Tag: meditation

Stress Less

As the holidays are fast approaching, we are getting into the most stressful season of the year in the Western world. So today let’s discuss how to keep the stress at bay and more importantly, how to make sure that you keep your mental peace amid all the chaos.

Before we talk about tackling stress, let’s discuss how stress originates in our body. Stress comes from trying to control people and situations. Getting other people to behave our way is not really working and is never effective. The only thing we can control for sure is our mind. There will be always things to worry about. So if wait for things to settle down, we will be waiting for eternity. Our thoughts carry us all over the place and they bring stress in our lives. If we gain mastery over our mind and thoughts, we find deep peace. Our mind is like a crazy wild elephant. It destroys everything on its way, it thinks about scary thoughts that will most likely never materialize. Someone put it nicely, anxiety and worries are misuses of the imagination.

But we live in the real world so there will always be things out of our control. If we learn to control our reactions to situations, we will be able to avoid stress and bring happiness and peace. In that spirit, I found this stress handling quadrant. I am going to share this document on the screen. This document is courtesy of Tashi Nyma a Buddhist Monk out of Dallas, Texas. No need to copy this document – I will email you a copy at the end of this session. Those of you who are watching this on our YouTube channel or on LinkedIn, please email meditatedenver@gmail.com and I will email you a copy of this document.

As you can see, this is called the Four Quadrant Practice. The first quadrant is Avoid. We want to avoid as many situations as we can that can create stress in our life. For example, is looking at our phone 10 times an hour really necessary? Once people start looking at their phones, all kinds of stressful situations arise. They say an average American looks at their phone 96 times per day. That is insane!! Going on social media all day is another one of those things that we can avoid. What I found helpful was to limit my social media interactions to twice a day. And I am trying really hard not to get into an argument on social media. I limit checking my emails three or four times per day. Again, it is different for everyone but no one expects you to respond within minutes.

The next quadrant is Adjust. Let’s adjust our behavior to avoid stressful situations. For example, because I am in a High-Risk COVID group, I started getting stressed out when COVID increased in the last two months about shopping. So we adapted to a 100% online or curbside pickup model for the last 6 weeks. It eliminated all the unnecessary stress. You might want to limit the duration of meetings if that stresses you out.

The next quadrant is to Adapt. We adapt to the situations that we can avoid or adjust to. For example, you may not be able to avoid a meeting with that annoying coworker. Take some deep breaths before you begin the meeting. Go for a walk if you have an option.

The last quadrant is Accept. This is if all fails kind of category. Accept that you have to take that meeting and it may go bad. Prepare yourself and change your attitude towards it. There is no reason an external situation should give you stress. Train your mind. Essentially, this is what we started the session with.

So as you can see, there are ways to stay out of stressful situations. We must make sure that what the world brings does not need to disturb our internal peace. Hopefully, with some practice, we can all experience that peace within. I would like you to do this exercise as homework with the worksheet. It would certainly make you think if nothing else.

Mindful Speech

Some people talk a lot and others tend to be quiet. But all of us have a constant chatter in our mind this inner speech. So let’s discuss mindful speech both inner and outer. We briefly talked about asking ourselves Is it True? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind? Before we post anything on social media in Episodes 7 and 9. So let’s take this a little further. When we have any kind of communication with someone else, we must ask ourselves; is it True? Is it Helpful? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind? The answer to any one of these is negative, we should try and refrain from that speech. A speech can be any communication method be it social media, email, verbal, nonverbal, etc. This will help us bring a level of kindness to the world. More importantly, it will allow us to be less judgmental as we tend to judge everyone except ourselves all day long. It will also hopefully help us avoid exaggerated language. Because of the influence of marketing in modern society, we have all adopted this language of exaggeration. Either it is the best or the worst nothing in between. Do we really “love” that slice of pizza? Without that our life is somehow going to be incomplete? Is it really a slice of heaven? Do we even know what heaven looks like? If someone does not give us something, is it really ruining our life? My personal favorite is To Die For. Really? Will you die for that sweater? If we begin to pay attention to what we communicate, we will be able to avoid a lot of this.

Paying attention to our communication is great. But, if you think about it, the majority of all of our speech is internal. We talk to ourselves more than we talk to anyone else. We think about things that happened or things that may never happen. So let’s start to develop a habit. When we catch ourselves having an internal dialogue, we should ask ourselves; is it True? Is it Necessary? Is it Helpful? Is it Kind? And again, if the answer to any one of these is No, let’s just stop that internal dialog and try to just be without thinking anything. Personally, I find it helpful to ask Is it Necessary? Every time, the answer seems to be No and I stop that internal dialog. One useful tip is to use our MAC technic here as well. If we are alert looking out for this internal dialog, we will then can be mindful in asking the question so that we can stop that internal dialog. You will be amazed at how your day improves just by keeping a tab on your internal dialog. Some people ask if we should continue if the dialog is positive. In general, we want to avoid that internal dialog as it may start out positive but as you all know, our mind wonders and can get the negative drift anytime. If we make a sincere practice to scan for our internal speech, we will be able to tame our mind a lot faster and our meditation practice will improve as well.

Purpose of Meditation

One of our participants sent me an email asking is the purpose of meditation practice to find that 15 minutes of peace. This is such a great question so I thought we would talk about the purpose of meditation practice tonight. Surely, we want to find that peace within us on a daily basis for however long that we can find it. But the purpose of practice is never the practice.

What do I mean by that? Let’s say you decide to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Now unless you are used to climbing fourteeners, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is no small feat. Especially, the last day. The first few days it is relatively easy but on the last day, you are supposed to start climbing around 9 or 10 pm at night. You will reach the peak just around dawn. You take a few pictures and then continue with the descent for about four hours or so before getting to a camp. This is not an easy day for anybody. You will be essentially on your feet for 10 hours or so. In this case, you will start conditioning your body before you head out to Tanzania. You begin a daily exercise routine and probably weekly climbing practice. The purpose of this conditioning is not to get good at conditioning but to prepare yourself for the climb on Mount Kilimanjaro.

Our daily meditation practice is supposed to condition us for our daily worldly activities. For example, let’s say you buy a 10,000 piece Lego puzzle. That’s a lot of pieces and would take you a few days to complete for sure. Now you begin to organize your pieces in different piles first. Then you begin to build the puzzle. You spend say 30 minutes doing this. If you spend the next 23 ½ hours breaking what you have already built and mix all the pieces you had separated what is the result? The next day, you will have a bigger challenge on your hand.

So when we meditate, we are trying to find that peace within us for sure. The bigger purpose however is to make sure that we carry that with us throughout the rest of our day. We want to be centered no matter what life throws at us. That is the real purpose of our meditation. Getting grounded within ourselves. If during our meditation practice say you had a rough time concentrating on a particular day. But after meditation is complete, you are able to be kind and loving towards everyone you come across. That is a successful mediation session. On the other hand, if you had a peaceful meditation where you came close to enlightenment but after the meditation session you have difficulty showing compassion towards anyone, that was an unsuccessful meditation session.

Types of Mind

I am sure you have heard a lot about the mind. Before we dig into it, let’s just briefly make sure what it is not. A mind is certainly not your brain. Our brain is an organ, mind on the other hand does not have a physical dimension. Our mind is located in the region of our heart chakra. Its nature is clarity. This means that it is empty, like clear space, and that it is a formless continuum completely lacking shape and color, which possesses the actual power to perceive, understand and remember objects…The function of the mind is to perceive or cognize objects, to understand or impute objects. The mind also has the power to create. The mind is the “creator of all” according to Buddha. If we think about it, this makes sense. Everything that we have in this world, someone had to create it in their mind. Our computer for example, before someone built it, someone had to design it. They had to think about how it may work and then put it on a piece of paper. Similarly, in the building we are in, an architect came up with a design in their mind before creating plans for someone to build.

Our mind also known as “Chitta” is generally divided into three broad categories. Our gross waking mind, our subtle mind, and our very subtle mind. Our gross waking mind is the one in charge of our day to day activities. It allows us to function in this physical world. Our mind controls all of our actions. Our gross waking mind is in our physical realm meaning it knows the concept of time and space. At night, however, when we fall asleep, our gross waking mind ceases to exist. It is almost like the death process. We have no clue what happens in our deep sleep. As if we did not exist at all. During our sleep, our subtle mind takes over. This is the mind that controls our dreams. It makes sure that our bodily functions are still active. Our subtle mind is not conformed to our physical realm. It moves from one place to another without any concept of time and space. Sometimes we remember what happens in our dream state, that is because we are either in the process of moving from gross mind to subtle mind or the other way around. In these cases, we are in a lucid state and we distinctly remember our dreams. A very subtle mind on the other hand is our so-called consciousness. This is the mind that travels from lifetime to lifetime without any attachment to our body. It is mounted on our karma so that is why our karma decides our fate. Our very subtle mind leaves our body at death along with our karmic winds. Our very subtle mind is a pure mind. It has no delusions. It is our buddha nature meaning it has potential for enlightenment. Every one of us has that pure potential. During our meditation, the peace we discover is our very subtle mind. That is what we want to hold onto and use as our go-to resource when delusions arise in our gross minds.