Don't like the weather? Help change it!

Most of the US and Canada is in the deep freeze, after being pummeled by blizzards. While we in California are lucky to have relatively warm weather, we are suffering from a drought which could quickly become crippling after a dry year last year.

What to do?

Change the weather!

In Urban Shaman, Serge Kahili King talks about how weather, and specifically hurricane systems, are responsive to human emotion.

The cause of the drought -- and the deep-freeze -- is a center of high pressure stationed over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. This forces the wet weather, which would normally bring much-needed rain and snow to CA, to go north, where it gets very cold. Then the jet streams force it south, which is normal, but now it's laden with moisture, which dumps feet of snow in places that would normally get inches.

So what can you do? It's really simple:

1. Get into a meditative state.
2. Make contact with the high pressure system in whatever way you can -- perhaps by visualizing it, or perhaps by making a heart connection to it.
3. Ask if it is appropriate to dissipate this high pressure system. Is it in the highest good of the world to dissipate it? The highest good of the people living in the drought or deep-freeze areas?

• If you get that it is NOT in the highest good of all concerned, STOP. Be grateful for the information, and send love to the Earth.
• If you get that it IS in the highest good of all concerned, visualize the dissipation of the high pressure area, rain falling on the West coast, and the Mid-west and the East coast warming up. When it feels complete, stop, and send love to the Earth. 

Please write comments to let us all know what your experience is! And watch the weather reports. :)

High medical costs decrease 28% after 5 yrs of TM (meditation) practice

According to a study published this week in the September/October 2011 issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion (Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 56-60), people with consistently high health care costs experienced a 28 percent cumulative decrease in physician fees after an average of five years practicing the stress-reducing Transcendental Meditation technique compared with their baseline. Both between and within group comparisons were statistically significant. This study has major policy implications.

In most populations, a small fraction of people account for the majority of health care costs. In the U.S., the highest spending 10% in the general population incurred 60% to 70% of total medical expenditures annually. In the Medicare population, the highest spending 5% incurred 43% of total Medicare costs, and the highest spending 25% of seniors accounted for 85% of total expenses. A large number of these people have consistently high medical bills over many years. (References in article, available upon request.)

Chronic stress is the number one factor contributing to high medical expenses. Stress reduction may help reduce these costs.

This new study compared the changes in physician costs for 284 consistent high-cost participants—142 Transcendental Meditation practitioners with 142 non-practitioners, over five years in Quebec, Canada. The non-TM subjects were randomly selected from Quebec health insurance enrollees with the same age, sex, and region to match the TM participant profiles. The TM participants decided to begin the technique prior to choosing to enter the study. In the year before the intervention began, there were no significant differences between the groups in payments to physicians.

During the five-year assessment period, the TM group's annual rate of change in payments declined significantly (p = 0.004), while the comparison group's payments showed no significant changes. After the first year, the TM group decreased 11%, and after 5 years, their cumulative reduction was 28% (p = 0.001).

The primary measure for assessing the effectiveness of TM practice in decreasing medical costs was the fees paid by the Quebec health insurance agency to private physicians in all settings for treating study participants. In Canada and U.S., physician payments have been 20% of national health expenditures. This study's results are important because doctors' decisions determine most medical expenses: tests, prescription drugs, hospitalization, surgery, and other treatments.

The paper's sole author, Robert E. Herron, Ph.D., is an independent researcher, and director of the Center for Health Systems Analysis. Dr. Herron was the first to describe the impact of the Transcendental Meditation technique on health care costs.

This study's findings were similar to earlier ones. In a previous Canadian study, the TM group exhibited reduced medical expenses between 5% and 13% relative to comparison subjects each year for 6 consecutive years.

In a subsequent Canadian study of senior citizens, the TM group's five-year cumulative reduction for people aged 65 years and older relative to comparison subjects was 70%.

In a sample of American health insurance enrollees, the TM participants had reduced rates of illness in all disease categories. An eleven-year, cross-sectional study in Iowa found that subjects age 45 and over who practiced the TM technique had 88% fewer hospital days compared with controls. Their medical expenditures were 60% below the norm.

Other studies, including randomized clinical trials, indicate the TM technique can improve physical and mental health, decrease tobacco use, reduce substance abuse, and decrease other unhealthy habits and risk factors that lead to chronic disease and costly treatments.

"This article has major policy significance for saving Medicare and Medicaid without cutting benefits or raising taxes," said Herron. "Almost no intervention for cost containment has decreased medical expenditures by 28% over 5 years from a baseline. Now, it may be possible to rescue Medicare and Medicaid by adding coverage for learning the Transcendental Meditation technique."

[I got this from Bayho, which sells supplements.]

Global Cooling? YOU Can Help!

Remember the old saying, 'everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it?' I'd like to suggest that you CAN do something about it.

There are lots of anecdotal reports of people changing the weather, through some combination of conscious intent and meditation. Here's one that happened to me on Mt. Shasta 2 years ago:

The group was meditating in a huge meadow, with a densely overcast sky. The air was completely calm — not a pine needle stirred. When we finished meditating, most people had felt raindrops (I didn’t feel them; I was either deep in meditation or asleep. However, rain will normally rouse me, and there were no wet spots on my clothes, so maybe it rained around me!) and the sky above us was completely clear in probably a quarter mile diameter circle! The surrounding sky, however, was still thickly overcast. Then, as we watched, the clouds formed an unmistakable heart shape in the center of the clearing directly above us, ringed by open space and then the original clouds.

Here are two more:

• A friend of mine, an amazing chi gung practitioner, tells of having the intention to protect her Minnesota home from an approaching twister, then going into the basement with her family to wait it out. When she emerged, the neighborhood was a disaster zone -- except for her house, which was in perfect condition, except that a piece of gingerbread trim she'd never liked had been pulled cleanly off the house.
• Dr. Valerie V. Hunt, Professor Emeritus of Physiological Science at UCLA, in her book, "Infinite Mind", writes of almost being stranded for the winter in Tibet by an early blizzard. Apparently, after the first blizzard there, you can't fly out until spring. She and a companion went into meditation, with the intention of clearing the weather. A hole was created in the storm and she flew out.

In the book, "Urban Shaman", Serge Kahili King, a huna practitioner, writes of successful group meditations to change the path of hurricanes.

Roger Nelson, designer and director of the Global Consciousness Project, did the following study while he was at Princeton University:

Every year, Princeton has extensive festivities around Commencement, which include a huge reunion of graduates. Typically, the University population (which has grown to 7500 graduate and undergraduate students, plus about 1000 faculty, in recent years) swells by 15,000 people or more.

Dr. Nelson used University records & the National Climatic Data Center to get the precipitation data for the town of Princeton and 6 surrounding communities on 4 of these festive days, for all the years which had all this data available, the years 1950 - 1986. The 4 days were the days of

• the P-rade, which is a parade of alumni, including the graduating seniors (Saturday - outdoors),
  
• Baccalaureate (Sunday - indoors),
• Class Day (Monday - outdoors), and
• Commencement (Tuesday - outdoors),

There was a significant difference in rainfall between Princeton and the surrounding communities for the days of the outdoor festivities, which are the days on which people typically wish for good weather. Dr. Nelson notes "...a trend toward less rain, less often, is quite persuasive on Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, but on Sunday, the day of Baccalaureate, no clear tendency is evident... A look at actual weather data seems to suggest that precipitation tends to stay away from Princeton for the P-Rade, and Class Day, and Commencement, to a somewhat unlikely degree." That is, a large group of people wishing for good weather tends to bring it! And I can personally vouch for the fact that, even when it rains on those days of outdoor festivites, the rain generally will hold off until after, or stop for, the festivities themselves.

So with all the agonizing about global warming, why are we not consciously intending global cooling? I'm not suggesting that it's the only thing we should be doing, certainly conservation, etc. are all still important. But what if this could help? And what could it hurt to add global cooling to your daily mediation or your prayer list?

Here's what I ask for every day:

"May the climate be turned back quickly, easily and gently, to that of 1950, in the best interests of all species."

Why 1950? Because my guides tell me that that is the farthest back we can go and still have everything remain in balance.

Will you join me?

Amen Clinics Study on Meditation Using Brain SPECT Imaging

We just received some exciting news here at the Amen Clinics. A study we conducted on the effects of meditation on the brain will be appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Nuclear Medicine Communications, one of the premiere journals in the field of nuclear medicine.

For years, I’ve been recommending meditation to my patients as a great way to relieve stress, increase focus, and improve relaxation. In our practice, we have seen patients with Alzheimer’s disease or who have had a stroke make great improvements thanks to meditation. With this study, we set out to examine what happens in the brain during meditation to bring about these positive benefits.

We performed the study in conjunction with Dharma Singh Kalsa at the Alzheimer’s Prevention Research Foundation in Arizona and Dr. Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania. Together, we examined changes in brain physiology during Kirtan Kriya meditation using SPECT imaging.

Here’s what we found. The left posterior parietal lobe, a region known to control spatial orientation, was deactivated during meditation. Consistent with this finding, the participants reported a sense of transcendence or detachment.

The subjects also reported an increased sense of focus and capacity for concentration, although we did not find increased activation in the attentional networks of the brain. This suggests that it is the willful act of focusing, not necessarily the mere act of meditating, that improves attention.

We also found heightened activity in the areas associated with working memory and language. Deactivation in a region called the subgenual cingulated gyrus might explain subjective reports of happiness and a sense of well-being while meditating.

Overall, the results offer evidence that this form of meditation changes brain function in a way that is consistent with the positive benefits we have observed in our patients.

Try meditation in your own life to enhance brain function and reduce stress. Just a few minutes a day may be all you need to see results.

[hat tip, Seth]

Morning Ramble

(I understand that in the UK, hiking is called 'rambling', and so this is a (bad?) pun.)

I did my normal morning walk today, doing 2 of my favorite meditation techniques simultaneously -- looking at the spaces between the tree branches and the silent mantra. Something kind of amazing happened.

First, because of looking at the spaces, I began to notice the air as it's own thing -- it had its own presence. You know that joke about one fish saying to another, "What's this water I hear so much about?" We humans are like that about air. We walk in an unnoticed sea of air. Not me, at least not this morning.

Second, the mantra developed into a field I could feel swirling around me, kind of like a gentle tornado. I'm used to that. But what happened today is that I could feel the interaction of that swirl with the energy fields of the trees as I walked by them. So I noticed that the energy fields of the trees, and eventually the bushes, even the cars and light poles, were interpenetrating my energy field. (Cars and light poles, not being alive, seem to have much smaller, much denser fields than those of living beings.)

Is this the beginning of quantum perception in the physical world, of us all as a giant soup?

The world's quickest, easiest way to relax, anywhere, any time!

Usually, when I go for my morning walk, I get into a meditative state by just looking at whatever I pass, without making words in my mind about it. If words show up, I just let them go. Or I repeat a mantra in my mind -- same effect.

Today, however, I decided to look at the spaces between things, instead of at the things themselves. Bingo -- instant trance! I couldn't even make words in my mind.

The easiest way to start is to use tree branches (or anything else that has a lacy effect). Look at the spaces between the branches.

Or try it right now, wherever you are. Are there dangling wires for your equipment? Look at the space between them. A pair of scissors in a pencil cup? Look at the spaces in and around the scissors.

Pretty quickly, you'll move on to bigger things, so that you see all the space around you. For me, that seemed like I was walking in a sea of air, like I'm a tiny creature in this sea.

What happens for you? Let me know...

Soular Power

This morning, I did another walking meditation, so early that, at this time of year on a sunny morning, much of my route was in shadow.

I started, as usual, by doing my invocations: asking to have the light come through me and to have my guides around me (for the specific words, click here). Then I just became present to what was around me, the trees, the sky, the sidewalk, the birds, etc. As I was in this state, I emerged from the shadows to a place where the sun was directly in front of me, so low in the sky that all I had to do was lift my eyes from the sidewalk to stare at it.

And BLAM! it hit me full in the chest, flooding me with energy, that the sun is not just some burning mass of hydrogen -- it is a conscious being! It has its own purpose, and its own evolution, just like earth, just like you. And part of its purpose is to help earth's evolution.

You are a child of the earth, but you are no less a child of the sun, because without its power (to grow food, to evaporate water and make rain), you would not be here.

Swimming to save the earth

Yesterday morning, despite being completely exhausted from lack of sleep, I had the sense that I just had to go swim in Lake Siskiyou.

I've done this lots of times before, and it is spectacular! I bring swim fins and a kickboard, and swim distance (literally a mile or more) in the lake. Because I can go so far from where cars come in, no one else can swim where I'm swimming. Because it's after Labor Day, there aren't even any kayaks or row boats with people fishing, so I am all alone in the quiet with the water, the birds, the trees, the sky, and the most amazing view of Mt. Shasta, which seems to rise from the lake, framed by evergreens. (Wish I could take a camera in the lake with me, but I just have to use the mind camera!)

So yesterday's swim was a swimming meditation, because I was supposed to meditate for an hour. I began the mantra again. An enormous gold ring appeared around me, probably over a hundred yards radius. It had that counter-clockwise rotation. I was aware that the trees could feel it, too, and that they knew from this that at least one human cared about them and the earth. This was BIG for them!

And then I remembered my experience with the tree in Santa Cruz, which showed me a beam of light from its top, and explained to me that trees use these beams to communicate with each other.

So I asked the trees to tell their friends of this experience! and to hold on -- to know that we support them, and to do their best to hang in there while humanity gets its act together.

Then I 'heard' the words 'boreal forest', and so I think that they can spread the word far and wide.

Yes, one person (you!) can save the earth

Every day, we are supposed to meditate in the morning for an hour. I'm not good at sitting still to do that, so a couple of days ago, I went for a walking meditation. In my mind, I sung a mantra pretty much the entire time, walking up a mountain road.

Now, this mantra is really powerful -- it is the one that I use which brings star visitors to heal people's physical ailments.

At one point, my guides directed me out onto some land (with a great view!), and showed me the effects of doing this meditation outside. A counter-clockwise vortex of golden light emanates from this meditation, and helps to heal the earth. So if I do the mantra as I walk, I am healing the earth. As I walked back down the hill, the soles of my feet seemed to have suction cups to the ground. This made it a bit harder to walk, but I could 'see' the trail of golden light behind me.

You can do this, too! Focus on a mantra as you hike.

The Multiplier Effect (Part II)

After the orbs in the Bay Area (see “How Psychics Have Fun (Part II) below), and the enhanced photo, I was pretty excited to see what would happen at Mt. Shasta, which is renowned for its spiritual activity, with a bigger group, and a respected contactor of ETs.

Many anomalous things happened:

** Lights appeared in the sky, that could not possibly have been airplanes (wrong shape, no lights on wingtips, moving way too fast, etc.), and were not on the satellite charts. They blinked on and off, stood still and changed direction, which satellites can’t do. What looked to my naked eye like a craft sending out an energy streamer was apparently (to those with high power binoculars) was apparently one banking hard left into space, away from Earth.

** The temperature inside a circle of 60+ people (i.e. A BIG circle) sitting in a field was often warmer than the temperature outside the circle (and one circle of 60 people sitting father apart than shoulder to shoulder is much too big for this to be body heat). In fact, one night, sitting out on the mountain from 8:30PM to 1AM, someone used a thermometer to check the ‘inside’ temperature repeatedly. It went from 67F to 64F in about twenty minutes, then back to 67F in another 20 minutes, then to 65F, where it held for a long time before beginning to descend permanently. I could feel the temperature varying, as well. There was no wind, and the cloud cover never changed.

** Another night, we were meditating in a huge meadow, with a densely overcast sky. The air was completely calm — not a pine needle stirred. When we finished meditating, most people had felt raindrops (I didn’t feel them; I was either deep in meditation or asleep. However, rain will normally rouse me, and there were no wet spots on my clothes, so maybe it rained around me!) and the sky above us was completely clear in probably a quarter mile diameter circle! The surrounding sky, however, was still thickly overcast. Then, as we watched, the clouds formed an unmistakable heart shape in the center of the clearing directly above us, ringed by open space and then the original clouds. That was magical.

** One afternoon, we sat at the edge of a clearing in the woods, doing a long guided meditation. That is, everyone but me was doing it. There were hordes of yellowjackets in the area, and I’m very allergic to them. Sitting in the circle, I always seemed to have 4 to 6 of them around me, and was constantly swatting them away. I left the circle to stand away, where there seemed to be fewer yellowjackets and I could move quickly away from the occasional one that found me without disturbing everyone else. Of course, I had to stand, and stay alert, which meant I couldn’t get deeply into the meditation. However, I did what I do whenever I’m standing around doing nothing, which is to see what I can see clairvoyantly. What I saw with my external clairvoyance (my eyes, I guess) was that most everyone’s crown chakra was open, while they all followed the meditation, parts of which asked them to all think the same powerful mantra at the same time.

We had the multiplier effect again, that is, all those minds broadcasting a powerful mantra at the same time out into the universe attracted a lot of attention. After a while, probably after half an hour or so, I began to notice (with my internal clairvoyance) that the clearing was filling up with all sorts of beings, from nature spirits (or devas) to spirits who guarded the place (probably Native Americans who’d lived there) to ETs to angels. It was unbelievably beautiful! And as the meditation ended, they told me they’d be back that night. (And yes, they came back.)

I think the reason that we attracted so much attention was that our minds were sending out coherent thought. Not only was each mind coherent (which is probably pretty rare for a human being), but on top of that, 50+ minds were coherent with each other. This is similar to the multiplier effect I was talking about last week, though in that case, tens or hundreds of millions of minds had the same thought occasionally.

Imagine what we could do if a lot of us were coherent about something!

(Actually, I think this is what happened with the “Fire the Grid” meditation. ( In case you missed it, the email went around certain communities on the web like wildfire — and apparently 30 – 40 million people participated. We were asked to send love to planet Earth, in a meditative state, for one specific hour in August.) That hour happened to be from 3:11 AM to 4:11 AM Pacific time, which meant that I meditated, and fell asleep, and meditated and fell asleep, etc. When I got up around 6:30 AM, I checked in with Earth, and it felt different, more alive somehow!)

Do you want to be happier? More successful?

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a very brief talk on the relationships of meditation, luck, emotional awareness and success, as part of a larger program given by others. There was a lot of material, actually too much for me to cover in the ten minutes I had, and that bugged me. Still, people were quite blown away at the picture I’d drawn for them of how all these things relate to and reinforce each other. So after I sat down to listen to the rest of the program, it hit me — this information needs to get out there! People need to know not only about this reinforcing relationship, but also about all the exercises that one can do to feed the virtuous cycle. So I had an idea... But first...

Quick — How happy are you, on a scale of 0 –10? (Where 10 is “it couldn’t possibly get better — life is a blast!” and 0 is “I’d be better off on the other side”.) Check inside quickly to answer that (whatever number comes up first is the right one). Then scroll down...

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If you answered less than 10, would like to improve that happiness level? (And if the answer is 0 – 1, please go get individualized professional help now.)

If you’re reasonably happy, or so-so, or even kinda bummed, and would like to be happier day to day, read on.

Did you know there are simple, scientifically proven strategies (no, no drugs!) to boost your happiness and sense of well-being, not to mention your success? Because there is now lots of research into the psychology of happiness, emotional awareness, the effects of meditation on the brain and body, and the structure of luck, which you can use to improve your life. But it’s fragmented into hundreds, maybe thousands, of different books and websites.

You could find all this information yourself, but why bother? Do you have that much time? I’ve gathered much of the best of the current research in one place. How much would you be willing to pay for all this information? $300? $500? $1000?

I’m offering it, along with some experiential tools not included in the literature, this one time only, for FREE (of course, there is a small catch, but it is for your own good)!

I’m offering a teleclass, based in solid scientific research into meditation, luck, happiness, and emotional awareness, which aims to boost that happiness level, along with your success, by giving you simple, easy tools and strategies. This is groundbreaking, as I haven’t seen anyone put all these things together in one place. There will be some lecture, especially in the first session, to explain the framework for the class, some guided meditations, some group discussion, homework (about 30 – 40 enjoyable minutes daily — and you may already be doing some or much of it), and questionnaires.

Here are the details:

When: 5 Wednesdays, 6/13, 6/20, 6/27, 7/11 and 7/18, 6PM PDT, which is 9PM EDT, for 45 – 60 minutes each

Where: Wherever you are, by long-distance telephone. However, you must not be driving a car, as it would be too dangerous to take part in the guided meditations.

Cost: Because this is a beta test, it is FREE, if you (a) attend all teleclasses and (b) fill out all questionnaires (don’t worry, they’re short). If you don’t do these things, the cost is $100, which is what it will be in the future. I do this because if you don’t attend all the classes, and don’t fill out all the questionnaires, I don’t know what is working, or how well.

Contact: Hollis Polk at hollis@888-4-hollis.com, 650-616-9377, or 888-4-hollis (888-446-5547) to sign up, get details and/or ask questions.

I’m looking forward to this — it will be fun! Please join me for what promises to be a life-changing journey!

Reality Creation Begins at Home!

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, “you create your reality through your beliefs” (to quote Seth, a discarnate entity, in books channeled 30 or so years ago by Jane Roberts). Well, reality creation starts at home, with your identity. How many stories, good or bad, do we tell ourselves about who we are? And I’ve got those stories going on, too.

Now, I’m a also really big believer in playing to one’s strengths. I mean, no one really wants you around for what you’re bad at, right? So unless you’ve been in one of my classes, where I made a joke of it, you don’t know that I referred to myself “one of the slowest runners on earth”. And you don’t know that I can barely carry a tune. Well, actually, the tunes need their own dollies.

This “slow” part of my identity came about in 7th grade, when we first started to run track in gym class. I was small for my age, with short legs, and two years younger than all my classmates, which made me a head shorter than many of them. There were girls whose legs came up to my bottom rib! So naturally, I was embarrassingly slow in that group. I hated being 50 - 100 yards behind everyone else! And it hurt — mostly in my lungs, but also a bit in my legs. Oh, I forced myself, and I kept on forcing myself to run when I couldn’t swim or skate, because back then, it wasn’t known that walking was about as good for you as running. As I got to be an adult, I developed shin splints, and that’s when I completely gave up on running.

I still walk — a lot. 3 miles most days, sometimes more, occasionally less. And in my neighborhood, that means I do serious hills, with stretches that are 20% grade. I hike, too — which is pretty much just walking in nicer surroundings, as near as I can tell. But running... NOT!

The non-musical part of my identity started earlier, when I couldn’t carry a tune as a small child. My Dad kept saying,”Oh, she’ll get it when she gets older; I couldn’t carry a tune till I was about 12, and now I’m fine.” And he was. He could sing, as could my mother and sister.

Also in 7th grade, in a vain attempt to be normal at a school where I was anything but (not only by my age and size, but also by my ethnicity), I joined the Glee Club. The other short girl (a 6th grader) and I sat directly in front of Mrs. Miller at her piano. All year long, Mrs. Miller kept saying that one of us was flat, but she could never tell which one. Occasionally she’d silence everyone else to figure out who it was, with the idea that whoever it was would be, um, invited to leave. She never did, though whether that was figure it out or ask us to leave, I still don’t know. One year of optional humiliation was enough; I learned my lesson, and thereafter confined my singing to solo sing-alongs in the car and “Happy Birthday”, where I figured even if anyone noticed, they wouldn’t care.

Fast forward a few decades.

Last weekend, I joined my more-or-less monthly meditation/discussion group for our very first retreat. The group has built up an amazing energy over the several years we’ve been meditating together. It’s so strong that I feel it literally hold my torso up if I lean in to our circle. And each person I’ve gotten to know is really cool, too — intelligent, articulate, talented, good-hearted, really committed to his or her own spirituality and to community, many of them teachers in their own right. We were going to a beautiful spot in Sonoma, with comfy, though rustic, sleeping cabins, a huge room with a wooden floor and cathedral ceiling for meditation, all set in spectacular gardens — and scrumptious food, too. So it was going to be a great weekend!

And then the group leader, decided that we should run as well as meditate and discuss some texts. He wanted to import the running coach he described as a genius, who “gave him running”, a coach who is used to working with world champions. The group agreed. My reaction was that since I was so bad, any coaching could only help. And hey, someone who can coach champions can probably help anyone. So I was open. Not expecting much, but open.

We arrived at the ranch on Friday afternoon, got settled, and had meditation and discussion before and after dinner, as well as some exercises and meditation before breakfast on Saturday morning. After breakfast, the plan was for meditation to lead into running. Okay, I thought, this is a different approach, and it might actually work for me. No discussion of running form at all. We began with a quick lecture/demo/participation of different running speeds. Then we moved (literally) into a zen walk, where the point is to walk as slowly and mindfully as possible. That’s easy for me, as I grew up skating school figures, which basically require the same focus on the body moving through space. Then the coach, Mike Spino, just said, now you can walk at whatever speed you feel like as long as you maintain your focus. If you lose focus, stop, recollect yourself, and begin again. And if you feel like running, run.

After a little while, I actually wanted to run! This was new! Maybe it was the mindfulness of it, or maybe it was my connection to the group, which included some long-time runners. Then something in my body wouldn’t feel quite right, and I’d go back to walking. Then I’d want to run again. Periodically, Mike would gather us back to teach us something new, or to zen walk, or to do another exercise. In one exercise, we stood and silently shared energy with a partner (whoever was closest to us at the moment) by holding our palms facing our partner’s palms without touching. We were then instructed to have one partner “pack the energy” into the other partner and run together. My partner missed the running together part, so we somehow split off in different directions. Oh, well.

Later on, Mike gathered us in a group out on the driveway, had us focus on a tree 100 yards or so away, visualize throwing a lasso onto the tree, tying the other end around our waists (I connected it to my heart chakra instead) and letting the lasso pull us to the tree. I flew! Okay, it was slightly downhill, but I was passing people! Me, the (now former) slowest runner on earth! I had to change that part of my identity. I’m a runner now.

The next day we went out on a nearby track. We meditated, did the zen walk, walked and ran and walked and ran some more, in any direction (not just around the track). Sometimes we ran as a group, staying together intentionally. Mike taught us another visualization, one of a giant hand coming down from the sky to support us and push us forward. With that one, I felt like my feet barely touched the ground!

And we got another shot at the partner exercise. This time, my partner was a 6’1” ex-NFL linebacker. Oh, God, I thought, how am I ever going to keep up with him? But we shared energy through our facing palms. He wisely decided that he should give me the energy and fell in behind me when we were instructed to run. I could actually feel his hand behind my back, pushing me down the track! And we still weren’t touching.

On the drive back to Sacramento (yes, I’m still out of town, working on my cell phone), it occurred to me that what a great coach does has nothing to do with techniques or skills. A great coach gives you parts of yourself that you could not previously access. I know I do that for people all the time, but I never got what I did, until someone did it for me. Thank you, Mike! I’m truly grateful.

So here’s the really odd part. I indulged myself in an iPod sing-along on the way back to Sacramento, and I’m pretty sure I was on key a lot more often than before. And a few days later, when I called my Mom to sing her “Happy Birthday”, she commented, with no prompting, that I’d done a good job, sung all the right notes. She’s never done that before — she would never say something to make you feel better if it weren’t true — so I believe her. Maybe I can carry a tune? I know I can if I find the right coach to teach me. Maybe I can begin to think of myself as a singer, too.

No time to meditate?

Are you one of those people who says, “I used to meditate” or “I meditate sometimes” but “I can’t keep it up because I don’t have time”? Meditation comes in many forms — and it may be something you do without noticing.

Last week I had lunch with a friend, Tim, who, with only a little prompting, began to rhapsodize about fly fishing. You know, standing hip-deep in a stream, casting and waiting and reeling them in, only to let them go, because after all, this is about the experience, not about eating the fish. It had always seemed kind of silly to me, but not when Tim got done telling me about it. He told me about the wonders of being still, connected to all of nature, hearing the rush of water over rapids and the breeze ruffling the trees, feeling the sun on his face, seeing the glint of sunlight on tree leaves, the beauty of myriad colors in a freshly caught rainbow trout, the smell of the stream and the fish. He described the sensitivity he felt in his hands because of the lightweight equipment, and the connection to, no, the dance with the fish as he reeled it in. He’s been doing it for over 20 years, and it’s always a thrill.

That reminded me of figure skating in my childhood. It was different back then, because people actually skated figures — the famed figure eights, as well as three lobed figures, called serpentines, and circles within circles, in many variations — forwards, backwards, turning once or twice in the middle of each circle, and on and on. This required intense concentration on very slow, fluid movements, because if you lost your concentration, even for a moment, a part of your body would bobble; you could see the result of that on the ice as an imperfection from the ideal. (Today, the emphasis is on freeskating, the jumps and spins skated to music, because that is what sells on TV, and sadly, most of the “figure” skating is lost). You skated the same figures over and over and over again, for years sometimes, till you got them right in front of a mostly impartial audience.

And then, today, I found this article in the NY Times, “Your Brain on Baseball”, included below (emphasis mine). David Brooks talks about training the unconscious mind to do things well through repetition and about how some things are done better without thinking about them.

Does this all sound like meditation to you? It sure does to me. In all these cases, your focus solely on what you’re doing chases out random, or even pointed, conscious thoughts, and allows for a wider, occasionally mystical, experience. Maybe you can get that fly fishing, or doing baseball drills, or shooting basketball freethrows. or golfing, or cycling, or running. I do it when I walk, either focusing completely on my surroundings, or on an affirmation (a kind of mantra) as I walk. I have a friend who goes there just by vacuuming — she gets so absorbed in the motion and the look of the carpet!

So if you “don’t have time to meditate”, maybe you can meditate just by focusing on your senses and performance in sports or even mundane tasks. How can you incorporate meditation into every day life?



Your Brain on Baseball


By DAVID BROOKS
It’s spring training fielding practice, and Jeff Kent, the Dodgers second baseman, is covering first. A coach rolls the ball out toward the mound. The pitcher scrambles to pick up the ball. The catcher yells out which base he should throw to. Kent runs over and catches the ball at first.

Jeff Kent is 39 years old and has been playing professionally for 17 years. He’s probably been doing this same drill since he was 10 years old, because the practice drills the Little Leaguers do are basically the same drills the major leaguers do. Why is Jeff Kent, after all these years, still learning to cover first?

Because the institution of baseball understands how to make the most of the human brain.

One of the core messages of brain research is that most mental activity happens in the automatic or unconscious region of the brain. The unconscious mind is not a swamp of repressed memories and childhood traumas, the way Freud imagined. It’s a set of mental activities that the brain has relegated beyond awareness for efficiency’s sake, so the conscious mind can focus on other things. In his book, “Strangers to Ourselves,” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia notes that the brain can absorb about 11 million pieces of information a second, of which it can process about 40 consciously. The unconscious brain handles the rest.

The automatic mind generally takes care of things like muscle control. But it also does more ethereal things. It recognizes patterns and construes situations, searching for danger, opportunities or the unexpected. It also shoves certain memories, thoughts, anxieties and emotions up into consciousness.

Baseball is one of those activities that are performed mostly by the automatic mind. Professional baseball players have phenomenal automatic brains.

As Jeff Hawkins points out in his book “On Intelligence,” it is nearly impossible to design a computer with a robotic arm that can catch a ball. The calculations the computer has to make are too complicated to accomplish in time. Baseball players not only can do that with ease, they can hit a split-finger fastball besides.

Over the decades, the institution of baseball has figured out how to instruct the unconscious mind, to make it better at what it does. As we know the automatic brain only by the behavior it produces, so we can instruct it only by forcing it to repeat certain actions. Jeff Kent is practicing covering first after all these years because the patterns of the automatic brain have to be constantly and repetitively reinforced.

But baseball has accomplished another, more important feat. It has developed a series of habits and standards of behavior to keep the conscious mind from interfering with the automatic mind.

Baseball is one of those activities in which the harder you try, the worse you do. The more a pitcher aims the ball, the wilder he becomes. The more a batter tenses, the slower and more tentative his muscles become.

Over the generations, baseball people have developed an infinity of tics and habits to distract and sedate the conscious mind. Managers encourage a preternaturally calm way of being — especially after failure. In the game I happened to see here on Tuesday, Detroit Tigers pitcher Nate Robertson threw poorly, but strutted off the mound as if he’d just slain Achilles. Second baseman Kevin Hooper waved pathetically at a third struck fastball, but walked back to the dugout wearing an expression of utter nonchalance.

This sort of body language helps players remain steady amid humiliation, so they’ll do better next time.

Believe me, the people involved in the sport have no theory of the human mind, but under the pressure of competition, they’ve come up with a set of practices that embody a few key truths.

First, habits and etiquette shape the brain. Or as Timothy Wilson puts it, “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitudes and feelings.”

And second, there is a certain kind of practical wisdom that is not taught but is imparted through experience. It consists of a sensitivity to the contours of how a situation may evolve, which cannot be put into words.

Baseball players are like storm-tossed sailors falling and rising with the slumps and hot streaks that emanate from inaccessible parts of themselves. The rest of us rationalists use statistics to try to understand the patterns of what they do.