From the BBC 4th January 2012: This is time of year when many people are focused on looking after their bodies better...but perhaps the mind should receive similar attention?
Today we talked to Dr Danny Penman, author of "Mindfulness - A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World," and our culture correspondent, David Sillito who has been finding out if mind over matter really can help improve pain and depression.
That's great! How are you finding it? Are you using any specific techniques?
Yeah, really good when I remember to do it. I did try and start once before but then I started reading about Kundalini and scatted myself out a bit. I'm just doing breathing meditation at the moment which works really well for me at just bringing everything down and back to present moment as I live inside my own mind a lot. It's strange though, once I get into the meditation session and am starting to properly focus I get this reasonably intense energy feeling in my head. As if something's bowling about inside, which is often accompanied by the sound of rushing, not unlike the sound you get when purposefully contract your tensor tympani muscle. But yeah once I get past that things seems positive.
That's the thing. I always seem to have something else more important to do than sit down and meditate. I think a large part of the measure of success is how often you manage to gather the will power to actually meditate. It takes real discipline to do it regularly. Maybe we should start a #meditationInspiration tag to remind us to meditate more regularly. I've read that may mean that the top chakra is opening, I have no idea if that is true or even what it means. It sounds like you're achieving something though : ) The longest I meditated for was a month in a small eco-village I was volunteering at. We used to start the day at 7:30 with 45mins meditation. It got easier towards the end. And then one night I experienced something weird just as I went to bed. It felt as if all my awareness had left my body and was concentrated right between my eyes. It's hard to describe but it was an incredibly uplifting experience that lasted for only maybe 20-30 seconds until my next thought came online "Holy shit, what's going on!" and I was back, feeling my whole body again, as if nothing had ever happened. I wonder what the world would look like we/humans learned to control our minds : )Yeah, really good when I remember to do it.
It's strange though, once I get into the meditation session and am starting to properly focus I get this reasonably intense energy feeling in my head.