Effortless Mindfulness Sampler

We all have within us the potential to experience life in a way that is deeply peaceful, joyful, and creative. Thanks to advances in the field of neuroscience, we now know there are ways we can train our brains so that they spontaneously give rise to this experience.

Our online course, Train Your Brain, Change Your Life, teaches you how your brain works and how you can train it to enhance your overall sense of well-being. It includes guided audio and video practices that are rooted in an effortless approach to mindfulness. The gentle practice of effortless mindfulness prepares your brain to experience increasingly frequent glimpses of the deeply peaceful and dynamic state of mind that we call “open, heartful awareness”.

We devote several parts of the course to looking at how these glimpses can provide not only a powerful foundation for positive change in ourselves, but a powerful foundation for making positive change in the world as well. In this sampler, we’ve given you a few of the practices from the Train Your Brain, Change Your Life course.

The sampler is in four parts:

Part One

Balancing the Autonomic Nervous System:
Some Simple Breathing Exercises

One of the main obstacles to experiencing a state of effortless mindfulness is the static created by our overstressed autonomic nervous systems. An important first step in clearing the way for the experience of effortless mindfulness is to calm the static of our overstressed nervous systems by learning how to balance the autonomic nervous system. One of the fastest and most effective ways of doing this is through some simple but powerful breathing exercises. To make these exercises more fun and even more effective, we’ve included one of our breathing videos that guides you to breath in a gentle, rhythmic way.

The Benefits of Breathing Exercises

These three breathing exercises calm and balance your autonomic nervous syste, making open, heartful awareness far easier to access.

As you get comfortable with the practices, you’ll be surprised at how little time it can take to feel their beneficial effects. We both use them regularly throughout the day to relax, refresh, and replenish our energy. We also use them when we’re facing any kind of challenging situation as a way of helping us to take a step back, get calm, think more clearly, and respond more effectively. They’re also very helpful for relaxing into sleep or easing any kind of physical pain.

Click on these links to learn the practices:

OCEAN BREATHING
BREATHING WITH WORDS
HOW TO USE BREATHING VIDEOS

Why Practice During the Day?  

These simple breathing practices can change your brain and change your life. But in order to have a lasting positive effect on the functioning of your brain, they need to be practiced regularly. Practicing once can make a temporary difference in how you feel, but the way the brain restructures itself is through repeated experiences of being more balanced.

As you’ll most likely discover, these breathing practices are easy to learn (in fact, almost effortless!). Once you’ve learn them, you can experiment with modifying them in ways you find enjoyable and that work well for you.

We also encourage you to experiment with things like taking a moment before going into a meeting to do some slow, gentle ocean breathing or breathing with words. Or pausing momentarily before a meal to take a few calming ocean breaths and then see whether it makes a difference in how you enjoy or digest your food, or even how much you feel you need to eat.

The more often you do a brief (30-60 second) breathing practice at different times during the day, the better prepared you’ll be to learn the more advanced practices in our course.

Part Two

Quieting the Noise of Reactive Thoughts and Emotions:
Learning the Art of Effortless Mindfulness

Another major obstacle to the experience of effortlessness is the static caused by all our reactive thoughts and emotions that are in the habit of arising continuously as we go through our day. As you learn to attend to these thoughts and emotions mindfully – that is without judging them or getting all caught up in them – they lessen in intensity and lose their power to control your behavior or stress you out. These next two practices are basic exercises for developing mindful attention.

So what does it mean to be mindful? It’s simply means gently attending to your sensations, thoughts and emotions without judging them, reacting to them or trying to make them any different than they are. This is not something that requires any kind of strained effort on your part. It’s just about calmly noticing what’s in your experience now – noticing how sounds, thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc. come and go all on their own. It’s not about controlling or manipulating them; simply noticing that they’re there. 

In the first mindfulness practice, Breath Watching, we guide you through the practice of gently noticing the sensations related to the spontaneous flow of your breath.  In the second practice, Mindfulness of Feeling Qualities, you’ll learn to calmly observe your reactions to all that you encounter as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

The Benefits of Mindfulness Practices

Over the past few decades, neuroscientists and psychologists have documented many benefits of mindfulness practice. It is one of the most powerful ways to rewire your brain for greater ease, happiness and well-being. And according to the research, when you practice mindfulness in an effortless way, its power to rewire your brain is even greater.

Breath Watching

In addition to its calming and focusing effects, Breath Watching trains your brain to gently attend to body sensations without judging them good or bad, without trying to control or manipulate them, and without reacting to them emotionally. When this kind of calm, nonjudgmental, effortless attention is brought to an experience of pain – whether that pain is physical or emotional – it enables you to experience the pain without being overwhelmed by it or having it affect your behavior.

Mindfulness of Feeling Qualities

Becoming mindfully aware of feeling qualities helps you to be aware of the subtle pushes and pulls that keep us stuck in habitual behaviors and reactivity. Simply observing these reactions in a calm, non-judgmental, effortless way can help to lessen their hold over you.

Click on these links to learn the practices:

BREATH WATCHING
MINDFULNESS OF FEELING QUALITIES

Why Practice During the Day?

Because you’ve spent years reinforcing the neural pathways in your brain that support tension, compulsive thoughts and stubborn habits, it will take more than a couple of mindfulness sessions to replace those old pathways with new ones. Brief practice moments during the day are a very effective way of reinforcing new, more beneficial neural pathways.

Part Three

Evoking Glimpses of Open, Heartful Awareness

Having calmed your nervous system and learned to relate to reactive thoughts and emotions with gentle mindful attention, you’re now ready for practices that give you a glimpse of what it’s like to be effortlessly mindful and to experience open, heartful awareness.

Everyone has had occasional glimpses of a wider, more peaceful, more joyful state of mind. Whether sitting quietly before an endless stretch of ocean or sky or in the midst of an exciting sports event, there are moments when our mind and body feel in harmony with everything around us. These moments can be among the most compelling of our lives. But can we, at will, shift out of an habitual state of anxiety or dullness into this more harmonious way of experiencing the world?

In addition to using breathing exercises and effortless mindfulness to clear away some of the obstacles to experiencing open, heartful awareness, it’s possible, by gently redirecting your attention, to deliberately evoke glimpses of it. When you do, it can feel as though you’re stepping out of a crowded, noisy, smoke-filled room onto a wide veranda in the hush of twilight with a view of the ocean stretching out to the distant horizon. Effortlessly, your mind becomes quiet, your heart softens, and a sense of peace and joy come over you.

THE PRACTICES AND THEIR BENEFITS

Relaxing into the Present Moment

This practice is very simple. It involves letting go of any concerns about the past or the future, and bringing your attention fully into the present moment. This simple act can be very powerful because so much of our stress comes from the endless and often distorted or irrational stories about ourselves, other people, and the world that are brains are constantly manufacturing.

The act of effortlessly bringing attention to the simplicity of the present moment – particularly to the immediacy of our sensory experience – can calm this incessant narrative, unveiling the ever-present background of open, heartful awareness.

Widening Attention

This practice has the potential to give you a direct glimpse of effortless awareness.

Click on these links to learn the practices:

RELAXING INTO THE PRESENT MOMENT
WIDENING ATTENTION

Practice During the Day

Now that you know six different practices, you can experiment with when and how you can best use them during the day. For example, if you’re feeling tired or unfocused, you could try one of the breathing techniques – or use the breathing video to guide you. 

If you’re feeling reactive or struggling with an urge to eat something you really don’t want to eat, you might take a moment to just calmly notice what it is you’re reacting to as pleasant or unpleasant. And then, instead of immediately acting on it, try some breathing with words and see if that makes it easier to allow the urge or reactivity to just pass by.

If you’re feeling caught up in a negative thought stream, emotion, or behavior, you might try simply coming into the present moment and widening your attention. After a few moments of widening, you may discover that whatever was going on before looks and feels different, making it easier to deal with.

Part Four

Putting It All Together:
An Integrated Practice

This last part consists of a breathing video that guides you through one way of combining the practices you’ve learned in this sampler, along with a few others from our Train Your Brain, Change Your Life course, so that they build on and enhance each other.

Integrated Practice

As you get very familiar with these various practices and the effects they have on your mind, body, and emotions, they can become an integral part of your day. You may find yourself spontaneously pausing from time to time to take a few conscious breaths, to widen your attention, or to simply to let go of everything and just “be” for a timeless moment. And when something throws you off balance, you may begin to have an intuitive sense of what to do to help yourself return to the calm and clarity that enables you to deal more wisely and effectively with whatever’s happening.

As these practices become more and more woven into the fabric of your life, one thing you may notice is that it becomes easier to declutter both your mind and your surroundings. You may find that you won’t need as much from others or the world in order to feel happy or fulfilled. And you’ll become gradually freer from being pushed and pulled by fears and desires, freer to enjoy the richness and fullness of what’s right here right now.

Over time, with repeated, consistent practice, as your brain and body become more harmonized, you’ll find yourself relating to people in kinder, more empathic and compassionate ways. You’ll also find it easier to persist in challenging work or school situations without getting overly stressed. And, most important, you’ll start to have increasing glimpses of open, heartful awareness. Finally, as these glimpses expand to include more and more of your experience, you’ll be increasingly inspired to act in ways that will be beneficial to others and the world.

Click on this link to learn the practice:

INTEGRATED PRACTICE

Next Steps

We hope you’ve enjoyed and will continue to enjoy these practices and that you’ve gotten at least a taste of the many benefits they have to offer. 

As you may already have discovered, practices like these can be effective for providing relief amidst the usual stresses and strains of the day. However, to bring about a lasting experience of peace, ease, and well-being – one that holds up even under challenging circumstances – takes repeated practice over time. Keep in mind that most of us have had a lifetime of “practice” using tense, strained effort to fix, control and improve ourselves. So it makes sense that it takes time to unlearn those habits. It takes time to learn to let go, to learn to shift into a more flowing, effortless and experiential way of being and living. It can also be very helpful to learn the practices as part of a comprehensive program that includes an understanding of how your brain works with regard to habit change, such as that which we offer in our Train Your Brain, Change Your Life online course.

These are some of the things you can learn in our course:

• How the ancient programming of our brain creates internal stress and disharmony

• How the practices retrain your brain to create peace, joy and well-being

• How to make the practices second nature so they’re at your fingertips whenever you need them