What we’ve been doing so far in terms of the mental exercises – we’ll call
these mentalizations – that’s the bit where you get to fly. That’s where you
get to explore, discover things about your inner landscape and get archetypal
forces to emerge and the symbolic landscape you’ll be creating in due course
and have some very powerful, healing and transformative experiences.
But they have to go hand in hand with the grounding practices, the things that
will keep you, for want of a better word, sane. You’ll need a balancing point so
that you don’t get too lost in your own mental processes and ultimately have
to come back to something practical and something useful.
Very importantly, part of those grounding practices will be the safety valves
that make sure that wherever you go inside your mind will be safe so that
even if it’s a troubling thing – let’s say you want to resolve some kind of
conflict from your past or an unpleasant thing that happened to you.
If you want to free yourself from that at some level, you may have to end up
facing it and you’ll need safety mechanisms to be able to do that and be
absolutely certain that it’s going to happen in a healthy way rather than
unhealthy ways, one we already mentioned at the start of the course. Do you
understand what I mean by this? Now luckily there’s a roughly
3,000-year-old practice that has already excelled in this. Has anyone here heard of mindfulness?
It’s of course one of the key Buddhist practices.
We need to talk a little bit about meditation, what it is and what isn’t and so
on to be able to fit it into this method and understand the purpose of it within
this method. The purpose is not the
same as in Buddhism for enlightenment and so on, although of course you can probably reach those
areas in a similar way by doing the same practices.
Primarily the reason for it is in order to get those big moments you have to do
a lot of it. We’re talking about days of meditation, hours of it and intense
focus and most of us don’t have that kind of time in our lives to do it. What
we’re going to end up doing is stuff that takes you five or 10 minutes, but it
adds up because you’re doing it constantly. It becomes as natural to you as making sure
you wear pants before you leave the house – or a skirt if you’re
a woman or a man who likes to wear skirts. So, we’re going to use it for a slightly different
purpose, but the reason it’s very useful is because mindfulness
has a lot of research behind it. Essentially when you come to the Eastern
meditation practices, you have two essential different types:
1. The mindfulness or inside meditations. 2. The concentration meditations.
Most people tend to be attracted to the concentration meditations where you
maybe look at a candle flame and just focus on that and focus on it intensely
and build it up inside your mind and so on. Has anyone heard of Kim’s Game? I think
Kipling wrote a book on that, where you look at objects and then you close
your eyes and you intensely try to visual all the objects and so on.
These require a lot of concentration, levels of concentration that most of us
do not have. We can build up those levels of concentration, absolutely, but
there’s a problem with that style of meditation. It’s the flight.
It’s very intense. It gets all the weird phenomenon people want where they
feel like they’re translocating, where they lose touch with their reality and
showers of stars come and hit them and they feel intense emotions and all
kinds of stuff. Very intense experiences can be
achieved relatively quickly if you have the wherewithal to stick through very arduous
concentration practices, but they also have a tendency to detach
people a little bit from reality. This is something that in meditation
circles is not much talked of but there is a little bit of research on it. It’s very
important research for our purposes here, and that is meditation-triggered psychosis.
Because we have two different
styles of meditation – one which is fast and hard and one which is slow but
steady – most people go for the fast and hard route because they can do it.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people that get attracted to the fast and hard route
are the ones that have the bigger issues because they want to resolve them
more quickly, so there’s a risk that they will detach from everyday reality, lose
themselves in these concentration meditations and go to places where in
traditional parlance they are mad. Because what they’re experiencing is
totally disconnected from what the rest of the world is experiencing, and
that’s not a very useful place to be in unless you’re doing it on purpose in a
time-limited environment. Do you understand where I’m going with this?
Again there is very little written on this but I did come across one
Ph.D. who did a study on meditation- triggered psychosis, and in particular
how different meditation groups deal with it. Dealing with it, believe it or not,
is through mindfulness. It’s more grounding.
So, if someone is a little psychotic and a little nuts – to use a technical term –
the more experienced meditation teachers will take one look and say no, this
is not your practice, you go to this group and that’s going to be better for you;
and once they see the signs that they’re more stable, then they can join the
more intense group again. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Now as it happens, mindfulness is also the most researched of all the mental
practices. Psychoanalysis has no research behind it. It’s a lot of very
interesting ideas, some of which kind of bear out in reality and some of which
are just figments of someone else’s psychosis.
There are many psychotherapeutic practices that have more to do with a pet
theory that someone has than with actual
neurological stuff. By the way, I include with this hypnosis.
As much as I love hypnosis and as many wonderful results as I’ve achieved
with it, those results are purely anecdotal. They haven’t been researched in
the more stringent scientific methods sense. Does that make sense to you?
It’s important that you understand that. Just because something hasn’t been
researched doesn’t make it valuable. It just means that you’re more prone to
errors, which means your conclusions should be a bit more cautious than stuff
that’s been researched more fully, if you get what I mean here.
Let’s get back to the idea of mindfulness. This has been researched intensely,
especially over the last 10 years. The reason I think it’s particularly interesting
is because that research is both pragmatic research in terms of people who
meditate are like this before, and after a certain period of time of doing these
exercises they’re like this now. So, it’s a very strong
correlation and by having other groups that aren’t meditating in that particular way
who don’t have those same results, you can quite confidently ascribe the changes to the
meditation practice. Do you understand?
The other reason it’s important is because we actually have much better
technology for actually seeing what’s going on inside the brain. PET scans,
fMRI scans and so on tell you what’s going on inside, and that tells us that
mindfulness meditation alters the actual architecture of the brain.
If you look at the highways of the brain, the neurons connecting to each other
and so on and you look at someone who’s done a lot of meditation,
it will look different.
Now here’s the bit that’s most interesting to us. Let’s talk a little bit about
your brain just so you’ll understand why we’re doing some things. If you take
your right or left hand – whichever you’re more comfortable with because
you’ll be touching yourself right about there – place it on your forehead and
let the hand wrap around. The area that your hand is covering,
especially if it’s kind of open a little bit, is known as not the skull, but if you were to
touch your brain directly – which would be unpleasant but it would be
interesting – that’s called the frontal lobe or the frontal cortex. That’s
the bit that makes you human. If you just hold your forehead now,
this is called your prefrontal cortex. There are a whole bunch of different areas inside of
here, and these areas are of particular interest to us.
Within these areas, when these have been developed
properly, you end up having various psychological benefits.
They’re responsible for certain psychological traits, shall we say, that if you
asked pretty much most psychologists in the world, they would agree that
those are signs of a healthy stable mind. If you asked most everyday people and
you translate that into everyday parlance, they would say yes that
would be a person that is a good stable healthy person, mentally speaking.
There are a number of functions that the prefrontal cortex runs.
The one we’re particularly interested in right now, although we’re interested
in several of them, but the one which is most important for the practice we’re
going to do is these fibers called GABA fibers. Those of you who want to have
the long version of it, it’s Gamma Aminobutyric Acid, and they link your
prefrontal cortex directly to the limbic system. The limbic system is your mammalian brain,
your more instinctual brain. It’s where your emotions are generated
and things like that. The GABA fibers are interesting because the switch off fear.
The stronger the GABA fibers, the larger the bundle of fibers becomes,
the more easily you can cope with fear and frightening situations.
Are you beginning to have a sense that developing this part of your brain will
be particularly crucial to us if we wish to take flight into the more nether
regions of our own minds? Another function of the
prefrontal cortex which is going to be of great importance to us is they regulate our emotions.
In other words, they keep them balanced.
Not too intense – which means basically you become an emotional wreck and
wreck people’s lives around you at the same time, because you can’t control
your behavior, so your emotions end up overriding your frontal lobe, which
means that you have no more control over your behavior.
If you have too little emotion, your life becomes pretty sucky for starters and
your decision-making gets worse. There’s actually a little bit of research that
shows that when people completely alienate their emotions from their
decision-making process, their ability to make good decisions totally gets
destroyed, so we need our emotional health in order to make good balanced
decisions, which is very important when you’re working with yourself.