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How to Feel Good When You Want to Feel Bad

It’s funny isn’t it? I mean how we can drift off into our memories and relive events as if they were real. A scent, a sight, a question – can all send us off on an unintentional journey into a place of pleasure or pain. We can be bumbling along in our own little world, quite ok with everything, and then Bam! Our thoughts take us to a place of heaven or hell and we begin to relive a memory.

That memory brings with it either pleasurable or painful emotions – sensations that we experience in our bodies. Sensations that tell us we are happy or sad.

Sad

Do it now. Go back into the past and find a sad memory – perhaps the breakup of what you once dreamed was the perfect relationship; the death of someone close; even a moment of total embarrassment as you made a complete idiot of yourself in the eyes of people who were important in your life. Pull back the pictures in your mind, relive it, and remember the scents, the sounds, the feelings. Spend a few moments reliving it before continuing to read.

How do you feel?

Has your mood changed?

Do a quick body scan and notice any areas of discomfort.

Allow all thoughts of that memory to drift away back into the past where they belong.

Happy

Now repeat the exercise, but this time with the best memory you can find. Perhaps it was that first kiss; getting your dream job; a wonderful holiday; holding your son or daughter in your arms for the first time and looking into their beautiful scrunched up face; maybe even a moment when you were overflowing with love for something or someone. Pull back the pictures in your mind, relive it, remember the scents, the sounds, the feelings. Spend a few moments reliving it before continuing to read.

How do you feel?

Has your mood changed?

Do a quick body scan and notice any areas of discomfort.

Allow all thoughts of that memory to drift away back into the past where they belong.

Which exercise did you like the best?

Did either of them bring tears to your eyes?

Is it Really Real?

Now I want you to think carefully about this next sentence.

None of it was real.

They were memories.

Memories aren’t real. They are just sensations that we interpret as pictures, sensations, sounds, and thoughts in our minds. We behave as if they are real. We behave as if they make us who we are. We behave as if they are important.

But they are just illusions.

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have them. I like my memories – especially the happy ones. But that doesn’t make them real. That doesn’t mean we should base what we do right now on something that is nothing more than an illusion.

Here’s a little thought experiment for you to do right now. Just imagine, for a moment or two, what would be different if you, and the planet, and everything on it, were created one second ago, and all  those memories that you think are real were already programmed into your brain cells?

They Control You – If You Let Them

Yet you let them control your life.

As I mentioned at the beginning – something happens, a sight, sounds, sensation, scent – and it triggers a memory. That memory shifts your mood. Your mood affects your decision making process and consequently how you experience your life. Let’s say, when you were a baby, a doctor with a big beard stuck a needle in you and handled you roughly. Let’s say, because you were a baby, he didn’t treat you as a person, more as a thing.

So back to today, and you find yourself always a little suspicious and wary of men with beards. You call it intuition and you know that wariness is keeping you safe – you’ve just never realised it’s about beards and never noticed that your intuition never flags up clean-shaven men.

Subliminal Programmes

What happens at a subliminal level is that your natural, programmed, survival instincts – operating outside of your awareness – get triggered whenever a beard is in sight. Those same emotional chemicals, the ones that were released when you did the unpleasant memory exercise earlier, are set free. You notice emotional discomfort and feel a little uncomfortable. It’s just the echo of a memory, but because you can feel it, because you can feel the uncomfortable changes in your mood state, you think it is real.

It Must Be True

If it’s real, it must be true and so you act out a fantasy created by an ancient survival system that works on the basis of if it hurt once, avoid it forever because it might kill you next time.

What you feel, that slide into a negative mood state, is nothing more than chemicals floating around in your blood stream. Chemicals triggered by your primitive survival instincts that were not designed for 21st Century living on a planet with billions of people that you can never avoid.

The exercise you did earlier shifted you first into a negative mood and then into a positive mood in a matter of moments. You can always do this. You can consciously choose what to think about. So next time you feel low, find as good a memory as you can get hold of and use it to lift your mood a little – unless, of course, you enjoy the misery. Use your ability to make conscious choices to focus on thoughts that make you feel good, rather than thoughts that make you feel bad.

And whenever you feel bad, remind yourself, it’s just sensations.

More Help

If you’d like more help on how to shift your thoughts into the positive. My book Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis is a training course that helps you to take control of your mind, your thoughts, and how you feel so that you can consciously shift into a permanently more positive mind set where setbacks are nothing more than temporary glitches in the smooth running of your life.

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Memory, Alzheimer’s and Meditation

Meditation itself is well-known to have beneficial effects: like slowing down the physiological effects of ageing, lowering blood pressure, and reducing stress. It was thought to be a slow process, but some new research has found a marked benefit in a group that only meditated for the 8 week duration of the study.

The study was to test the impact of meditation on age-related cognitive impairment. 15 people were enrolled in the study with ages from 52-77. All were suffering from some form of memory impairment, cognitive dysfunction, or Alzheimer’s. None of them had any prior experience with meditation or yoga.

At the end of the study all the participants reported improved memory or cognitive function. This was supported by brain scans, taken before and after, which showed significant changes. The study itself was over an 8 week period and the participants were asked to meditate daily for just 12 minutes. So results are produced fairly rapidly.

This study was a small-scale preliminary study, consequently it isn’t possible to draw definite conclusions or start to make amazing claims about the power of meditation, but they used a form of meditation, Kirtan Kriya that I hadn’t come across before, so I checked it out and thought I’d give it a go and see if I noticed any effects.

One of the problems with regular meditation is that it isn’t much fun. This is one of the reasons why I have started to create meditation CDs to make the process much more enjoyable. The boredom factor is also another of the reasons why it’s difficult to notice any benefits you may gain from meditating. It’s easy to do something when your body gives you immediate positive feedback. Not so easy when all you get is 10 minutes relaxation and during that time you have to focus on something like a mantra or your breathing, rather than on your much more interesting thought world.

Now when I checked out the details of Kirtan Kriya meditation I found it was quite different from anything I had done before, but I was immediately presented with a problem.

Kirtan Kriya is a Kundalini yoga meditation based around a chant consisting of four sounds: Sa Ta Na Ma voiced with long a’s at a pace of around one sound per second.

Here are the rules:

  • Sit cross-legged, or in a straight-backed chair.
  • As you chant Sa, touch tips of thumbs and forefingers.
  • As you chant Ta, touch tips of thumbs and middle fingers.
  • As you chant Na, touch tips of thumbs and ring fingers.
  • As you chant Ma, touch tips of thumbs and little fingers.
  • Repeat this chant in a normal voice for 2 minutes.
  • Repeat this chant in a whisper for 2 minutes.
  • Repeat this chant in silence (as thoughts) for 4 minutes.
  • Repeat this chant in a whisper for 2 minutes.
  • Repeat this chant in a normal voice for 2 minutes.

You can see that this is a cycle within a cycle. The cycle of finger/thumb contact moving round the fingers, and the cycle of loud, quiet, silence, quiet, loud. The sounds themselves are another cycle. Sa represents the beginning, Ta is life, Na is death, Ma is rebirth & regeneration.

My problem was how I time the minutes without breaking my concentration to open my eyes to look at a clock, or set and reset a timer. One possibility was simply to meditate eyes open and watch the clock. That was a possibility and I was going to see if that would work when I found this amazing recording by Wahe Guru Kaur. So I made myself comfortable in front of my computer and started listening.

I think I have a pretty good sense of time and I thought I must have got something wrong, or this wasn’t what I needed, because loud seemed to be going on for an awful lot longer than two minutes. I was just about to stop and turn it off when it changed to a whisper, so I closed my eyes and continued listening.

It turned out that this was a 30 minute version of a Kirtan Kriya meditation. 5 minutes out loud, 5 minutes whisper, 10 minutes silent, 5 minutes whisper and 5 minutes out loud. And it was really good.

The first thing I did this morning, before starting work, was to listen again. It has left me with a feeling that I want to do it, rather than I should. Why this audio track works so brilliantly and makes the meditation so easy is that for the out loud parts you have Wahe Guru Kaur’s beautiful voice to speak along with. So any embarrassment about muttering weird sounds to yourself is gone completely. There is also a really pleasant background track to listen to. The beat in this is synchronised with the sounds so you don’t lose track of the timing when it gets to the silent bit.

My own feeling is that this meditation is bringing body and mind back into balance. The finger-thumb touching with both hands is activating both brain hemispheres. The chant forces your breath into new rhythms – and breath is powerfully connected to emotional states and the releasing of negative emotions. So you can see that even physiologically it has the potential to be beneficial without needing to subscribe to any mystical beliefs about the power of meditation – though you can do that too if you want.

A quick search around the internet reveals many other beneficial claims made for the benefits of this particular meditation, so why not try it out.

Let me know how you get on.

Michael