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As most people I meditate and read with my eyes closed, at least in my formal exercises. No need for anything but my own awareness. An Iphone and fancy applications are a bit odd in this perspective. BUT we live in a world where they exist as well. They make life easier supporting and inspiring also my inner travels.

Equanimity’s design is simple and very easy to use, to me this means that it is intuitive. Upon start it shows you a circle representing 100% of your meditation time. A small “i” at the bottom lets you set Preparation Time, Interval Chimes and your complete sitting time. Also at the bottom is “journal” where you can see when and how much you have meditated other days. Hitting a day shows you journal entries if you want to work with them. Turning your iPhone to its side will give you additional info; Recent sittings, Continuous Runs and Total Practice hours.

What I liked about the previous version was the simple design, intuitive use, the just what you need approach and the chimes. Maybe I am a sucker but it really helps me to get in and out meditation easy with these calm sounds.

The new version has tracking possibilities what makes it even more attractive to use. Being present is a quality and not to be measured but to be lived. Formal exercise and finding the energy and time to keep them doing are however highly stimulated by stats and keeping track of progress.

Consciously keeping track of your progress and making adjustments if the things you try are not working is for me the key to personal development. Daily life asks a lot of our attention, it is not easy to keep track of subtile changes that in the long run will make the difference in your life. Stats and Journals are a great help to overcome this and not waste your time and energy.

What I like even better about the new version is that you can switch to other applications while keeping it running. This enables you, for example, to start your ipod for a partly guided meditation. In my case I use this function to record a reading with iPhone’s native Dictaphone and stay within the allocated time.

Description

Pro’s

Cons

Tracking features can make it an achievement game. Don’t fall for it. Quality is far more important then duration

• You learn to consciously observe sensations.
• You create ownership.
• Get more objectivity and space in your awareness, the distance to the sensation is increasing.
• Train your awareness of energies, giving you the possibility to make conscious decisions. Instead of duly unconsciously perform your standard programming.
• Re-learn to observe subtle changes in your field of awareness and getting the tools to differentiate between the qualities they poses.
• Discriminate between your intuition (higher-self) and other sensations.
• Feel more relaxed and at home in your body.
• Feel inspired and energetic.(Streaming for 10 minutes feels like a power-nap to me.)
• Boost your personal development, by creating awareness of and distance to concepts and patterns enabling you to live consciously

Daily training will make this exercise a second nature boosting the advantages and shortening the time and energy you need to do the exercise.

After such an intro expectations will be high and they should. There is also a but however; It is an training and you gain what you invest. The exercise it self is in the beginning rather complex and asks for familiarity and understanding of lot of concepts that are touched upon in the exercise. I have done my best to find a balance between giving you enough understanding to work with, without making the exercise to complex. To start you off some definitions to get at the same page. Probably I will write a lot more about these in the near future but for now:

Definitions:

Preparation for the exercise

• Find a place where you feel safe and can be by yourself.
• Make sure there are no disturbances for 10 minutes. (Switch off any devices that can interrupt, close the door and inform people around you.)
• Since you may loose track of time setting a timer is helpful to relax deeper and get more out of the exercise.

Streaming your Energy

• Sit down on a chair with your back straight.
• Place your feet, next to each other, on the ground.
• Close your eyes.
• Be aware of your breathing for a minute or so. I normally start with the “3 minute breathing exercise that will change your life” to jump start the exercise with getting my attention back to myself and out of previous activities.
• Bring your attention in the center of your head. This is the space were you can find a neutral perspective and will find enough space to look objectively at sensations your are perceiving. With enough space and objectivity you have the tools to be conscious and stay present with the sensations you perceive. Without you will duly and unconsciously perform your programming getting you the results that you already know.
• Imagine a rose in the center of the room you are in.
• Give this rose a grounding. You can do this by connecting the base of the rose with the center of the earth with an imaginary line. For me placing the rose and giving it a grounding is a very relaxing and calming experience. It gives me the feeling that my body is dropping a few centimeters.
• Are you still in the center of your head? Even if so, please check again.
• Connect the rose with all the corners of the room. Effectively this gives the room a grounding. It gives me also a sense of clear space with an degree of ownership.
• Take a moment to feel the effects of the exercise so far. Don’t feel a thing yet. No worries it takes some training to get more open to these sensations….you ignored them so long they are a little rusty.
• Give yourself a grounding. Imagine a line between the base of your spine and the center of the earth. What does the line look like? What qualities does it have?
• Start streaming (mother)earth energy. Let the energy of the earth get in at the sole of your both feet and let it stream up through your legs into an imaginary bowl at the base of your spine. This is the place of your first chakra, the bowl is an helpful metaphor. The bowl will fill up, the surplus will stream through your grounding back to the center of the earth.
• Start getting back your energy. Imagine you have a private sun above your heat. This sophisticate piece of machinery exactly knows where your energy has been dispersed, how to get it back and filter your energy from other energy. Connect your sun with the base of your skull by imagining a connection between the two. Poke your sun to wake it up and ask it to start getting back your energy from all the places you left it.
• Are you still in the center of your head? Even if so, please check again.
• Stream the energy from the previous step along side your spine to the base and into the same bowl where the earth energy is streaming. The excess of energy will also use your grounding to flow back to the earth.
• Let the energy from the earth and the energy you get back mix in your bowl.
• Feel and decide in what ratio you want to stream this mixed energy back up through your chakra’s again. For instance 60% vs 40% earth energy. Make a conscious decision. In my experience to much earth energy makes everything heavy and slow. To much of the other energy makes your experience chaotic and unstable.
• Let this mix of energy fill your second chakra. Be aware and present with your second chakra while remaining in the center of your head. Either look down from the center of your head to your second chakra or look at a screen before you. The latter will have advantages in the long run, but I found it harder in the beginning.
  It is my experience that with ongoing training you start noticing more and more. Since everything is information, paying attention will train your ability to perceive (or just re-learn you to perceive the signals that you have ignored for a long time) and at the same time build your reference frame and ownership.
• Let this mix of energy stream further up and fill your third chakra. Again be aware while remaining in the center of your head.
• Fill your fourth chakra. Let it fill and stream on without interference, the tendency is to push. Feel what is happening and follow while remaining aware and in the center of your head.
• Let the mix of energy fill your fifth chakra. Are you still following and aware while present in the center of your head?
• Let this mix of energy fill your sixth chakra.
• Let this mix of energy flow out the top of your head (your seventh chakra) like a fountain. The energy will flow over the outside of your aura back to your grounding and is absorbed by the earth.
• Pause a little to observe and get to know this feeling.
• Place a rose at the border of your aura. This helps you to define the space around you. There is no need to judge the size of your aura. Any size will do as long as you are aware of it and own it.
• Imagine that the top of your seventh chakra is a vertical circle filled with golden energy. If you did wonder about the energies that will have to pass don’t. The energies that need to go through will do so. Filling my 7th with gold makes it easier for me to stay in my body.
• Let this energy stream continue without your interference. Be aware of it for the remaining time of this exercise or for as long as feels comfortable. It should feel relaxed and give you a sense of belonging and spaciousness.

Getting out of bed
Even getting out of bed in the morning demands processing a lot of sensations. For most of us it will start with a sound that we hear. We have to decide what the sound means. Is this our alarm clock or just a sound? You unconsciously run through sound recognition patterns. If it is the alarm clock you create the concept or image that you want to stop the noise. In order to reach that goal you have to know where the sound is coming from, you have to asses the position of your body and in particular the position of your arms. You have to gather the information and patterns that tell you how to move your arms, body and head in such away that you come closer to your goal of stopping the sound. During the process you constantly make small readjustments based on new sensations such as the blanket that needs to be moved out of the way. Most of this process you will probably do sub- or even unconscious.

Making sense
From birth on we learn how to make sense of all the sensations that we experience. We learn ourself, based on early experiences to filter sensations, see patterns, decide on priorities and create reactions patterns to deal with them. With every new experience we confirm the pattern we have created or when evidence shows us that the pattern is not correct we make an adjustment.

Small children
If you have small children in your surroundings you can observe this process of creating sub or unconscious patterns easily. Young children are predominant busy with physical and emotional patterns which by their more physical and outer nature are more easily observed. My biggest teachers are my youngest, now almost 6 weeks and her older brother of 2,5 years. A lot of their energy and attention goes to creating basic patterns to function well in this world. The moment they have created an pattern that functions well enough to perform a task they start performing the task more unconsciously. This frees some of their conscious attention and creates the opportunity to perform more tasks at the same time. Like walking, asking questions and study the surroundings for fun activities.

“Automated” reactions.
In our daily lives we have “automated” most our reactions. That means that the process of perceiving an sensation, making sense of it, setting an goal and working towards this goal happens for the biggest part outside of our consciousness. The advantages are enormous. One of the advantages is that this learning pattern has enabled us to free a lot of our conscious energy from tasks that help us to just stay alive. We can perform and are performing in increasingly complex surroundings were we have to find solutions that work well on all levels of our being. We can driving a car call wirelessly to the other end of the world, speaking a different language, dealing with cultural differences while finding a common vision of some sort that will create the basis for a deal. But if we don’t pay attention to the red traffic light it may well be the last thing that we do.

Missed the “red-light”
Everybody will have his or her own experiences were you missed the “red-light”, literally or figurative. All our attention went to perform other tasks then the most essential task at hand. Often it is only then that we realize that we have to calm down. Re-focus. Get our awareness back to the here and now. The 3 minute breathing exercise is just doing that. Getting you back to yourself.

Advantages
Besides keeping you alive at the red-light this exercise has been researched a lot as part of the Mindfulness movement. This and other similar exercises, that are also used in Mindfulness, have a lot of advantages:

Life changing
To me this and similar exercise have proven to be life changing. Because of the sub- and unconscious nature of much of our behavioral patterns it easy to give up all your space and loose yourself in the thing that you are doing. In away there is a system overload and all that your attention is doing is jumping from one to the other pattern to keep everything going.
Much like keeping juggling balls in the air. There is no moment to reflect and check if what you are doing is really important to you. You do the things with out thinking or checking your gut feeling about them. All is automated. Living like that is exhausting. It drains you from your life-energy. Numb and empty we often fall for other not so healthy habits only to briefly escape the feeling of emptiness. We typically start to eat and drink less healthy food, do less physical exercise or over do it, watch numbing things on the television, stay up later, etc. If you have more of these tendencies in your life then you like, start doing the exercise. With as less as 3 minutes a day you start a life shifting habit that will get you back on track. Get you more in contact with your deepest wisdom and wishes or your life destiny if you want.

Practical: doing the exercise.
This meditation exercise is easy to use during the day. All you basically need is a space were you will not be disturbed for 3 minutes. Your desk, your car, a small break from physical activities are all excellent moments. If there are no other options you can even withdrawal to a toilet to have a moment to get back to yourself. The pay offs over time are tremendous.

A healthy habit
I advice you todo exercise as often as you can, preferable at least once a hour. The more often you do the exercise the greater the benefits. The more benefits you experience the faster the process of automation works for you, you start sub- or unconsciously the exercise at every opportunity. It will become a second nature to get back to yourself. Creating new habits can be hard, you can read more about changing habits in my post: Can you change a habit in 21 days?.
There is no better moment to start your habit then now. Have fun!

3 minute breathing exercise

• Bring your attention to your breath.
• Slowly breath in and out through your nose.
• Feel your belly rise on an in- and fall on a out-breath.
• Make contact with the sensations in the area of your belly.
• Observer as neutral as you possible can, without labeling, judging or changing anything.
• Just be present with what is. Bring more and more awareness to observing your belly.
• Keep observing your belly for 3 minutes or so much longer as you prefer. Let the sensations, emotions or thoughts pass through your center of awareness without grasping them.

70% van de veranderingen faalt, 94% levert niet op wat bedacht is. De belangrijkste reden is een niet goed functionerende organisatiecultuur. Dr David Potter

Alan’s personal website with more information http://www.alanwallace.org/

Heel normaal
Wat de aanwezigen daar opviel is dat de meest consultants dit gedachtegoed als heel normaal beschouwen. De meeste van onze klanten niet. In mijn ogen hoort dat ook zo te zijn, wat is anders onze rol als we niks nieuws brengen?

70% van veranderen ….
Een goede reminder voor mij was dat 70%!! van alle verander projecten mislukt door de cultuur waarin ze plaats vinden. Loopt een verandering stroef? Kijk eens naar de impliciete normen ze zijn van doorslaggevend belang voor een succesvolle verandering.

Persoonlijk
Wat mij persoonlijk boeide was het model met de 8 lagen op sheet 57. Ik herken de beweging door de lagen van het model in mijzelf op een aantal manieren:
- Als ik weinig slaap krijg zit ik eerder in de onderste lagen. Tom, mijn zoontje van 2, is nu ziek wellicht dat mijn slaapgebrek maakt dat ik het nu herken?
- Een andere trigger voor een ritje naar de onderste lagen is als ik teveel ga nadenken. Ik verlies dan het contact met het nu en raak de verbinding met de mensen om heen kwijt wat eerder tot gevoelens in de lagere lagen leidt. (Veel nadenken in organisaties is niks anders dan veel bureaucratie, stafadelingen, commissies en eindeloze overleggen….)

Hoe herken jij het model in je eigen functioneren? Mindfulness is een krachtig hulpmiddel om meer bewustzijn te ontwikkelen juist op deze stukken. Waarom zou je dat willen? Als je het patroon bij jezelf herkent is het veel makkelijker om er op te coachen in team of organisatie verband. Wat je niet doorleeft hebt is bijna niet over te brengen.

Veel plezier met lezen: