The Efficiency of Slowing Down
If you are like most people, every morning, you roll out of bed, pick up your phone, check your email and your social media accounts and then follow your morning routine. As your mind orients, it quickly finds its familiar patterns of behavior so you can feel like you. You walk into the bathroom with the same basic gate, perform your daily ablutions in the same basic way. And then you slip your clothes on, the same foot going through the same pant leg the same way as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Same with your shirt and shoes. You’ve done these things many, many times, and you know exactly how they are done most efficiently.
Then you go to work and, in much the same way, you allocate as many of your movements and behaviors as possible to the unconscious mind.
But what if these well-ingrained habits were actually not creating the efficiency you believed they were? What if they were actually getting in the way of your life? What if they were slowly killing you?
We can all relate to the character in the movie who stares at themselves in the mirror as they brush their teeth. Their minds wander as they think about the events of their recent past and their predicted future. They only look half-conscious as they repeat the familiar pattern of brushing with the same basic brushing motion that they have employed for decades.
From the moment you awoke, your brain transitioned into a beta wave state in order to navigate the familiar world. As it did so, it began to outsource movements and behaviors to the unconscious mind so that your conscious awareness could be available to focus on new and complex situations without having to think about the things that were repeatable.
In essence, your body remembered what you did yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and on and on to before you can probably remember. In other words, you are completely identified with your past from the moment you began to wake up.
Meanwhile, you talk to your friends, family and coworkers about the future that you want to create.
Can you see the problem here?
Most people look to improve efficiency by implementing new structures into their routines so that they can try to get more done, faster. It’s common wisdom to do so. But then they complain that their routine is killing them and they dream of a better future.
But here’s the thing… Your routines and your dreams live in different parts of your brain. As you go about your day, your brain activity is mostly in a mid-beta or high-beta brain wave state. It is focused on tasks and routines, not a vision of your future. So you are wanting a better future, but focused on a familiar past, and, meanwhile, hardly ever present.
But we’re not about to change the way our brains operate with the snap of a finger. So what can you do about that?
Meditate, that’s what. Meditation is one of the most poorly understood practices because, frankly, even most people who think they are doing it, aren’t; let alone those who don’t do it but have only heard about it.
Meditation is not just a tool to relax, contrary to popular belief. Those who commit to the practice, overtime, begin to pause their beta brain wave activity and rest in alpha, theta and (in certain cases) even delta brain wave states. It is in these states that the stimulus of the external world completely ceases and one can access the “inner vision” of the subconscious mind. The boundaries between “self” and “other” disappear. As such, you can feel a sense of connectedness to all that is nearly impossible to access when you are in your normal, waking state.
To write this off as “woo-woo” would be a big mistake. This is basic neuroscience.
Meditation is a reset to the present moment, where the mind and heart can be free to explore and feel into a new future that is not restricted by the predictability of the past. It is the real dreaming; not fanciful thinking, but truly dreaming, where the intuitive guidance of the subconscious mind can be revealed because the familiar mental chatter has ceased. It is a practice of getting the activity of the sympathetic nervous system to slow down enough so that you can rest in the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system.
In what may appear to be a paradox to the logical mind, the greatest efficiency is in training yourself to slow down and listen deeply to the direction coming from within. From this space, clarity emerges about how to live and behave in such a way that will create your best possible future.
Without regularly checking in with yourself in this manner, you are bound to keep repeating the same habits and routines on a daily basis, perhaps with only minor tweaks. In some cases, you may even be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, so to speak, as the life you are living is out of alignment with what you truly desire. If that is the case, no matter how many new structures you implement into your routine, you will never find the peace of mind and sense of purpose that you desire.
As the benefits of meditation begin to become more and more widespread, we will undoubtedly begin to see more and more scientific data and anecdotal evidence to support the practice.
