Shift your awareness from constant mental activity and ’toxic recursive loops’ of thought to your physical body. This helps you avoid being ‘owned by your swirling stories and ancient grudges,’ allowing you to navigate the world more effectively and successfully, turning ‘obstacles into opportunities.’
Throughout the day, have specific moments to tune into your body and ground yourself. This helps avoid discursive thinking from hijacking your sense faculties and allows you to be more in tune with the ‘undercurrent feeling tone.’
Actively train yourself to use senses like deep listening (without adding labels) and seeing (without compartmentalizing or judging). This helps to slow down or ‘bracket the monologue’ of your discursive mind.
Begin seated meditation by systematically relaxing the body from head to toe, tensing and releasing difficult areas like eyebrows and shoulders, and focusing on tactile sensations. This primes the body and allows for a deeper, more effective meditation practice.
For effective meditation, ensure four conditions are present: a primed body, regulated breath, a content feeling tone, and a focused mind. Addressing these foundations allows any meditation method to be efficacious.
To manage pain, relax the body to short-circuit the stress response, isolate the painful area, and observe its changing nature without labeling it with words like ‘pain.’ This increases pain tolerance and reveals the illusory nature of discomfort.
Train yourself to be more aware of your undercurrent feeling tones (moods or attitudes), which are subtle, unformed thoughts that dictate and color your experience. Regularly ask, ‘What’s the attitude in the mind right now?’ to identify your perceptual lens.
Choose five innocuous daily activities and for one minute during each, relax, ground yourself, tap into a content feeling tone (‘It’s all good’), and engage with the activity using other sense faculties without discursive thinking. Sustain this for 1-3 months, then extend to other triggers.
View junctures of life (contact, tension, change, lack of recognition, power dynamics, status, influence) as opportunities to practice. This helps expose habit tendencies, allowing you to understand, embrace, work with, and let go of them.
Train yourself to cultivate the attitude ‘It’s all good’ (I-A-G), even if initially forced. This cognitive and experiential reframe helps your body avoid stress, opens possibilities, and allows you to find solutions rather than being overwhelmed.
When you expose your habit tendencies of labeling and categorizing things, embrace them (understanding their history), then work to transform them, and finally let go. This process helps to free you from negative perceptions that shape your suffering.
Use words and language to rephrase negative perceptions (apophatic terms) into positive ones (cataphatic terms). For example, rephrase ‘impermanence’ as ’new beginnings’ or ‘relationships/connections,’ which carries different feeling tones and can create a virtuous cycle.
Cultivate a practice of wonderment and curiosity, approaching experiences with an innocent, non-judgmental attitude. This shifts your brain’s response from threat to problem-solving, diminishing identification with rigid containers and labels.