Let your inner calmness upon waking stay with you for longer than usual. Before you stir your mind awake with all the things you have to do and all the things you have to worry about, plan for and undertake today, hold onto the stillness you awaken with, where everything is calm and peaceful, where everything is equal and nothing needs attention. Step into the morning in this calm frame of mind and hold onto it for as long as possible. Each day from hereon in lengthen that calm state, holding onto it intentionally for another hour, and then another. Each day make this your first priority, to lengthen your inner state of calmness and peacefulness. Hold onto it for as long as possible.
Conserve your energy. Make decisions based on how much energy you have for yourself and how much you are willing to give to others, to other causes, and to that which appears important. How important are you? Gauge your time and your energy so that you are not depleted but renewed and rejuvenated on a daily basis. You will do no good if you do not have energy to support yourself in your daily life, if you give it all away and have no time to renew it. Take good care of yourself, allowing time for rest and rejuvenation. Only then will you safely have time and energy for others.
Strive for balance in mind, body and spirit, allowing each to have its part but none too much. Moderation in all habits of mind, body and spirit will allow balance to be achieved. When any aspect is overdone or neglected the whole suffers. It’s a pretty simple concept to grasp but obviously a difficult task to achieve. That is why it can be the work of an entire lifetime, and a worthy endeavor indeed!
Remain contained and resolve inner issues within the self rather than project them onto others. It’s not enough to say you understand something when you really don’t, so take it inward and ponder it until you do understand it at a deeper level. When you assume without deeper contemplation you make the mistake of taking on another’s ideas. Better to avoid conflict by deeper contemplation within the Self, for the Self knows everything. You just have to go to the Inner Self to discover this.
I would like to say that, yes, it is that simple. By telling your heart to beat slower, it will beat slower. By telling your blood pressure to flow more calmly, it will flow more calmly. By telling your breathing to calm down, it will calm down. By telling your body to relax, it will relax.
And though I know from personal experience that these things are true, I also know that our internal programming, largely molded by our social conditioning and education, tells us that such things are not possible.
The rational mind either rejects such a simplistic possibility and refuses to do it or makes half-hearted attempts a couple of times and proves its absurdity.
If we allow our accepted beliefs to control our actions without honestly testing out possibilities beyond those beliefs, we will be slow to evolve. Evolution requires that we allow life to progress through its changes. If we grasp too tightly to old beliefs without testing new possibilities we create roadblocks to our own growth and evolution.
The true scientist is not offended when the outcome of an experiment disproves the stated hypothesis. To the contrary, there is the thrill of the discovery of a new truth. Science, at its purest, is a lover of truth. Beliefs that refuse to yield to an unprejudiced experiment are no lovers of true science.
It is true that many of our cognitive, emotional and behavioral actions happen outside the control of consciousness. Our subconscious minds are the home of the programs that automatically operate our physical and mental systems.
We should be quite thankful that the subconscious automatically shoulders the directing of these systems. Imagine if we had to tell ourselves to breathe every breath we inhale throughout the day! We’d have little energy and focus to do any other activity. Yet, it is a fact that at times, when we do assume conscious control of our breathing, it can have a deeply calming effect upon our body and state of mind.
The science behind the efficacy of conscious self-regulation can be traced to the pioneering research of German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz in what he called autogenic training. The marvels of hypnosis were in deep display in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. No one could deny that the subconscious mind could be influenced to vastly change the condition of the body.
What Schultz advanced was the possibility of a direct relationship between the conscious mind and the state of the body. Rather than put the conscious mind to sleep in a state of trance and then have the subconscious controlled by the suggestions of the hypnotist, in autogenic training the conscious mind is fully awake, talking with conviction to the body and the underlying subconscious, consciously directing physical changes.
The mind, at the level of the ego, the chief navigator of daily life, can decide at any time to direct thinking and behavior. This means volitionally, with conscious intent, interrupting and overriding the currently active program operating from the center of the subconscious mind.
With calm, unbiased perseverance, one can discover, for themselves, the power they have to directly influence the state of their central nervous system. Of course there are many other ways to influence this relationship, such as through the use of medications, whose chemicals exert direct influence over the automatic programs running the body.
Energy therapies such as acupuncture also directly impact the energy channels in the body, by overriding subconscious programs causing energy blockages. Massage therapy deals with the relaxing and redistributing of energy at the level of the densest concentrations of energy, the physical body.
All these methods have their benefits and may be helpful to creating harmony within the CNS. Statements made directly to the body empower an individual to directly impact their state of being. Of course, one should always investigate the reason behind an uncomfortable body condition, as there may be a message behind it to the psyche from the body, asking it to change a dysfunctional behavior or to investigate some deeper issue.
Nonetheless, even that kind of investigation requires a calm state of being to allow for clear mental processing. For this, the simple directive from the conscious mind, telling the heart to beat slower, may prove extremely useful.
