awareness – The Brilliant Beast Blog

What I’m Learning From Regular Meditation

Of course I’m going to say it’s awesome. But I’ll get specific for you. I want you to know what exactly is happening for me. Meditation has already been a quiet, but gargantuan, force in my life. Regular meditation, though, is a whole other beast.

I haven’t been perfect this past month. Sometimes it was only once a day. But for the most part I meditated upon waking, and before going to sleep. With the exception of a few days, I meditated at least once every day.

The thing I really noticed was an increasing awareness of myself. I heard the words I was saying. I felt the emotions I was feeling. I saw the thoughts I was thinking.

You might think this is obvious stuff. Who doesn’t feel what they are feeling? Let me go deeper. When you get up in the morning, what’s the first thing you think? What is the very first word you say each day? What do you feel? Are you happy? Sad? Excited? Or maybe angry?

Believe it or not, there is a first emotion. A first thought. And more tangibly, a first word. If you believe that the beginning of something sets the tone for the rest of it, then your first everything of the day might be worthy of observation.

I heard a Buddhist monk say that there are actions of the mind, of the mouth, and the body. These are thoughts, words, and physical acts. We have responsibility for all of them. I’ve been noticing my actions throughout the day.

One thing I don’t like is how I curse. I feel like it hurts people and it adds little positive value to anything I’m trying to say. But I do it because I like how it feels fresh in the moment. It’s a thrill thing. After meditating regularly, I’m actually aware of myself doing it in the moment.

I’m just more able to pay attention to how it feels, what it sounds like to other people, and what I think about it. Right in the moment. Here’s the crazy thing. The next time I’m talking, I actually feel a curse word coming. It’s like a good time, a nice spot, for a curse word to emphasize my point. And I choose to not say it.

There’s a lot of other words to use to express myself. And when I don’t curse, I still say what I want to say. I just don’t feel like it’s me to curse, even though I’ve been doing it since junior high. It’s one of those things that I don’t do for a while, and then I pick it up from somewhere and mindlessly start cursing again.

Mindlessness. That’s what I’m shedding through regular meditation. Why make actions left and right with no attention to the quality of my impact? Am I that lazy?

Meditation is building up an awareness, stronger every day, of myself. It makes sense, because in meditating we are paying attention to ourselves. We breathe, we pay attention to the smallest thing in the world, our breath, and in that we are able to see clearly what out minds hold.

We also see that our minds keep a lot inside, but we don’t have to be the things that run through our minds.

I see thoughts about myself, about other people, how I feel about situations, and I realize day to day that these are simply thoughts. My actions will come from a place of wellness and happiness. At least I want them to, and I’m finding it more doable recently.

Let me know if you’ve noticed something similar from meditation, or if you just naturally have this sort of awareness.

Live powerfully,

Steve

The Brilliant Beast Blog Daily

Expressing Emotions with Awareness

Feeling emotions and expressing emotions are two different things. Some of us get angry but don’t say anything about it. We just feel the anger. Others of us say something about it. Some of us do something about it.

My usual response to emotional situations is to hold back from expressing myself directly. This is a survival tactic I developed from being in a highly emotionally charged family and work environment.

There were so many people around me with emotional turmoil, it seemed harmful for me to blab about my own emotions.

This backfired, to say the least. I grew up with a lot of repressed feelings. I got through work situations with a “professional attitude” but had to let the feelings burn inside of me. In my mid-twenties I was a field of blackened tree stumps, a wasteland of a forest fire.

I learned from my mistakes, but it was too late for me to recover in the same environments in which I had died. The roots were charred, seeds were turned to dust. There was no springing of life where I was. So I left.

I traveled for four months to get out of the ashes of my life. I had cultivated enough positive mentality and nutritional practice to get myself healthy and moving again before I left. Travel freed me from the stagnant waters of anxiety and allowed me time and space to meditate, rediscover myself, and stretch out in a spiritual and physical sense.

I met new people, took part in new cultures, and grew in love. My wife and I, through the constant adventure of finding our way, expanded our hearts and built courage. We lived our dream of seeing, learning, sleeping, and waking in new worlds. And now even home is a new world.

Meditation was key to my awakening to my misery and grasping an optimistic view of myself. It helped me in several areas of life. Strength training, sleep, and fear were a few areas of growth through meditation. Recently, through meditation I reached a breakthrough in how I express emotions.

I noticed a difference in my awareness of emotions and expression after several days of meditation. My sessions were two times per day, 5-15 min each time. Nothing big.

However, when a recent emotional argument broke out between me and someone close, I noticed a difference inside. I expressed myself through my emotions, but I was fully aware of myself. I could hear myself talk, see what I was feeling, and feel what the other person was feeling. This was very unlike other times, where I would have gone blank in the head.

The awareness allowed me to process what was going on, during and after the argument. It also allowed me to start the forgiveness process. Since I was “there” while it was happening, I remembered how I felt, and why, and what triggered it all.

The reason this happened was that during meditation leading up to this day, I had been focusing on how I felt. As I breathed and came into a centered disposition, I let my feelings float up into my awareness. Whatever I felt, I let my mind rest on it. I breathed, identified the emotion, felt it plainly and deeply for what it was, and sometimes even visualized the root. Then I breathed again and let it go.

This built awareness of my emotions. It made me feel okay with what I was feeling. I used to get uncomfortable with the fact that I was emotional. It felt like a weakness. But this awareness practice was facing reality. I accepted myself as an emotional being.

I still felt upset after the argument, I still dealt with the residual emotions, and all of that. But I was in a place where I could build on the experience. Rather than wallowing in confusion, I learned about myself. I thought forward to the next time I would be in that sort of situation. And instead of feeling apprehensive, I felt excited. I wanted to grow!

I’m not saying I’m a saint and we should have a day for me because of this one incident. But I hit a definite pivot point in my emotional life. This is an area of discomfort for me. I’m not used to getting deep into my emotions, and evaluating them, let alone talking about them.

But I’ve been trying within that past few months to dig into this and grow. And I’m learning the importance of expressing versus simply feeling emotions. The key is awareness.

Live powerfully,

Steve

Studies on Meditation and Emotion Regulation and Mindfulness

Meditation and Powerlifting

My Brilliant Friends,

I used to think meditation was for religious people, or Buddhist monks. I first tried it in high school though and noticed some very real benefits to sitting, breathing, and focused mind exercising.

More than just “clearing” the mind, it’s a practice of setting yourself back to zero. Equilibrium.

Meditation helps me to take root in myself and come from a place of solid foundation. I’m aware of myself, who I am, why I think and feel what I do in specific situations, and how I react to cues. Knowing this through quiet breathing and awareness of the things that live in my mind allows me to let it go and just be myself.

During my first powerlifting meet, breathing and awareness helped me to stay calm and focused. More than the amount of weight I was attempting, the newness of everything, the nervousness of being there for the first time, and being in front of the judges and spectators could have been an overwhelming wave of stimuli. I warmed up a bit and went to my car to turn on the emWave2, for some breathing, calming down, and focusing. This substantially leveled me out and positioned me to utilize all my skill and strength that I had built up during training. I successfully achieved my goals for squat and deadlift. Bench press wasn’t a great concern, but I did hit a PR as well.

Some short and long term benefits of meditation that I experience:

Calms nerves
Self awareness. Seeing where thoughts come from, identifying fears.
Letting things go that are necessary baggage
Reduces effects of lack of sleep
Focus and concentration improve
Ability to be clear minded in the middle of stressful situations
increases oxygen to the brain and rest of body
Happiness
Pure joy and bursts of laughter, if you get deep enough long enough
Helps relationships, from increased self-understanding
Mind healing. You become aware of traumas, sources of stress, and become empowered to work through them.

For powerlifting, it’s invaluable. Anything that requires a high level of performance can benefit from focused breathing and mental equilibrium.

At the 2014 California State Championships in Irvine, I pulled my first “official” deadlift of 391 lb. Watch me take a deep breath in and out before grabbing the bar, in front of the judges and everyone.

I didn’t really know if that was gonna come across as weird, but I wanted to give it a try because it’s something I do at the gym before challenging sets. Most often, at the peak of our performance demands, the challenge isn’t in our musculoskeletal capabilities, but in our minds’ ability to allow that power to be released in full.

On my hardest training days, when I had trouble getting myself to put on my shoes and get out the door, it was a battle of my mind. I didn’t want to face the heavy weight on the bar, for fear of failing, fear of getting injured, fear of being weak. I dragged myself many times to the gym when I did not want to go. And when I got there, most of those days I performed better than ever once I tucked my head under the bar and lifted it off the rack. The key was to jump through the fear, grip the bar, and do what I knew I could do.

Tim Ferriss encouraged me through his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, to “feel the fear and do it anyways.” He challenges his readers to identify the worst case scenario, the thing we feel most afraid of, and when we do that, we realize it’s not so bad after all.

To do this, especially in the moments of paralyzation from our greatest fears, it helps to have trained yourself to go the route of courage. I’m more able to face challenges now if I am meditating regularly and identifying my weaknesses, my kryptonites, and simply knowing that they exist. I recognize my weaknesses in real time because I know them. I practice pausing before I react, focus on the problem at hand, and harness my resources and skills to effectively address the problem.

When the problem is a heavy weight in front of me, and fear of getting crushed by it, getting injured, or embarrassed, it’s in the mind that I first address all of this. I take a moment away from the bar, close my eyes, and take a deep breath or two or three. I concentrate on the breath going out, revel in my brain’s love of oxygen, and come back to my core self. I become me again, let go of the thoughts and nagging possibilities, and when I’m clear and strong, I open my eyes and step up to the bar.

Only then can I grip the bar, suck in air, and crush it.

To powerful living,

Steve

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Note: the links to the EmWave2, which is a heart-rate variability device used to aid in meditation, and the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, are affiliate links with Amazon.com. I get a percentage of their sale if you use the link to make a purchase. I only share things that have made a significant impact on my life in this blog. Hope you check them out and enjoy!

On Being Recovered

How do I know if I’m ready to train again? Recovery can be a difficult thing to measure. Rather than focus on the doing, I focus on the being. No matter how well I eat, how much sleep I get, and how hard my last training session was, I measure my recovery based on Symptoms. This is how I feel upon waking. After reading this you might think these are soft and subjective measures, and they totally are. But I trust these signs because my mind and body are connected, and I have noticed that I benefit most from training when I feel all these symptoms.

Symptoms of being recovered:

1. Waking up fresh in the morning. You open your eyes and feel

Calm.
Positive energy.
Positive excitement.

2. Heart Rate Variability is high with minimal effort.

During breathing awareness practice, or meditation, you are able to focus quickly.
If you have the EmWave or other HRV measuring tool: You are able to get to Green or high HRV relatively quickly and you are able to stay there relatively easily. Compare this to any other day’s mental performance.
You have high control of your mind, and your mind is quiet. You are excited and thinking of what you can do or accomplish as you wake up and get your day started.
You have easy control of your breath, and breathing feels good and your lungs feel strong. You can breathe deep, both in and out.
Taking a quiet moment in my car to breathe and get my HRV higher before my powerlifting meet. This helped me to stay focused throughout that tense, crazy day and hit two PR’s.

3. Joints and muscles are happy

You have good control of your body and legs feel strong under you as you get up and take your first steps.
They are willing to do the work you want them to do.
Your body may still feel a little tight or crusty from previous training, but it is quite responsive and good to go.

That’s it.

If I wake up and feel these symptoms, I train.

Symptoms of not being recovered:

1. Waking up stale in the morning. You open your eyes and feel

Tender
Low Energy
Negative

2. Heart Rate Variability is low and takes a lot of effort to raise.

Or just never gets to a high state, if you are using a device to measure it.
You have trouble taking deep breaths in and out.
You cannot get negative, repeating thoughts and emotions out of your head – even when you sit down to meditate.
You cannot focus.

3. Joints and muscles are like cement that hasn’t dried.

They feel like yesterday’s joints.
Rather than sore, you feel achy.
They don’t want to work for you.

If I wake up and have these symptoms, I know I’m not recovered. I refrain from training, even if it’s been two days, even if it’s been two weeks. I don’t care, I know that no good will come of it.

If you’re not recovered, don’t worry. Just realize that you are in a state of getting stronger or more resilient, and you just need to take more time to get there. Don’t push it. Look into meditating or deep breathing upon waking, journaling, getting some sun, and eating well. Supplements help too. Above all else, sleep until you awake fresh and feeling the positive symptoms described above.

I don’t have much time now to lift, and have been taking up to two weeks off between training sessions. That’s why I make the most of each session. I don’t go unless I know I am ready to take on the cost of growth. Nutrition helps to maintain muscle mass and strength, and allows me to go on these long stretches and still come back to train at where I left off. With late nights at work and then early mornings the following days, I refrain from training even if I had the two or three hours free. There is a biological cost to training that we must pay in order to benefit. Training while not fully recovered is like taking out a loan while already deep in debt. You just end up deeper in biological debt.

Stay wealthy. Cook while the frying pan is hot, let your body and mind tell you when that is, and do everything you can to recover.

To powerful recovery,

Steve