Effortless Mindfulness: Train Your Brain, Change Your Life, Change the World
From Week 5 of our Effortless Mindfulness course, “Train Your Brain, Change Your Life”
Open, Heartful Awareness
Open heartful awareness is like the sky – always here. It’s the background of all our experience, though we rarely pay attention to it. It includes everything we experience “inside” our mind as well as everything we experience in
the world “outside” our mind. It’s like the ocean, whose waves are the thoughts, memories, feelings, and sense perceptions that rise up and fall again, returning to the sea.
People have found these images to be helpful because they evoke a sense of boundlessness. The sky may be filled with dark clouds, there may even be a raging hurricane, but the all-embracing sky itself remains clear and luminous, unchanged by what moves through it. The ocean waves may be turbulent, but the depths of the ocean are not affected by the changing waves on the surface.
When we shift attention away from ongoing concerns about our health, relationships, success, etc., there’s an openness through which we may catch a glimpse of this wide, calm, joyful awareness that is always potentially available to us. This freedom from concern about the “little me” opens and softens our heart, allowing feelings of connection, kindness and compassion to spontaneously emerge.
Becoming “Accident Prone”
The “sky” of open, heartful awareness is not something you can “create” by practicing techniques. But you can use the techniques to create the conditions that make it more accessible. As you develop your PFC by training your attention and generating positive emotions, it gets easier to notice the “clouds” of instinctive, emotional, and mental reactivity that block the sky of open, heartful awareness.
Glimpses of open, heartful awareness can occur anytime along the way, and they seem to happen as if by accident. You can’t make them happen. But as your PFC becomes stronger, and your brain becomes more balanced and harmonious, the possibility of experiencing these glimpses increases. As John Yates, neuroscientist and mindfulness instructor, puts it, glimpses of open, heartful awareness may happen by accident, but practice makes you more “accident-prone.”
Cultivating Positive Emotions
One of the most powerful ways to make yourself more “accident-prone” is to clear away the clouds of anger, fear, craving, desire, and confusion produced by your unbalanced instinctive, emotional and mental brain programming, by attending to them calmly, with an attitude of gentle acceptance. This ability to calmly notice what’s present in the sky of your awareness, without trying to change, control, or “fix” it – is what we’ve been referring to as mindfulness.
Mindfulness is a highly effective way to develop your PFC. Another very powerful way is through the cultivation of positive emotions such as gratitude, compassion, kindness, and appreciation.
Noted researchers in the field of positive psychology such as Robert Emmons have found that intentionally generating positive emotions has a variety of positive benefits:
Experiencing a positive emotion, creates “compassion” neurons - nerve cells in areas of the brain associated with empathy, kindness, compassion and love – which make these feelings easier to access.
Helping someone with a genuine concern for their well-being causes endorphins –neurotransmitters responsible for feelings of euphoria – to surge in your brain.
Experiencing positive emotions and performing acts of kindness both strengthen your vagus nerve, which can lower your risk of heart disease, regulate your glucose levels, and strengthen your immune system.
As you become more practiced at being mindful and cultivating positive emotions, there will be greater synchrony between the activities of different parts of your brain and your brain’s processing power will increase.
With a more synchronized brain, it becomes easier to experience flow-like states that release powerful neurotransmitters – such as norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, and anandamide (the “bliss molecule”) – bringing about feelings of ease, lightness, joy, and vitality, even in the midst of strenuous activity.
When your brain is more synchronized, it’s also better equipped to deal with the complexity of the modern world. You learn more easily, process information more efficiently, are more creative, and develop stronger connections to people and the world around you. And perhaps most importantly, it gives you the ability to participate in creating a world that fosters harmony, good health, happiness, and inner peace for all peoples of the earth.
As you become more skilled at being mindful and cultivating positive emotions, it becomes gradually easier to let go of the concerns of the “little me” and shift to the open, heartful awareness that is already present as the background of all you experience.
Going Beyond Individual Transformation
Is it possible not only to change your own life through training your brain, but also to change the world? This is a major focus of our effortless mindfulness course. If you’re interested, learn more here – www.RememberToBe.life, and ask about this (and hopefully, make some suggestions for dealing with our time of crisis) in the comments.