A Simple Practice to Build Clarity
It’s hard to have clarity about what you want from life when all the so-called answers are coming from the outside. Knowing your true path can only come from the inside. But if you don’t have a connection to your inner self, you are never going to get the clarity you want.
No one else can tell you what’s right for you. You can follow the prescribed paths of what is supposedly “right” but it doesn’t mean that it’s right for you. When you’ve followed prescribed paths for too long, you have severely limited your capacity to see what’s right for you, much less believe in your choices. It’s a natural outcome of suppressing your impulses in the service of achieving goals. Which is not a bad thing, unless that’s the only thing you can do.
Letting go of the “have to”
Being able to let go of your “have to” can be tough. Especially when your ability to achieve has built your confidence. But what happens when you’re not doing what you’re “supposed” to do? Does your confidence from seeking achievement transfer to your ability to choose for yourself? In other words, can you enjoy life without a task to complete?
Without following someone else’s prescribed path, you tend to lose interest. You’re looking for the next thing to achieve, but you’re not sure how that achievement will be useful in your life.
Be your own authority
The only way to get clarity and experience your achievements as meaningful is to be your own authority. To do that, you must tune into your impulses and act on them.
That’s not to say you should be irresponsible. It means that you start a practice that allows you to fully notice and act upon your impulses.
This practice can be as simple as paying attention to your feelings when you make a choice about what food you want, or what clothing you feel like wearing. When you practice in simple ways like this, you build your capacity to notice the sensations in your body that motivate your choices. It is this capacity to notice your sensations that is the foundation of being your own authority. It is also the trick to having clarity about the bigger things in your life.
What having clarity looks like
When you are authentically motivated by your own impulses, you will have the clarity you are looking for. You will be able to make choices about what’s right for you, and you will know why you make those choices. The things you do will not be a mystery anymore.
Any resistance you get from others to conform to their standards will be easy to stand up to because you are confident in your own choices. Ridicule or humiliation used to try and sway your decisions will be weak against your confidence.
Clarity looks like a life where you enjoy what you’re doing because you know why you’re doing it and it has meaning for you. Your choices are in line with the overall goals you have for your life.
Calm Your Mind with Bioenergetics
How to calm your mind with bioenergetics
Have you ever heard of bioenergetics? If not, you’re in for a real treat. Bioenergetics is one of the original body-psychotherapy methods. With exercise at its core, bioenergetic exercise is a super effective way to calm your mind.
It’s so effective that if you use bioenergetic exercise as a meditation to start your day, you’re going to be so much more mentally ready for whatever comes at you. Starting your day with the mental clarity that bioenergetic exercise provides is going to lay an incomparable foundation of calmness for the day.
One of the great things about doing bioenergetic exercise is that you can do it anywhere. Plus, you can easily pick up this new skill with little effort on your part.
Using bioenergetics to calm your mind can be as simple as moving and stretching your body for less than 10 minutes a day.
Here’s how bioenergetic exercise can help you calm your mind.
- Bioenergetic exercise will help you forget the stresses of the day.
A daily routine of standing in the grounding pose and doing expansive breathing is a super simple and immediate way to calm your emotions and relax your mind.
- Bioenergetics allows you to feel an internal connection.
When was the last time that you connected with yourself? Bioenergetic exercise allows that and is an uncomplicated way to let it happen. With bioenergetic exercise, there’s nothing but yourself and your awareness of your body. Interestingly, you can tune in to yourself on a level that maybe you haven’t before.
Why should you care about developing your internal connection? Because self-awareness is the basis for peace of mind.
- Bioenergetic exercises will stretch your body.
When you’re tense, your muscles constrict and tighten, which adds more pressure to your body. That pressure is then reflected in your mindset and your emotions and will inevitably lead to you feeling more stressed.
Doing bioenergetic exercises will help stretch your body and allow you to move about more freely. Reducing the pressure on your body will also allow you to think more clearly. Making you less likely to make rash judgments and decisions.
- Bioenergetic exercise is something to look forward to.
When you give your body something that feels good, you’ll look forward to it on a daily basis. Then you’re on the path to the peace and ease that you crave.
Making time to incorporate bioenergetic exercise into your life every day will create great results for your mental and emotional health. And as you do bioenergetic exercise your breathing is going to open up and improve and you will begin to alleviate any anxiety you carry around with you.
- Bioenergetic exercise can create a safe place for your thoughts.
You don’t need any special equipment or memberships to practice bioenergetic exercises. Just set up a small space in your home or be like the Tai Chi practitioners and do it at the park. Because the intention is all you need in order to practice bioenergetic exercise.
Regardless of where you are, or whether you use additional equipment to help make your breathing more expansive, bioenergetic exercise will help to create a safe place for you in your mind.
When you notice that your thoughts are racing, it’s important to find a way to calm your mind. Using bioenergetic exercise in your daily routine will lead to calmer, more peaceful, and less stressful feelings. If you do it, there’s no way it won’t help.
Give bioenergetic exercise a try. Clear some of the clutter in your brain. And give your body a good stretch. Because if you do, it’s going to make you feel GOOD.
A Secret For Better Sleep
If you have trouble falling asleep because of racing thoughts, you are not alone.
This problem is so common that there are literally hundreds of thousands of sources where you can find lists of ideas about how to calm yourself down before you go to bed.
These include breathing techniques, meditation apps, and even lifestyle adjustments such as exercising moderately, avoiding caffeine late in the day, eating carbs to stimulate serotonin and getting sunlight in the morning. The list can be seemingly endless.
Why you may have trouble falling asleep
When your thoughts won’t stop racing it’s because there are feelings in your body that have split off from your consciousness. For whatever reason, you don’t want to feel them. Your mind is working really hard to keep you from feeling them. But by doing that, it’s creating a problem than if you were to simply feel your feelings.
During the day, there are lots of ways you can distract yourself from the sensations of your body and avoid your feelings. But at night, these feelings inevitably resurface and cause you to have trouble falling asleep.
The secret
Generally, the feelings that make your thoughts race are fear and sadness, mostly generated due to a feeling of helplessness. If you can’t figure out which feeling it is, then the content of your worrisome thoughts will probably clue you in. Once you can recognize feelings associated with your racing thoughts, you can try to let them move through you.
In other words, the secret to getting rid of the racing thoughts is to feel the feelings associated with them. It’s really the only way. You will never get relief from a feeling that isn’t expressed. And even if you try to avoid it, it will always find its way to being expressed, either directly or indirectly. Hence, the racing thoughts.
What this means is that if you follow this advice, you will probably find yourself feeling more emotions than usual. If you follow this advice and can’t seem to get to your feelings, there is some other work you need to do to prepare yourself to feel them more easily.
When you breathe more, you feel more
To feel more easily, you must deepen and expand your breathing. There are many ways to deepen and expand your breathing, but one of my favorites is sitting for five minutes over a stability ball with your arms raised. Once you have started breathing at a steady rhythm you are much more likely to notice and have access to emotions in your body. Now you can try to feel the feelings associated with your racing thoughts.
Once you have expressed whatever feelings you have inside you, your body will naturally return to a state of equilibrium. The racing thoughts will be gone and you will relax, and if you are tired, you will have no trouble falling asleep.
Surrender to Your Experience
With most psychedelics, every experience is unique. Ketamine is no different. This medicine is subjective to the condition of the patient. What does that mean? It means the medicine will respond to the state of the patient both in the body and in the mind. This is why setting an intention and creating a safe space is so important.
There is no guarantee that every experience will be comfortable and every experience will be like the last. Though this may be the case for the majority of the experiences, because of the relativity of the medicine, it should not be assumed. That is why surrendering is so important with this medicine.
Despite the variability from person to person, session to session, one common denominator with all psychedelics, ketamine being no different, is to surrender to the experience. What you resist, persists. If you find yourself in a state or experience that is uncomfortable or may be intense, do not fight it. Do not try and counter it, breathe through it. The breath is the anchor to bring your mind, your body and your emotions to presence.
Breathe in your intention and trust the experience.
This is where the healing begins, in the act of surrendering to your experience.
Remember physics teaches us that everything is made up of energy, therefore nothing can be destroyed, only transmuted. Trust that whatever comes up that may not be pleasant, is simply being transmitted through your intention to whatever your intention is. Surrender to it. If you fight it, it will only intensify the situation. This energy has to come up and move out in order for it to clear. This is the work of medicine. On the other side of the experience is your freedom to bask in your intention.
You got this!
Creating a Safe Space
When engaging in a new experience, it's important to ensure that the space you engage in is comfortable and safe. For reasons aside from the obvious, set and setting calm the mind to not rile up any potential thoughts or feelings of stress or anxiety. Surrendering to the experience with total commitment is the best way to receive maximum benefits of the medicine. Therefore, a safe space is extremely important.
What is a safe space?
It can be anything from a comfortable environment (plush seating/bedroom area, moderate temperature, ambient music) to clearing your day so you have the time and space to be present during your experience.
A safe space also includes preparing yourself on the day of the session. That could be beginning to plan ahead to clear your schedule, possibly taking a technology break- from social media or emails- ahead of time so no lingering thoughts carry into the day of. Taking the same measures after your experience would also apply. Journaling is a great way to calm the mind and get out any thoughts and feelings that do not support your intention. This is transmuting the energy so you can clear the space for your healing to take its course.
A safe space varies from person to person, and it is up to you to decide what works for you. Be honest with yourself, you came this far to take this stretch, you owe it to yourself to be one with your experience so you can receive the maximum benefits from it.
Music & Psychedelics
Music is a powerful and transformative art form that can serve us in many ways. Learn how music can serve you during your psychedelic experiences.
Setting An Intention
Setting an intention is important to receive the most benefits from your experience.
Set and setting are paramount in psychedelics as they map the journey you will embark on.
Physics teaches us everything is made from energy. Therefore, energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transmuted.
Setting an intention is where the magic begins in transformation. Consider the intention- the final destination of a road map.
The goal here is to focus attention on what you want your result to be. Where attention goes, energy flows. This can be extremely beneficial to the mind as it can support the busy mind with focus and clarity. Oftentimes, the mind's thoughts may go into contraction mode when the body and the soul engage in a new experience unfamiliar with the mind. In setting an intention, it prepares and allows the mind's logic to shift in a certain direction.
If this is your first experience, we encourage you to set an intention. Not sure where to begin? A great start would be to ask yourself the following questions:
- What do you want to let go of (anxiety, depression, anger)?
- What do you want to experience and bring in (peace, joy)?
There is no judgment around this, your intention is personal and important to your experience.
Why Therapy is a Mindfulness Practice
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is putting intentional focus on something you're doing. Although this may sound like paying attention actually, they’re not the same. When you pay attention to what you’re doing in the traditional sense, you're completely absorbed by what you're doing. You're so involved that you're not aware of what you’re doing at all.
Mindfulness is different.
In a way, mindfulness is a consciousness of what you're doing while you're doing it. It’s a “meta” experience. It all starts by noticing, without judgment, what is happening in your five senses and in your sixth sense of “interoception.” Which is paying attention to the sensations of energy inside your body, such as pain, tingling, vibration, temperature, and numbness.
Let me explain through an example, take a sip of your drink if you have one. Did you focus on the experience or did the movement feel automatic? Automatic movements are not mindful and movements that are not mindful cannot be modified.
Why mindfulness is the foundation of change
So, if you're trying to modify the way you do something in your life, you first have to see all the movements of the way you do a particular thing. This might sound easy if you’re talking about how you tie your shoe or button your shirt. However, if you’re talking about how to change the way you interact with your family, children or co-workers; things might get a little more complicated.
The thing is, you cannot change what you cannot see. If you want to avoid a cliff when you’re driving a car, you need to see the cliff and turn your steering wheel. If you can’t see your own emotional cliffs, you can’t turn your behavioral steering wheel which can lead to an interpersonal disaster on your hands.
Seeing all the movements that go into your interactions with your various relationships requires seeing processes inside yourself that are largely invisible to you. It often requires that you realize attributes about yourself that you may have been avoiding.
How therapy builds mindfulness
Now, let’s talk about therapy. Since it’s all about seeing how you do you, internally and externally, it is in essence a massive exercise in mindfulness.
Even the old-fashioned name for it, “psychoanalysis,” is a tip-off to the reality that therapy is about mindfulness. When you analyze something, you examine it methodically. You discover or reveal things through detailed examination.
When you enter therapy, you start becoming self-aware. You begin to reveal the moments that cause you to do things the way you do them. Your automatic process can be stopped. You now have a choice about whether you keep doing things the same way or change them because there’s a better way.
When you enter therapy, you start becoming more self-aware. You begin to reveal the moments that cause you to do things the way you do them. Therapy reveals that your automatic processes can be stopped. It gives you the power of choice about whether you keep doing things the same way or change them because there’s a better way.
Gaining these insights can help build your self-awareness and help you gain the capacity to change your behavior. If being mindful is the first step towards a new you, then therapy can equip you with the tools and support to bloom into the best version of yourself.
Intrusive Thoughts: Egosytonic vs Egodystonic
Intrusive Thoughts (ITs) intrude upon your ongoing thought processes and startle you with attention-grabbing content or imagery.
Intrusive thoughts are common - research says that 94% of the population experience them occasionally.
Intrusive Thoughts can be categorized in two forms:
- Egodystonic thoughts: which are an expression of wishes that oppose your values
- Egosyntonic thoughts: which are an expression of wishes aligned with our values.
It is best to understand what your intrusive thoughts say about you. These thoughts usually hone in on what is important to you. You will never have an intrusive thought about a topic your brain finds irrelevant, such as “oh no, what if my shoes get untied?” Your brain will only exert the effort to offer up an intrusive thought about something you care deeply about and its fears may be threatened.
The flip side of your intrusive thought is what you value the most.
However, these thoughts DO NOT reflect your hidden desires. Experiencing an intrusive thought does not make you “deranged” or “depraved” because the only unhealthy thing about your experiences with intrusive thoughts is how hard you are trying to not have these thoughts. What you may find to be true is that there is a difference between a bad thought and a bad behavior.
Thought Suppression Exercise
- Intentionally think about an intrusive thought.
- For the next minute, place your attention on anything except for the intrusive thought. (find something a sense can attract to - the sound of birds outside, the ac unit running, the pen in front of you, the mint inside your mouth, etc)
- After 1 minute, note your anxiety levels on a 0-10 scale
- Next, for another minute, practice bringing forth the same intrusive thought.
- After 1 minute, note your anxiety levels again on 0-10 scale.
With this exercise, you can teach your brain to grow bored with your intrusive thoughts as we have realized in neuroscience that repeated attention to the intrusive thought will reduce reactivity over time (not so instantly) and can be done without necessarily seeking some answer to the reasons why they are rising within our thoughts.