I’m not sure if the increase in awareness or the detachment from emotions comes first but they are surely parallel events that will greatly increase the quality of your life!

Enjoy!
Martin

Subconscious mind childhood

Subconscious mind childhood. I learned something very interesting in a webinar from Christie Sheldon yesterday: the brain of infants and children function in different wave lengths than adults. The brain of infants from 0 to 2 years old runs in delta waves from 1 to 3 Hz and children from 2 to 5 experience theta brain waves from 4 to 7 Hz. The adult brain operates at a higher frequency of beta waves from 13 to 30 Hz. I find this fascinating because I heard a few times about theta healing, which is apparently the wavelength in which the brain must be in to reprogram the subconscious mind easily. That would make a lot of sense since this is also the vibrational level in which the brain lowers during meditation. In short, while meditating, we go back to a state close to our infancy’s and therefore become more easily reprogrammable… just like when we were kids! That also means that we can access our subconscious mind better and use this temporary plasticity to insert the beliefs that we choose and which will serve us better! (as opposed to when we were 2 years old and didn’t decide which beliefs were going to be ours)

Wow! Having a scientific explanation certainly adds strength to my current beliefs and to the certitude that I am going in the right direction to improve myself and my life! I did try holosync meditation with Sonia Ricotti’s program and I felt a very strong a positive change in the beginning. I’ve now been doing the program for 6 months and I don’t see the improvements as much but I believe they are still there: it’s just that I’ve become more accustomed to them.

A product that I’ve been wanting to try is Omharmonics by MindValley. I just love everything MindValley does! This is another binaural meditation (a different frequency in each ear) which induces the meditative state better. I believe binaural meditation is a great tool for beginners as it is an easier way to reach deeper meditative states.

I hope that all this wisdom and knowledge is helpful to you and feel free to share your own meditation secrets!

Thanks!
Martin

Self-help debt: First steps to recovery.

Self-help debt: I just go a call from the bank because I’m not reimbursing one of my credit cards. It’s amazing how a human-made concept such as money can have a powerful grip on the mind. It reminds me of the stories that my ex-boyfriend was telling me and which I didn’t want to hear. My entire body would shiver in fear and terror. The confrontation in my mind was brutal. But I dug deep inside of me. I sought to understand why I was attracted so much to something that was causing me so much pain.

In my current case with money, it’s not causing me pain in the same way. But I certainly didn’t want to face some part of reality. It’s tough to admit that I messed up. I thought so hard that I was following my intuition, while I was in fact following my ego in disguise. Still, I choose to look at the bright side of things. Going through my wall of terror with my ex-boyfriend contributed a great deal to my growth and I’m totally convinced that it’s because I went through that painful experience that I can now embrace a loving relationship.

Same goes with money. I had to put myself in financial “danger” to realize that there was something wrong. I had to uncover my addiction to spending before I could fix it! And now that I am in trouble and need to borrow money, the incentive to make money is much stronger. It’s opening my eyes to quantum leaps and it’s changing my mindset to look for wealth. The debts are an indication showing me that I perceive myself as worthless and, since I’ve recognized it, I can now start working on that. Wow! Life is exciting! All the movement inside that can be created for owing a few thousands! I find my emotional attachment to money so intense, yet so futile. The beauty of the situation is that I’m now taking responsibility and I’m on the way to recovery!

To help you go through this, read my article on how to meditate.

Also read this article if you want to learn more about addiction to spending.

Thanks for reading!
Martin

Meditations in an emergency

What brought my interest to meditation? It was a difficult customer I had 3 years ago. Whenever I’d see her, I knew I was going to lose my balance, feel destabilized and vulnerable to her never-ending demands. During the same period though, my life coach introduced me to a relaxation technique that I can now label as a guided meditation. Because I could see the direct benefits of the meditation exercise when I had to face that difficult customer, it became very easy to discipline myself to do it every morning that I knew I would see her. By first witnessing the direct benefits of meditations in an emergency situation, it then became exciting to apply the technique to other life situations and watch the benefit deploy into a variety of events!

Meditation is most beneficial when performed repetitively on a constant basis. In order to develop discipline though, it is better to match your meditations to specific events and see the advantages in real life! Then it will become very easy to discipline yourself. Actually, it’s not event discipline anymore since it just becomes natural to do what feels good.

My favourite meditations in an emergency are very short – usually 5 minutes. You simply find a quiet spot – I used to meditate in the car (parked!) – but you can also do it on the bus, or in public places if you’ve had some practice and the surrounding noises don’t bother you.

5-minute meditation

As I said, the more you do it, the greater your stability and inner peace will evolve. I was amazed to notice the benefits a year ago when I had to rush to catch my flight with my boyfriend. We were both running, but I remained calm and in total control of my mind and thoughts! That was such a beautiful feeling! And it really helps to take faster and more effective decisions too!

Hope this helps!
Martin

How to meditate

Many people ask me how to meditate. Most people are usually frustrated that they cannot stop the flow of thoughts that comes to their mind. Actually, what you need to do is the opposite: let your thoughts flow completely! At first, you will feel flooded by them, but with time, the flow will calm down and ultimately cease completely. When you get upset about your mind not staying still, you actually increase your mind’s activity and worsen the problem! So here’s how to do it:

1. Sit still in a quiet place.
2. Set your timer to 5 minutes so that you know how long you meditated for. You can increase that time progressively when you feel the desire to.
3. Close your eyes and acknowledge the first thought that comes to your mind.
4. Here’s the important step: DO NOT link this first thought with any other thought. For example, if your thought was “I need to get some milk”, don’t think about when you’ll do it or feel bad because you forgot about it. Simply ACKNOWLEDGE the thought and let it go.
5. Sit quietly until the next thought comes up.
6. Repeat step 4 and 5 until your timer rings.

As you can see, the important part is to BREAK THE CHAIN of thoughts. NOT suppress them. It’s a little bit like breaking a dam that’s holding water. When you break the dam, water (or thoughts) will rush like crazy. You might even feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable by all this activity in your mind. But once you acknowledge your thoughts, one by one, the river will gradually recede to its normal flow and you will regain your stability. Over time, you will actually ground yourself even more, stay calmer in stressful situations and become more aware of what is moving you away from your steady and comfortable flow of thoughts.

Enjoy!

And as always, let me know if you need more guidance with this!

Martin