CBT clinicians have found that techniques drawn from centuries-old Eastern philosophies are helpful in quieting an overactive mind. A deliberate combination of breathing, meditation, and acceptance of a situation greatly quiets a person, often leading to much improved feelings and even manifestation of better outer circumstances.
Deepak Chopra has written extensively about meditation and clarity of the mind, encouraging people to slow down and notice how their mind works, even trying to catch a glimpse of the gaps between thoughts, as those are the little morsels of silence that bring calm and fresh insight.
Notice Your Environment
You may have lived in your neighborhood for a long time or a short time, but the next time you take a walk, try to look at things as if it is for the first time. Notice the blossoms on the trees and shrubbery. What are the shapes?
Could you sketch them and reproduce the colors? Has a neighbor remodeled a garage or made an addition to the house? What exactly were the changes made? Look at each house, shop, person, and pet as if it is a fresh vision. You will undoubtedly see something new.
An interesting mindfulness exercise is one in which you sit quietly and name each emotion that you feel at that moment. Resist analyzing or judging the emotions. Merely name them. This will have the effect of calming your mind and making you feel less at the mercy of runaway feelings.
Mindfulness means that you are present in your life. Your thinking is not focused on the past or the future. It is noticing what is going on right now.
This lifestyle brings you a great deal of energy and brainpower because the thinking is not wasted on ruminating over the past or dreading unknown components of the future. Mindfulness has the added blissful bonus of dramatically decreasing negative emotions. There is simply no place for them cand now.
Be Attentive to People
Even though you interact almost every day with people in your life-friends, family, coworkers, and clients—how many details do you notice?
Talk with the elderly neighbor for a few minutes, noticing the exact color ot his hair, the stoop of his shoulder, the timbre of his voice, and the lilting accent of his words. Is it Puerto Rican? Cuban? Ask him questions about his garden and grown children and truly listen to the answers. Notice your tendency to race ahead to what you want to say and stop. Listen to what the person is saying.
If you do not have small children in your family, spend time with a young child and ask her questions about her life. What movie did she recently see?
How was her last birthday and how is it to be this particular age? If you listen carefully, you may learn how to protect yourself from catching any cooties.
When you practice mindfulness, along with learning to enjoy a particular place and the people in it, you slow yourself down, undo the digital speed of your usual existence, and calm your mind and bodily organs to a healthier pace.
Meditation
Meditation is one way to develop a spiritual nature and confidence in a connection with a Higher Source. An Internet search for your locale will possibly lead you to groups and teachers who are eager to help others. Churches, yoga centers, and hospitals often offer meditation classes. Be wary of taking unhealthy negativity into the meditation experience, worrying that you’re not doing it correctly. Although there are a variety of techniques and meditation philosophies, there really is not any way a person could meditate incorrectly.
Getting Started
When beginning meditation practice, try to include the following:
Walking Meditation
If you have tremendous difficulty sitting still during meditation, you might investigate groups that practice walking meditation. The technique is similar to the sitting meditation, but the practitioners quietly walk in a circle within a designated space during a specified length of time, usually forty-five minutes at a time, followed by a seated time of rest.
Labyrinths for walking meditation are situated in various places around the world, as well as in private locations. Some famous labyrinths include those at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, California; Land’s End Labyrinth, also in the Bay Area; and the labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral in France. Many mystics and seekers walk labyrinths as a type of pilgrimage.
Awareness of the Breath
Many of the different styles of meditation suggest that a person focus on the breath. This has two benefits-increasing the depth and regularity of the breathing and taking the mind away from worries and distracting mental chatter. If you are unable to tackle the more intricate rituals of meditative modalities, at least learn to focus on the breath. This practice alone will do wonders to calm down a frenetic lifestyle, if practiced on a daily basis. Eck-hart Tolle, author and lecturer on many topics related to conscious living, suggests that those who meditate become as alert as a cat watching for a mouse, watching for the next thought. Heightened awareness may tame the brain into quieting those extraneous thoughts.
Make Friends with the Enemy
The enemy could be anything that you perceive is in your way, out to get you, or thinking badly of you. The enemy could be your habitual negativity and tendency to retreat into passive victimhood. Only you can decide what
Release Judgments
Thinking and believing judgmentally is counter to a peaceful, mindful existence. The emphasis is constantly on “them” or those qualities about
“them” that you detest. Judgmental points of view prevent a person from experiencing beauty, joy, and spontaneous pleasure in life. Constantly going over what the other person is doing wrong can be diversionary, a way of avoiding what might be changed in a person’s own life to improve a situation.
A recent study at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine found that a person’s memory of a specific event shifts with each subsequent memory, much like the childhood game of Gossip. This is important in terms of testimony of witnesses in court trials and also for people using CBT to alter their memories and habitual mental patterns.
Being judgmental blunts natural curiosity about life, people, and the surrounding environment. If you hate your neighbor’s rap music, you close the door to understanding a slice of life that is an important part of pop culture.
Judgment creates a small, impoverished inner life and stifles creativity. Judgment assumes that you know what is best for others, and maybe that is not the case. The other person is probably doing just fine, with or without your opinions.
Dr. Fugen Neziroglu, author of Overcoming Depersonalization Disorder, suggests keeping a detailed log of disturbing thoughts, emotions, and precipitating incidents. One is then asked to acknowledge the distorted interpretations and formulate new interpretations. This helpful use of CBT enables a person to rein in those wild horses and give them a new direction to run.
Neziroglu notes the following thought distortions, which could be thought of as the “enemy”:
- All-or-nothing thinking
- Overgeneralization
- Negative filtering
- Discounting the positive
- Jumping to conclusions
- Magnifying and minimizing
- Reasoning with the emotions
- “Should” statements
- Taking things too personally
In order to get the most out of CBT, one has to take responsibility for one’s thoughts and emotions and their consequences. This may initially be rather upsetting, but in the long run, greater mental health is available when one owns up to the origins of muddled behaviors and a confused existence.
Slow Your Thoughts
Sometimes merely observing your thoughts goes a long way toward slowing them down. You can think of them as a string of beads, each one with a particular thought entity. Other methods are to think of only one thing, such as a rose or a lotus flower. You might focus on the flickering flame of a candle, letting other thoughts slow down and eventually fall away.
Greater relaxation of the physical self leads to a slower mental pace and a change in thinking style. Decreased judgment of the self and others sifts out a lot of mental chatter, leaving broader, deeper things to think about, probably at a slower pace. Author Jeffrey Wood reports that mindfulness therapy results in a strengthened immune system and reduced chronic pain.
