Postcards from the Funny Farm

When I ran across Dorian’s Blog “Buddha of Hollywood,” I was instantly curious.  Since I live so close to Hollywood and know a few “oddballs” that have come out of that town, I figured I had a tiger by the tail with this blogger.  Since then we have exchanged emails a few times and I have learned of his interest in meditation.  While I meditate and practice TM as well as the Relaxation Response in my life, I found out his knowledge was in some different aspects.  I was pleased when he agreed to 2 part guestblog on meditation.  I hope you enjoy his writing as much as I do.

When my friend Damien asked me to guestblog on self improvement, the first thing I did was to go to my book shelf and pull out my old psychology books. I ended up with a pile that would take me a year to research and I thought to myself “Well, this is not going to work.”  I’m not going to be able to train somebody to do psychoanalysis and therapy by writing blog posts.

Considering that 90% of the daily psychological bruises we are facing are small incidents, stuff not worthy taking it to a therapist.  (You wouldn’t go to a surgeon to put a band aid on your finger cut, would you?) Then only about 10% of our problems are of that magnitude that requires professional help.

Instead of getting too deep into the academic aspect of psychology, I thought that I could come up with something more practical.

The following posts are going to give you a series of tools to deal with the small stressors of the daily life. They will teach you how to be more relaxed, give you more energy, prop up your self confidence and optimism, and make you fell better and more enthusiastic about your life. Watch for the posts in this series, I hope they will benefit you.

Part I – The Concept of Relaxation Meditation

I wish I could come up with another word for meditation since what we are going to learn and practice has a lot more to offer than the classical meditation techniques.
Let’s say that we are going to learn how to use our mind, brain if you want to call it so, at a higher level and capacity. We are currently using only about 10% of our mental capacity. That means that using just 20% would double your brain output. Can you imagine what it would be like to function at 100% mental ability?
The problem we are facing as human beings is not that we are not equipped to deal with our daily problems or that modern life has become unmanageable and our brains can not keep up with it. Our problem is that we are running our brain with both the acceleration and the brake pedals to the floor at the same time. The gains in performance and improvements that I’m taking about achieving are not some miracle supernatural voodoo trick but they can be made.

You are not going to gain anything that you already don’t have, just the knowledge and ability of mastering your own mind.

We will start understanding the “Relaxation Meditation” in this post by examining the concept.

RM is relaxing your mind in a controlled, voluntary fashion. Sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of people in the field who don’t distinguish between physical and psychical relaxation, this is an important point to make.  RM means relaxing the mind as well as the body.

Have you ever worked on a project so difficult and so demanding that sitting in front of your computer screen or a piece of paper your brain just spaces out and you find yourself staring at the screen with your mind completely empty?  As I close this post, consider the benefits to RM:

Benefits. Even if you practice only this simple form of meditation the benefits you will incur are tremendous. From dealing with the daily stress to improve brain function to improved immune system, this meditation is essential in your mental and physical well being. The simple benefits like improved sleeping and improved energy will be apparent very soon after you start your practice. The more profound changes will take a longer practice time but your rewards will be worth the time and effort.  In my next guestpost here at Postcards from the Funny Farm I will dive right in and show the practice of RM.  So watch for it here next week!

In the past few years, my job and my private life have both benefitted by me setting goals.  That may sound a simple suggestion but it is really subject to interpretation.  For example, in teaching kids you might make a general goal of:

I will meet the needs of all my students.

This is really hard to achieve for two reasons:  #1) the needs are not defined and #2) each student has different needs.  I would say this goal as is is quite impossible.  Now watch what happens when we make it more specific and put measurable objectives in:

I will give each child a pre-test and post-test on which they will show 90-100% accuracy or at least a 10% improvement from pre to post.

You can also do this with your kids:

I will spend 30 minutes with my 10 year old son every Thursday talking and interacting away from the rest of the family.

Note I left out the general and went to the specific.

The serenity prayer goes as follows:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

The line that begins with courage is the goal setting line.

You need the courage but also the wisdom to kmow what you can control. I encourage you to be specific in setting measurable goals. Another example of how I do this is in my CAN Blog Self-Rating system that you can read all about on my personal blog. Understand that without a goal you can never achieve it and without a specific goal you can’t even see where you’re headed. Do you set specific or general goals?

Today’s fast paced world leaves us all exhausted at the end of most days. Right now, as an example, I have that woozy feeling I have forgotten an appointment because I didn’t transfer it from my wallet to my Yahoo! calendar. Oh well, if I did I did. I’m pretty good about that usually. Anyway, with life being so fast, as Randy Pausch reminded us all, I think it’s really important to have some therapeutic reverie once in a while. I talk about W.I.N. with my team at work and sometimes, reverie needs to be “what is important now.” One day it may be getting your kid immunized, another it might be to buy pet supplies.

Looking back at life’s seasons and grand events helps us move forward more bravely. When we can see our bio as separate from our now it makes us seem greater than we are, or at least more able. I recommend listing your accomplishments by decades but if you are in your twenties or younger, that’s not much of a filing system. Separate your life into sections you find relevant, but try and do it when you can steal away for some quiet time. You can draw mantras from these for the upcoming year (ie; “I carried my running team by gaining 4 points in the finals”)

Here’s a portion of mine as an example:

Decade 0-10

• I was put into the gifted and talented education program in 2nd grade.
• I wrote “Swimmy the Turtle” and won 2nd place in the state fair in 3rd grade.
• more

Decade 11-20

• I learned every guitar riff The Alarm recorded.
• I got my first job as a printer’s apprentice.
• I trained as a camp counselor and counseled on summer.

Decade 21-30

• I met and recorded with my rock hero Dave Sharp of the Alarm.
• I got a job teaching at 27 in an inner-city school.
• I got my Master’s Degree at age 28.

Decade 31-39

• I got married at 33.
• by 38 I had my third kid and decided that was plenty ;)
• I bought my first mortgaged home at 39 and it has a pool!

If you try it, have fun with it. I suppose if you’re a blogger you might want to consider it like a meme. Please do! Everyone else, just thank goodness you aren’t self-absorbed as we bloggers and do it on a notepad and save to your desktop. It’s therapeutic and an absolute recommendation from me. Can you say “absolute recommendation?” Hmmm. Ok well, regardless, I recommend doing it. Life is good, but it will pass you by if you don’t stop once in a while.