Gratitude in Adversity

When things go badly, it is a human tendency to see our lives being controlled by our circumstances. The reality is that our lives are not controlled by our circumstances. Our lives are empowered or destroyed by our attitude.

Jack Canfield, author of the prolific Chicken Soup series, offers this equation. E+R=O. Event + Response = Outcome. In other words, events do not have power over our lives. It is our response to those events that determine the path we take. There is no more powerful response to the adversities of life than gratitude. Adversity, when faced with honesty, faith, and courage can make us better, stronger, wiser people. But what about tragedy?

I am not saying we should be grateful for terrible tragedies in our lives. But when we can find the strength to find reason for gratitude even in the midst of tragedy, we will discover a powerful path to healing.

Terry Thomas enjoyed a storybook romance and a fairy tale wedding. He and his bride were en route to the airport for a flight to Nassau for their honeymoon when a tragic car accident took the life of his wife of only a few hours. In a remarkable tale of faith, he discovered healing through gratitude, shared in his book, "At Least We Were Married".

When I was a protestant minister, my first sermon told the story of Josiah. He was a little known Israelite king. Overshadowed by the personages of David and Solomon, the Bible records that Josiah was the greatest king Israel ever had. When Israel was attacked by an alliance of other nations who greatly outnumbered the small Israelite kingdom, Josiah went to war with an attitude of gratitude. He placed the choir in the front column of the army and marched into battle singing, "Give thanks to the Lord for he is good. His mercy endures forever." The enemy was astonished, confused and fled in terror.

Life seems full of adversities, even tragedies. Faith, patience, perseverance, and endurance all help to bring us through. But gratitude turns the table. We are no longer the victim being threatened by our circumstances. We are the victors, rejoicing in our triumph over adversity.

Tapping Your Subconscious

Your conscious mind is small and unable to enter into your subconscious. However, there is a point of intersection. To enter your subconscious, you must relax and focus through either through hypnosis or meditation.

Zen Buddhists focus on what they call the hara. Most practitioners will tell you it is the center of your being, physically located 2 inches below your navel. Actually, it is really nothing at all. Claudio Naranjo describes it in his essays on the Psychology of Meditation. It is not "nothing", but "no-thing". It is the complete emptying of your conscious mind so that your subconscious can speak to you.

Communication can go either way. Like Edison, you can listen to your subconscious and discover the solution that has been evading you.

Alternatively, you can input something into your subconscious, to create a new "normal" for you. That is what the Soviet athletes were doing. They were visualizing or meditating on the perfect performance to create a new "normal" for them and elevate their actual performance.

When you connect with your subconscious through meditation, you release much more mental power than you do with just your conscious mind. Your conscious mind works verbally and focuses on one issue at a time. Even when multi-tasking, you conscious mind only deals with one issue at a time. It just moves from one to another and back again. Multi-tasking with your conscious mind is like a juggling act. That is why numerous studies have indicated it is dangerous to multi-task when driving.

Your subconscious mind works with powerful images, symbols, and processes and is capable of handling numerous tasks simultaneously. Just think of how your subconscious handles your bodily functions without ever a conscious thought. Heart beat, respiration, digestion, muscle control, and cell reproduction are all going on at the same time without your conscious awareness. Yet your brain is busy controlling them all. Your subconscious is busy recording numerous stimuli including emotions you can't quite put into words.

Your subconscious is much smarter than your conscious mind. Connecting with your subconscious mind through meditation will open entire new worlds of insights and intuitions as you will be able to process much more information in images and symbols than you could possible address with your conscious mind - and at lightning speed.

Continue to mediate or probe more deeply into the subconscious and you will discover yet another doorway, this time into the noosphere. Once you have connected to the noosphere, you can access thoughts and understandings that are beyond your personal experience. Carl Jung espoused a similar concept that he termed the "collective unconscious", where powerful archetypal images provide the basis for our conscious symbols and imagery.

Continue past that, and you can touch God.

The point is that you can choose to live in your conscious life, or you can begin to explore yourself and your universe and discover wonderful things you probably never dreamt were there. Your ticket for that journey is meditation.

Be sure to follow the blog so you don't miss Meditation Part 5.

The Doorway into Your Subconscious

Working with your brain

Your brain is the central control unit of your life. It weighs just over 3 pounds, but consumes 1/5th of the oxygen you breathe, 1/4th of your blood flow, and 1/3rd of your water intake. Those are not just meaningless trivia. Oxygen, blood flow and water fuel your brain, and you can actually improve brain function by increasing oxygen, blood flow and water. (See my Jan 10 post on "Feed Your Brain".)

Your Personal Super-Computer

Your brain contains about 100,000 miles of blood vessels and ten billion neurons. Each neuron is connected to other neurons through 10,000 synapses making the brain capable of multiple parallel computations. This is what gives the brain its great advantage over a computer with processors that must conduct each computation one at a time. The brain consumes 15 - 30 watts of energy, about the same as a personal computer but is capable of conducting quadrillions of computations each second.

With such a super computer inside of us, we should all be geniuses, but we only use a small portion of our brains for memory and cognitive thought. Most of your brain is devoted to subconscious functions such as keeping your heart beating. In fact, your conscious mind only controls a small fraction of your perception and behavior. Your subconscious mind controls the vast majority of the way you view your world and make your decisions.

You may meet a person and immediately distrust them. There is nothing you can put your finger on, but subtle clues can trigger a warning in your subconscious. Conversely, you may meet someone new and feel like you are old friends. Again, subtle clues trigger an emotional response. Your conscious mind is too busy making conversation to notice them, but your subconscious mind is sending you signals through what you might call intuition.

You have an intuition about yourself as well. This can work for you or against you. No wonder, if you see yourself as a failure, you will make one decision after another that leads from one failure to another. However, if your subconscious mind sees you as successful, you will make one decision after another that leads you from success to success.

Your conscious mind thinks verbally in logical patterns and divides time into past, present and future. However, you subconscious mind thinks in terms of images and emotions and sees all events as in the present. That is why when you think of a great event in your life like the birth of a child, you can feel that sense of elation and pride. Conversely, if you happen to remember a particularly embarrassing moment, even one that happened 20-30 years ago, your stomach starts to flip and your palms may even start to sweat.

The subconscious is incredibly powerful. Meditation is the doorway through which you can enter your subconscious and communicate with your it.

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Meditation for Success Part 2

The Chardinian Noosphere and Chicken Salad

We used to operate a small coffee and sandwich shop. We offered nine different kinds of sandwiches, all of which are roughly equally popular. One day my daughter reported to me that is seemed everyone who came in ordered a chicken salad sandwich. Why did on this one day chicken salad more than triple in popularity? The common vernacular answer is “There is something in the air.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and philosopher, might say, “Yes, there is something in the air, and it is the collective consciousness.”
Chardin's theory was that there is a collective consciousness emanating from the interaction of human minds. This collective consciousness, he called the noosphere (from the Greek word for mind, nous). The noosphere is evolving and integrating with conscious human though until it reaches total integration which he called the Omega point.

This may seem like pretty far out stuff, but why is it that sometimes everyone seems to get the same idea? Is the collective consciousness whispering in people’s ears, “Eat chicken salad today.”?

Attitude is Contagious

Have you ever been in a room with friends, having a pleasant discussion, when in walks a newcomer? Sometimes the newcomer is ridiculously happy and excited. Perhaps everyone laughs at first, but as the newcomer shares his excitement, soon the spirits of everyone in the room are lifted. At other times the newcomer may be despondent and depressed. Soon people begin to leave because of the uneasiness everyone is feeling. There is a collective consciousness of everyone in the room. The introduction of a newcomer can affect that consciousness either positively or negatively. Either way, soon everyone is feeling it.

Collective Consciousness on a National Scale

The history of America is the history of dissenters. From the Federalist Papers to Henry David Thoreau to John Reed, America has prided herself in her dissenters. These dissenters usually develop a following, but are generally forgotten except in the halls of academia. But in 1968 America was reshaped by the voice of dissention.

The early 60’s were as American as apple pie. Popular music was dominated by folk songs sung by clean cut young men like the Kingston Trio and The Brothers Four. But in 1968 everything changed. Why did previous dissenters have to settle for a small following, while in 1968 there were so many dissenting voices that it became a chorus of dissent that changed the direction of the country forever. It was something in the air.

Prayer, meditation and visualization are ways of putting something into the air. It joins the noosphere of collective consciousness and rejoins the world of tangible reality, sometimes in very dramatic ways.

Several business leaders are discovering the power of meditation to enhance imagination and focus in business decisions. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, requires that his executives meditate three times a day. Thomas Edison, perhaps the greatest inventor of the previous century, had developed a very advanced meditation technique. He was known to say that when he was faced with a particularly difficult and complex problem, he would put himself into a form of trance - and stay there until the solution presented itself.

What he was doing was getting his conscious mind out of the way, and allowing his subconscious mind to work on the problem.

Be sure to follow the blog so you don't miss Meditation Part 3.

Meditation

This is the first post in a new series about meditation. If you follow this blog, you will be emailed about future posts on the subject.

Meditation has long been the domain of religion and spirituality. Every religion practices its own form of meditation. Catholics use the rosary as a meditation guide to help them focus on events in the life of Christ. Zen Buddhist monks practice zazen which is a meditation on the unity of body, breath and mind - and ultimately of all things. Protestants meditate on the Bible reciting Bible verses several times, each time emphasizing a different word allowing the full meaning of the text to sink in. Sometimes religious groups believe they have discovered the right way to meditate. In my opinion, there is no wrong way to meditate. In fact, meditation has left the confines of sanctuary and monastery and found its way into sports and even business.

I define meditation very broadly as any mental exercise that incorporates breathing, relaxation, and focus. This practice has made its way into sports under the term, visualization. Visualization is a type of meditation that incorporates relaxation and focus on such visual concepts as the perfect golf swing, the perfect swim stroke, or just plain winning. Many Olympic athletes take time each day to relax and focus on receiving the gold medal. Does it work?

The 1980 Soviet Olympic Team

In 1980, the Soviets conducted a visualization experiment. They divided the athletes into four groups. The first group practiced as usual. The second group devoted 25% of their practice time to visualization. The third group devoted 50% of their practice time to visualization. The fourth group devoted 75% of their practice time to visualization. At the 1980 Olympics, the group that spent 75% of their time practicing physically and devoted 25% of their practice time to visualization won the most medals.

The moral to that story is simple. Visualization works, but it is no substitute for practice. Visualization can enhance and empower practice sessions, but not replace them.

The DC Experiment

John Hagelin hypothesized that if enough people meditated in a city, they could measurably reduce the crime rate. In 1993, an experiment was conducted in the nation’s capital. About 500 people gathered in Washington DC and began meditating toward the specific purpose of reducing the crime rate in the city. At the end of 4 weeks, the crime rate had dropped about 2%. Then there was a marked increase in the number of individuals meditating. By the end of the eighth week, there were almost 4,000 people gathering and mediating. By the end of the 2 month experiment, the crime rate had dropped 23 %.

Clinical Trials

There have been a few clinical trials on the effects of intercessory prayer (a form of meditation) in the treatment of disease. In 1988 the Southern Medical Journal reported a significant better recovery of heart patients that received intercessory prayer as part of their therapy. A similar study with rheumatoid arthritis patients was published in 2000 in the same journal. Again, patients who received in person intercessory prayer had significantly improved recoveries.

To some, measurable results from prayer, meditation and visualization seems spooky and mysterious. There is really nothing mysterious about it. Mind, body and spirit are interconnected. We have all experienced how strengthening the body gives strength to the mind and spirit. Illness that affects the body, can also affect the mind and spirit. Why must we start with the body? Doesn’t it stand to reason that if we strengthen the spirit, the body and mind will follow?

More to come later. Don't forget to follow the blog.

Feed Your Brain

I don't know if you think about your brain very often, but you should. Your brain is very important to you. It is, after all, responsible for making the decision about whether or not to make an investment, start a new business, or marry someone you care about. Ultimately, your brain is going to determine whether you succeed or fail in life. That being said, perhaps you should consider how to take better care of it.

Your brain is the central control unit of your life. It weighs just over 3 pounds, but consumes 1/5th of the oxygen you breathe, 1/4th of your blood flow, and 1/3rd of your water intake. Those are not just meaningless trivia. Oxygen, blood flow and water fuel your brain, and you can actually improve brain function by increasing oxygen, blood flow and water.

1 - Improve hydration of your brain by drinking enough water.

Most people do not have adequate fluid intake. According to the Mayo Clinic recommended water intake varies according to a number of factors including general health, gender, activity level, etc. However, on average a female requires about nine 8-ounce glasses of water a day. The average male requires about thirteen 8-ounce glasses each day. Other fluids count towards total fluid intake. However, diuretics, like coffee, count for less than a full cup.

You may have never noticed subtle improvements in your thought processes on days you are fully hydrated, but you have probably noticed the inverse. If someone is acting stupid, people often say, "They must have been in the sun too long." If you have ever spent a good deal of time out of doors in the sun without proper hydration you have probably experienced headaches and deterioration of clear thought. The same can happen indoors in a dry environment, but it generally takes longer.

2 - Increase blood flow to your brain with aerobic exercise.

Research has shown that regular exercise improves blood flow to the brain. It has long been known that exercise improves attitude and promotes emotional stability. This is due to the increase of endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and other neuro chemicals. Studies in the US and Europe have clearly established that the same exercise that is good for your heart also improves motor function, auditory attention, and memory. One study of students demonstrated that aerobic exercise was related to scholastic success in reading and math.

Everyone who can move should perform 30 minutes of aerobic exercise each day. Start where you are. Build slowly. You don't have to run a marathon, just get your heart pumping and your blood flowing. You will not only start to think better, you will live longer - not a bad side benefit.

3 - Increase oxygen flow to your brain with regular deep breathing.

Deep breathing exercise is a fundamental part of many religions as well as exercise programs. Navy Seals, chess masters, and the Blue Angels have all developed specialized breathing techniques to improve brain oxygen levels in high stress environments.

I practice deep breathing in conjunction with meditation each morning as I plan my day. I alternate between upper breathing, which improves imagination and creativity, and lower breathing, which improves peacefulness and well being.
Your life is a series of decisions made in your brain. Feed your brain so you will be equipped to make good ones.

My Faith Musings

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