A martial artist once asked Bruce Lee, to teach him all that he knew about martial arts. Bruce held up two cups both filled with liquid and said, “The first cup represents all of your knowledge about martial arts. The second cup represents all of my knowledge about martial arts. If you want to fill your cup with my knowledge, you must first empty your cup of your knowledge.”
To create a life you love, find solutions to problems or discover what your life calling is you need to ’empty your cup’ by quietening the left hemisphere of your brain. The left hemisphere is the logical, analytical part of the brain that processes information sequentially. Give this part of your brain a problem and it will work on finding a practical solution for you. The brain is a wonderful tool, however, if you don’t know what you want, or you don’t know how to create what you want, logic, reason and analysis can have you going around and around in circles. This can lead to feelings of frustration or uncertainty and that’s when it sometimes gets too hard and we settle for what is.
You won’t find the answer to life’s problems in analysis, in continually talking about your frustrations, or by making lists of the pros and cons. You find it by allowing the right hemisphere of your brain to take over and guide you. The right hemisphere of the brain is your creative, intuitive side. It is the space where inner peace resides. You access this part of your brain through meditation.
Meditation isn’t just something that makes you feel more relaxed, it actually changes the structure of the brain and the chemicals your brain produces. It develops your intuition. It enables you to find a way where there appears to be no way. Science has proven that advanced meditators use their whole brains and this is the ideal state that we need to aspire to.
Brainwaves Entrainment
If you can’t meditate, join a group. By meditating with a group brainwaves entrain. This phenomenon of entrainment was discovered in approximately 1665 by a Dutch scientist named Christian Huygens. Charles had a room with a number of pendulum driven clocks and one day he noticed that the clocks fell into synchronisation with each other. Even when he deliberately started the pendulums swinging at different times they would revert back to synchronisation by themselves. Charles called this pattern ‘entrainment’. Since that time scientists have discovered that when a group of people meditate together their brainwaves entrain, making it easier to reach a deeper meditative state.
Another discovery made by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in 1893 was that binaural beats could induce relaxation. In more recent years it was discovered that listening to binaural sounds, on a regular basis, could balance both hemispheres of the brain. We experience binaural beats when we hear two different frequencies, one in each ear and these frequencies increase specific frequencies in our brains. To participate in a binaural sounds meditation you need to wear headphones. Holosync is one of the better known brands of Binaural meditation.
If there is something in your life that you are struggling with, some dream you are yet to fulfil, commit to meditating for 20-30 minutes every single day. State your desire/s at the beginning of your meditation, then start your meditation by giving thanks that you already have what you ask for. Do this for a minimum of 30 days, and longer if you choose. Support this habit by acting like a trusting person then place you focus on what you have right now. By doing this you find will that there is a gradual shift, often you will find a way to achieve a goal that you hadn’t thought of before, or people come along to support you. Sometimes you may find that something better has come along.