Igor: How many of you have ever tried to meditate
before?
How many of you fell asleep, got bored or gave up?
This is a very common thing.
The only people who stick with meditation are those for whom the dream has
excited them so much that they’re willing to put up with boredom, stress and
all the other stuff that comes with it until they actually learn the mechanisms
of it.
You see, the problem with meditation, especially in an English environment or
in a Western environment – because I think German, Spanish and French are
equally inept at describing mental experiences – if you ask any person who’s
grown up for example in Tibet or in the Tibetan refuge now with the Dalai
Lama or something like that, it’s very difficult for them to translate something
they’ve grown up from the age of 10 doing to a Western audience.
So they give you metaphors and flowery language and
a lot gets lost in translation, although it’s much better than that movie.
So, we need to start looking at what’s going wrong.
Why do most people who try to meditate fail?
Why do they give up?
What’s going on and how can you flip that around?
Would that be of interest to you?
Here comes in a nice little researcher called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, apart from having an interesting
name that most people cannot pronounce, is a psychologist who started
changing the trend in psychology because up until that point basically
most psychology was abnormal psychology.
In other words, what do people do when things go wrong?
You have an accident and your brain gets destroyed and
you suddenly can’t speak anymore.
Oh great, psychologists get excited.
Come in and I’ll spend the next 10 years torturing you to find out why you
can’t speak anymore.
A lot gets learned about the brain, but the poor person being studied of
course is a little less fortunate because it’s not as pleasant for them, but we
learned a lot because of these things.
So, for the first 90 years of psychology developing as a discipline – so for most
of the 20th Century – psychologists were only interested in what happens
when things go wrong.
What happens when you’re sad, when you’re depressed, when you’re suicidal, when you
have these physical problems and so on?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was one of the next generation of psychologists who
started getting interested in what happens when people do things well.
Shock!
How do people who actually cope with life do things?
How do people who are actually happy become happy?
The crazy thing he found is that it was irrelevant what station in life they had.
A factory worker could have a more successful and happy life within the
confines of the factory than a CEO, but sometimes the CEO had that.
Basically he had a huge study that was carried out across the globe at many
different universities and so on, and he wrote a book called The Psychology of
Optimal Experience.
It’s a wonderful book.
It basically repeats the same idea for all 200-plus pages of it, which he could
have given you probably in the Introduction and you’d be done with it, so I’d
like to give you the main idea here.
When people perform certain tasks in a particular kind of way, they
automatically enter what we call the flow state.
This is where we got the flow state from.
Has anyone here heard the term flow state?
He created it.
Sports psychologists talk about the zone.
It’s still a flow state.
You know you’re in the flow state because certain things begin to happen.
You lose your sense of self, your personal identity.
You basically identify with the tasks that you’re engaging in and you
lose yourself within it.
You lose a sense of time.
Time gets distorted for you.
There’s an overall feeling of wellbeing and satisfaction whilst you’re
experiencing it.
He had a whole list of seven or nine points that tell you you’re in the flow
right now.
That’s a useful list to have.
If you want, I’ll look it up for you and present it to you tomorrow, but that’s not
the important part that I’m particularly interested in.
What is interesting is how do you get into that flow where all this magic
happens, where you suddenly become better at tasks than everyone else,
where you’re happier, where your health actually seems to improve on its
own?
He came up with a very simple formula that will automatically get people into
that flow state, and that’s what you’re seeing right here.
He measures two things:
1.
What is the challenge that the task you’re engaging in presents to you?
2.
What is your skill level?
If your skill level matches the task, you’ll be in the zone – that flow channel.
It’s a channel.
It’s not like a point.
In other words, if your skill is a little lower
but the task is a lot higher, you can still be in that channel.
Remember what we talked about earlier – a small amount
of stress is still useful for the learning process.
Also if your skill is high and the challenge is lower, you can still be within that
channel, but the thing that’s interesting is what happens when you pop out of
that channel?
If the challenge is higher than your skill ability to cope with it,
you reach anxiety, stress, tension.
If the challenge required to do the particular task is significantly lower than
the skill that you have, you basically hit boredom.
For those of you that are ex-failed meditators, would it be fair to
say that the reason you pretty much gave up on it is either you were bored or
getting more stressed by trying to do it and figuring out I can’t do it.
What do you mean silence my mind?
I can’t silence my mind.
Every time I try to silence my mind, look there’s my words
again so I lose my mind.
What do you want from me?
That’s a little bit of the kind of things that have been going on there, right?
I get this a lot.
As you know I have a self-hypnosis course out there, and the
amount of stress it’s caused some individuals who didn’t understand how to
engage with a task, they increased what they thought was required of them in
the task, so the challenge shot through the roof.
Their skill level being tiny was no way commensurate with the challenge task,
so they overloaded with stress and anxiety, and as a result some people want
to give up.
It’s not that they can’t do it.
It’s that they’re doing the wrong thing.
The analogy I like to use is it’s kind of like being in the ring with Mike Tyson.
Without ever having done a single day of boxing in your life, let alone no
fitness training, that’s going to cause a little bit of stress to most people, isn’t
it?
Now contrast that to getting in the ring with a five-month-old baby, gruesome
images aside, you might get a little bit bored of beating up this poor kid
because the challenge there is very low, and your skill level no matter how
low it may be will still outrank the infant.
So, the secret is to stay in that channel.
You’ve got to make sure you break down the task that you’re doing so that
what you can actually do – your skill level – matches what is required of you
to succeed to some measure within that task, and that’s where mindfulness
practices that I’ve come across so far and what most meditation practices I have
come across so far have failed in, big time.