As we turn the corner on the new year, and those resolutions start to dissolve, I want to offer some practical tips and tactics that have helped me stay centered and improve my mental health and disposition.
I intended to fit all of these concepts into a single post. But coming in at over a whopping 6,000 words, it was a lot of information to digest, so I felt it would better serve readers as a series of posts.
The starting point and most useful tool for me is body awareness—recognizing the conditions of your inner world and subsequently regulating the nervous system. Everything else is downstream from there.
Mind in Body (Relaxation, Soft Eyes)
The mind should be an embodied mind.
Thich Nhat Hanh
A lot of mindfulness “gurus” preach non-attached observing of your thoughts—watching them pass without judgement, fighting, or identification with them. But I think body awareness is a precursor to watching your mind because you become conscious of sensations in your body and changes in the nervous system, and can see what thoughts or stimuli trigger that arousal (fear, anger, excitement)—where your thought patterns come from instead of merely what the patterns are.
In that sense, body and breath awareness can offer insight into your attachments on a primal level—what scares you, what angers you, what excites you, based on recognition of constrictions in your neuromuscular system.
It won’t enable you to always remain serene no matter what you come in contact with, but it will allow you better recognition of inner unrest.
A novice mindfulness practitioner is instructed to observe and then follow the breath when starting out, simply noticing it rising and falling. Nothing in the universe is constant, and the breath exemplifies this principle on the most basic level. Next they’re taught to become conscious of the body, which leads to recognizing sensations, which can be either positive (relaxation or warmth), negative (pain or tension), or neutral.
When you stay with the body, you recognize that this experience, like the breath, is also impermanent. The pain and tension transmute, and you realize much of it is a manifestation of the mind, or born out of your resistance to feeling it.
Taking it a step further, mind-in-body is also a part of your intuition. By being conscious of your nervous system, you can get a pretty good read on if what’s going on in your environment is agitating you, or if it’s allowing you to stay harmonious.
An adept mindfulness practitioner can realize when something brings them out of harmony (out of body), from a state of relaxation to a state of uneasiness. This occurrence is almost always brought on by an emotional trigger, but there are instances when it’s something that would unsettle anyone, like being front and center to a verbal dispute.
When you’re able to recognize that arousal, you can then down-regulate the body accordingly, bringing it back to the parasympathetic state through mindfulness of the body or breath.
Smiling With the Eyes
Many emotional, performance and physiological benefits come with relaxing the body – improved digestion, circulation, and as a result, cognition (cerebral blood flow) – but there are also cosmetic ones—you can influence others’ perception of you, appearing more attractive and inviting when relaxing one body part in particular: the eyes.
“Smiling with the eyes” is known as the Duchenne smile, but I prefer the term “soft eyes” because I don’t think you necessarily have to smile to reap these benefits. And I’ve found it to be the preferred part of the body to relax in order to have the most profound effect on the aforementioned down-regulation of the nervous system—mind-in-body is also the best technique for cultivating Jing, our life force or essence.
Mind-in-body meditation is comparable to the flow state, in which the mind is actively engaged with something but still at rest, in a state of alert relaxation. This mode of brain engagement is known as the task-positive network.
To recap, being mindful of your physiology alerts you to changes in it (and what caused that state change) or when your attention slips from the present. Just as the breathe rises and falls, so does everything else in the universe, including thoughts and emotions. Therefore, the natural progression is from observing the body to watching the mind.
Continue to Part II – Conscious Consumption: Detached Observing of Your Awareness
Conscious Consumption 