Let's talk about your face. What's the state of your face right now? The muscular state of your face, that is. Don't look in the mirror. Don't touch your face. Just experience it from within, proprioceptively. Is your face smooth and impressionable like a child's, ready to spontaneously express whatever emotional impulse comes up? Or is your face tense and rigid, stricken by past emotions imprinted in its musculature, perpetuating old memories like reminiscent scars? Emotional distress is … [Read more...]
How Breath Awareness Helps You Achieve Your Goals
Breathing is an automatic behavior. We can breathe without thinking about how to breathe. Evolution equipped us with conscious awareness not for breathing, but for solving problems and achieving goals. When we meditate, we're actually misusing our conscious awareness. It's not natural for us to focus our mind on breathing. So why waste cognitive energy on practicing mindfulness? Why should I learn to observe my breath if all I want is to achieve goals? 1. When you practice mindfulness by … [Read more...]
Blood Meditation (New Mindfulness Technique)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UrgaZCUEec I have recently created a new little mindfulness technique for myself, and I find it so powerful that I must share it with you. I call it blood meditation because it requires you to pay mindful attention to your inner blood flow. Here is how it works: Set a timer for ten minutes and sit down comfortably with an erect, proud posture and your hands resting on your lap. Close your eyes, relax your belly, and start breathing slowly into your … [Read more...]
The Benefits of Deep Diaphragmatic Breathing
As you may know, my master thesis in cognitive science was a psychophysiological experiment on how breathing influences willpower, measured as attentional self-control. Yesterday, a new study was published on the effects of diaphragmatic breathing, which means to breath down deep into the belly so that the diaphragm contracts. Such breathing is slow: 15 seconds per breath cycle, 4 breaths per minute—fully in, fully out. In the study by Ma et al. (2017), participants breathed like that for … [Read more...]