Engage in practices that bring your mind into a state of stillness or close to stillness. This allows the body’s natural self-regulation and healing mechanisms to activate, promoting homeostasis.
Regularly practice mindfulness, meditation, self-inquiry, and self-reflection. These activities are shown to change gene activity, reduce inflammation, and decrease the activity of genes responsible for disease, fostering self-regulation.
Stimulate your vagus nerve through techniques such as yoga, specific breathing exercises, mind-body coordination, dietary changes, and various physical exercises. The vagus nerve is considered the ‘healing nerve’ and its activation promotes the parasympathetic nervous system, enhancing well-being.
Breathe in through your nose to a comfortable count of four or six, then breathe out through your nose to the same count. This simple technique stimulates the vagus nerve, which is an anti-inflammatory nerve that helps reduce inflammation in the body.
Engage in meditation with the intention of immersing yourself in the ‘ground of all experience.’ This practice, rooted in Eastern wisdom traditions, aims for self-realization by going beyond your body-mind identity to connect with the source of all experience.
When experiencing sensations, thoughts, or sounds, ask yourself, ‘What is hearing this?’ or ‘Who is imagining this?’ This self-inquiry practice helps to reveal the non-personal, non-local nature of awareness, moving beyond individual identity.
Observe people and things without preconditioned labels or judgments, seeing them from a ‘zero point.’ This allows for a deeper perception, recognizing the transient nature of forms and identities (e.g., seeing a body as a ‘verb’ rather than a fixed noun), which can foster detachment and reduce suffering.
Consciously practice detaching from your ’localized I’—the provisional identity based on your name, ethnicity, religion, and other conditioned labels. This shift helps you connect with a deeper, non-local ‘big I’ (awareness), freeing you from the judgments and limitations of the ego mind.
Adopt the yogic principle of Karma Yoga: do what needs to be done, but release attachment to the outcome. This practice helps reduce worry and suffering associated with expectations, allowing for engaged action without being caught up in results.
Actively exchange ‘cleverness for bewilderment,’ fostering a sense of surprise and wonder about existence. This mindset is described as being ‘awake,’ moving beyond taking life for granted and engaging with existence more deeply.
Close your eyes and focus on feeling sensations within your body, moving your awareness from the inside out. This Buddhist meditation practice helps to cultivate interoceptive awareness and can lead to a sense of freedom from physical experience.
Cultivate the ability to feel sensations from within your body, extending beyond basic bodily functions. Properly developed, interoceptive awareness can lead to complete autonomic control over bodily functions like heart rate, gut activity, immune system, and body temperature, promoting homeostasis.
Practice imagining your own death, including the physical processes like cremation, and then observe the ‘one who is imagining.’ This exercise helps to realize that awareness itself is distinct from the body and personal identity, leading to a deeper understanding of non-local consciousness and preparing for death.
Engage in the ‘wheel of awareness’ meditation by imagining awareness as the hub and systematically moving it through four quadrants on the rim: the five senses, the muscular-skeletal system/internal body, mental space, and relationship with the universe. This helps to bring awareness to various aspects of experience, fostering a sense of being intrinsically free from those experiences.
For a more advanced practice, inhale through the nose to a count of six, exhale to a count of 12, and hold for a count of 12 before inhaling again. This deep breathing pattern, resulting in two breaths per minute, can lower brainwaves to a deep sleep state and significantly stimulate the vagus nerve.
Use a device like an Apple Watch to monitor your heart rate variability (HRV) during breathing exercises. An increased HRV indicates greater relaxation and parasympathetic nervous system activity, providing real-time feedback on the effectiveness of your practice.
Adjust your diet and incorporate meditation practices to positively influence your microbiome. Your microbiome contains 2 million microbial genes that significantly impact your overall health.
Utilize AI and technology, such as fitness trackers, to monitor biological parameters like heart rate variability. This provides real-time feedback, enabling you to adjust practices like breathing and meditation to improve self-regulation.
Close your eyes, bring your awareness to your heart to feel your heartbeat, then consciously move that awareness to your fingertips to feel the throbbing or tingling there. This exercise develops interoceptive awareness, demonstrating the body’s interconnectedness and potentially leading to greater autonomic control.
Cultivate an attitude of acceptance and even gratitude towards criticism, recognizing that it can keep conversations going. Adopting a broader perspective, such as contemplating mortality, can diminish the personal impact of criticism, leading to greater comfort and resilience.
Utilize AI tools like ChatGPT to research whether the quantum field influences gene activity. This allows you to explore and understand the scientific consensus and various opinions on this topic, rather than simply accepting claims.