Just a thought

What about that great % of our mind that we ‘don’t use?’

 A kind stranger

I was pondering that question and I wonder what goes on in the brain anyway, is it just thoughts?

Then I saw a documentary in which a man got his brain scanned, you could see different parts of his brain light up, all depending on the question asked or stimuli given. For instance when he was asked to fabricate a story a different part of his brain was active then when he was asked to remember something and when his feet got tickled a whole new area lit up. 

Recent studies have found the part of the brain that lights up when compassion is experienced, a discovery that happen quite by chances when a man was brought in with a knife stuck in his brain, he was “fine” no brain damages except one part of his brain was no longer active and he lost the ability to be compassionate. After researching this they located that part of the brain that lights up in most humans when compassion is experienced. Just to side step a little…they went further and even found that specific area in dog brains.

By now we know that different parts of the brain help us see and hear, store memories or solve mathematical problems.

The labeling of what we see, hear, store or solve is going on in our brain as well. We need labels to make sense of our sensations.

I felt down the stairs a few years back and badly twisted my ankle, a friend of mine found me at the bottom of the stairs screaming in pain. He called the ambulance and sat with me while waiting for it to arrive. This man happened to be a hypnotherapist and we had dabbled with different kinds of awareness for a long time, so it was not strange to me when he ask me to go to a different state of mind, he asked me basically to label the sensation I felt in my ankle not as pain but as a healing and I did. The excruciating pain dissolved in a sensation of warmth and when I arrived in the hospital I could no longer experience the pain. This made it very difficult for the doctor, who had only the labels of pain, to understand the severity of my injury.

 My mind thought pain so I sensed pain, my mindset changed and the sensation changed. So now what?

For me I feel that the answer lies in the labeling of the chain of events we call experience.  When we dissect and label every link in that experience we almost feel that we can take out one link and understand the whole. It is like saying the engine is the car and can function separate from the body work as a car.

Labeling and dissecting in it self is not a bad thing, when used right it can even help us to experience the whole on a deeper level. But when we get stuck in a label or the need to know the whole while dissecting just one link, we get lost in discussions about right and wrong, left or right, me or you.

For sure there are parts of the brain we don’t use or don’t have access to when we feel we need it. We all have those moments that you know the title of a book, it’s on the tip of your tong, you can almost feel your mouth form the words, but…nothing ...and then when you least expect it a light goes on and you know. So no doubt that there are more parts of the brain that are still in the dark.

Maybe the only way to make full use of our brain is to stop seeing it as separate from the rest of our senses and exercise our ability to be whole, complete with our experiences of creative and linear chain of events. Like an athlete exercising his body or a mathematician exercising his thoughts so we need to exercise our wholeness. So to experience the whole we need to lighten up.

Or as it was so eloquently put by the same kind stranger

As humans, we have the gift of consciousness and the ability to focus our minds on the act of witnessing our existence without judgment or the need to define or know. That’s when we feel God, truth, love…

Shenanigans

When I teach Aikido to kids’ age 6 to 10 we sit in meditation for a couple of minutes at the beginning and at the end of each class. It has become such a normal thing to do that kids that just join the group slot in right from the start. They sit there for minutes perfectly still, eyes closed, breathing in and breathing out. Mothers watch in amazement, their ADHD child sits still. Their “miss talk a lot” is quiet. Every now and then we talk about meditation and I tell them that thoughts are like clouds. When you watch the sky she is never the same, sometimes there are hardly any clouds, sometimes there are many. Sometimes the clouds are nice and fluffy, sometimes the clouds are dark and heavy. All these clouds are perfectly fine as they appear. When you look at the sky you know you can not hold on to any of the clouds, nor can you make them move any faster, they just drift by at their own pace and so should you not hold on to any thoughts or make them move any faster. Telling the cloud that it is a nice cloud or a stupid cloud does not make much different to the clouds but it does make a different to you who is watching. Clouds are just clouds what ever shape or size.


One day I was telling the story again about watching the clouds and how telling clouds they are stupid makes you feel different, one of my kids remarked: “when you say things are stupid, it is like you are blowing smoke out of your mouth, when you blow out smoke all the time, pretty soon you can’t seen anything any more, not even the clouds.

I bowed to him deeply.

It has not always been the normal thing to do, to sit still and meditate at the beginning and end of class. When I started, some eight years ago, things were very different. When I had them all neatly lined up and I would sit in front of them in meditation, some kids would get up and walk around, some would ask me if they could go to the bathroom, some would poke at their neighbor, some would roll their eyes and pretend to faint and some would make funny farting noises and they all would laugh. All the shenanigans kids can think of I’ve seen by now I think.

I had a hard time understanding what it is I needed to do to get them to at least sit still at the start of class. I tried the nice cop bad cop routine, did my best to ignore it for a while, lost my temper a few times, and let the entire discipline slide completely and joined in the fun. What it took to take them with me in the enjoyment of meditation was the realization that all the shenanigans they pulled, I pulled when I started with meditation.

The whole song and dance between me and the kids was a blown up version from the whole song and dance I went through with my teacher and I was still going through with the clouds in my own head.

I could not make them meditate and enjoy it, no more than I could hold on to a cloud; I had been blowing smoke left and right and could not see what I needed to see. So I began with being truthful to myself and see my shenanigans and sit with them, in front of a group of young kids.

Now we can sit together in silent’s me, my kids and our shenanigans, enjoying breathing in and breathing out and every now and then we roll around laughing at funny farting noises.