HOW TO QUIET YOUR MIND:
Relax and Silence The Voice of Your Mind, Today!
MARC ALLEN
How To Quiet Your Mind: Relax and Silence The Voice of your Mind, Today!
Marc Allen
Copyright © 2011 by Marc Allen
Published by Marc Allen at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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How to Quiet Your Mind: An Introduction
Beginning Meditative Practices
The Muscle-Sensing/Relaxation Technique:
Breath/Motion Synchronization:
Other Mind-Quieting Techniques:
Going Deeper: Advanced Meditative Practices
A Final Note on Quieting the Mind
How to Quiet Your Mind: An Introduction
You’ve heard the story before: a man goes walking through his neighborhood at night and comes across another man looking for something under a street-lamp.
“Can I help you find something?” The first man asks.
“I can’t find my keys,” the second man says.
“I see,” says the second man. “I’ve dropped my keys out here before. I know what it’s like. I’ll help you find them.”
“I didn’t drop the keys out here,” says the other man. “I dropped them on my porch. I’m just looking out here because the lighting is better."
As absurd as this story is, how many of us maintain exactly this sort of conversation with our inner dialogue? How many times did you, as a student, sit down to complete some important assignment, only to suddenly find something else (of far lesser importance) to attend to? How many times have you, in your adult life, been faced with some task or resolved to learn some new creative skill only to set it aside for some menial activity with no deadline or value? We’ve all been there. We’ve all been determined to do something important, only to be struck sidelong and taken off-task by some voice in our heads that encourages to play this game or watch that show, or organize some part of our office that doesn’t need it. After hours in front of the television spent flipping through substandard programming or perhaps even more time on the internet drifting from site to unnecessary site, suddenly it’s time for bed and we’ve lost another day that we began with high expectations? How consider how many meaningful things you’ve tried to do that somehow comes to be lost in a time-vortex of meaningless activity. It’s not uncommon, in fact, that after such a day we ask ourselves, “Why did I do that? Why did I waste so much time?”
The mechanisms that engage our inner dialogue go a long way towards enriching our experience as human beings, to be sure. They give us the ability to plan, anticipate, experiment, and come up with novel solutions to problems. The inner dialogue has been so successful throughout human existence, in fact, that it has devised an endless number of ways to avoid stressful situations in the modern era. The answer to “why” we procrastinate or otherwise fail to remain focused is actually quite simple: we’re stressed. Some part of our mind suddenly finds itself in a situation of an unpleasant or undesirable nature and bails on us.
If the voices that distract us from work or otherwise important activities weren’t bad enough, consider the converse situation. We’ve all been here too: it’s the end of a long day, and you’re simply trying to relax and reward yourself for time well-spent and jobs well-done, only your mind doesn’t seem quite ready to shift into neutral. You perhaps find yourself stuck worrying about work when you should be enjoying time with your family or some activity that you take genuine pleasure from. This is the real tragedy of modern life. That same inner-dialogue that guides us through challenging times, often with stunning grace and precision, can suddenly become trapped in a particular mode of exchange that no longer serves us once the challenges of the day have been met.
Most of us spend our lives struggling to deal with matters at hand in the present while half of our inner-dialogue is pulling us into the past or pushing us into the future, or trying to take us anywhere but right here and now. We tend to worry about the future of a task or project before it is finished. We may even find reasons why such an undertaking will be obsolete upon its very completion. Again, how many times has each of us finished something difficult, only to discover it wasn’t necessary or as important as we originally believed it would be? Doesn’t that leave us crestfallen? But what is the point of badgering one’s self about the fate of things we’ve completed in the past if there is nothing we can do to change it?
If it seems impossible to stop this inner conflict, that’s with good cause. As stated before, the inner dialogue is part of the human condition. We’re born with it, we use it so often we’re not aware of it—there’s no way to permanently “dispose” of our inner dialogues. They are far too important to us. However, as luck would have it, you can quiet it down. You can work with it, even cooperate with it. You can even get it to cooperate with you, given enough practice. With patience and determination—lots of determination, admittedly—you can learn this skill for yourself, and the benefits of doing so are seemingly endless. It’s more appropriate to ask how quieting the mind can’t benefit you, since it will leave you with a much smaller list.
This book is intended to introduce many of the benefits derived from quieting the mind. This is commonly done through meditation and other closely related practices. The reader will find it organized so that simpler techniques can be found before the more involved and time-consuming ones are covered, but that should by no means discourage anyone from attempting and exploring all of them, as the benefits derived from certain visualizations and mantras can far surpass simpler breathing-relaxation practices and quick stress release exercises. Suggestions and sources for additional information on the topics discussed herein may be found inside discussions of individual topics, and readers are highly encouraged to take utmost advantage of their local libraries as well as the internet in order to cover many of these subjects in detail.
It may be advisable to start with simple changes here and there in order to develop a more helpful and communicative inner-dialogue (i.e. one that isn’t harping on you at seemingly every opportunity). Many times our minds are stressed because our bodies aren’t being used in quite the way they were in past eras. In a similar vein, our minds are tackling problems and situations our ancestors probably never envisioned. Each of the exercises or habits below represents a very simple way ease and quiet the mind on any given day, allowing one to focus when focus is necessary, and allowing a person to relax when he or she has earned it.
Of chief importance is for you to consider your own personal lifestyle and how you may be able to incorporate simple tasks throughout your schedule in order to relax the rush of thoughts that ebb and flow throughout your mind. Some of these changes are seemingly obvious, but it is easy to overlook them on any given day, especially if a busy routine gets in the way of your intent to relax a noisy inner dialogue. Below are several tips for developing new habits that foster a quieter, more cooperative and focused mind. These are some of the very simplest activities one can undertake in order to do so. Nearly all of them take advantage of the vaunted “mind/body connection” in order to relieve stress and increase focus. While any of these practices are relatively simple to engage in, none of them are necessarily easy to commit to. Any change in habits will be met with some degree of resistance or forgetfulness. It’s important in this case not to succumb to frustration and abandon developing the new habit. Say, for example, that you discover the back-straightening exercise is very useful to you, but you realize at the end of the day while you’re drifting off to sleep, that you haven’t completed that activity. There’s no need to become frustrated—and there’s certainly no need to hoist yourself out of bed and force yourself through the routine if you’d rather go to sleep. Just make a quiet mental note to resume the practice upon waking up the next day in order to continue and be sure to give thanks to your inner dialogue for the reminder. Each of these activities is designed to quiet your mind, not upset it, so don’t associate any of them with force or you may come to resent them by that same association.