Clear Your Mind
Part One of Two.
When I was younger I had a hard time concentrating. Even when I wanted to focus on something as mundane as watching television I would find my mind would wonder. I never new how to focus and draw out the great potential on my mind.
In this article I will share some techniques I used to re-engineer my mind so that it would process data better and keep focused when I needed to do something.
An internal war is being fought right now between your conscious and subconscious mind. You may have noticed it by now, your concentration and focus is not 100% on what you are reading. It may even be as low as 30-40%. Things are creeping into your mind right now. Such as what you feel like eating for dinner, how your going to pay for that bill at the end of the month, that friend you needed to call the other day or many, many other distractions that enter our minds on a day to day basis.
Centering your mind and permitting yourself to think clear from your somewhat intrusive inner dialogue is the goal of this post. Being able to control your internal dialogue from giving you bad advice, distracting you, creating repetitive bad habits and demotivating you.
The area of the mind has fascinated me for a long time. When I was younger I had an accident where I feel off a two story building, onto concrete, face first. I was faced with amnesia for that point on and could not remember a moment before that time.
Having to ‘relearn’ almost everything again at the age of 8 brought me to a stage where I felt it important to understand how the mind works and how you can actually train yourself to have a seemingly ‘photographic’ memory. But that’s for another post.
Before you can accomplish anything amazing, you have to be able to focus and align your mind in such a way that you are optimizing it the best you can. This takes some effort and a lot of practice. In saying that it is a rather easy concept.
Step 1. Stopping your mind.
Alright, what I will get you to do is sit back for a moment and breath in and out a few times. Try and focus on nothing. Just go absolutely blank. How long can you manage to not think of anything?? Time your self and see how long you can go for. As soon as anything creeps into your mind you have to stop the timer.
How did you go? After years of practice I have managed 3 minutes 11 seconds of blank. Constant meditation can help in this area. If you can find a meditation class in your local area try attending that a once a week and practice on this skill.
It is an important one.
A good technique for this is to read what I am writing again out loud and halfway through the sentence stop and go silent. Remember the silence. Remember this ‘feeling’ and you can bring it back when you want by doing the same with your internal dialogue. With proper practice, you can keep that pause indefinitely.
Step 2. Bringing your mind into the now.
This step is about focusing your mind on the here and now. It is very valuable to be able to focus all your attention on the now and a crucial step in becoming ‘present’.
Some good ways to practice this is moving your conscious thought into the eyes or ears, or both. Once you focus on what you are seeing there isn’t much room to be thinking about anything else. When reading try focusing on your eyes and scanning across the page taking in as much as possible but not reading every word. After a little bit of practice you will be able to read at least twice as fast as before and retain a general understanding of what you have read.
Tags: autism, discovery, helping the world, Life, matthavok, mind, Mind wax, personal freedom, you mind, your mind
Inside my mind - Discovering Life 
May 29, 2009 at 3:54 am |
[…] completely clear your mind. I have a detailed outline of how to do this in my post cleverly named Clear Your Mind. Once you have achieved a level of quietness that a few years of practice guarantees then you may […]