Sunday, July 24, 2011

YOU - The Operator's Manual

“To know oneself is to study oneself…” –Bruce Lee


“Know Thyself” – Socrates

The concept of paying attention to yourself, your thinking, your attitudes, your beliefs, and everything else about YOU is an idea that has been echoed by philosophers and deep thinkers throughout recorded time.

Last week, I wrote about how this one aspect of introspection is helpful in understanding and realizing the meaning in your life.

So how do you do it? It’s easier than you think. Here are a few ways you can the start the process of figuring out the complexities that are YOU.

Breathe

Did you know the act of the breathing is the ONLY biological process that is both automatic AND under our control? Breathing takes care of itself when we are not paying attention to it, but we can also bring it under our conscious control when we want. The act of attending to our breathing and altering it can have a profound impact on our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health.

Taking 10-20 minutes each day to engage in deep breathing exercises can relieve anxiety, fight depression, and improve overall health. Deep breathing, meditation, and vocal toning can also give us those few minutes each day to look deeper within ourselves. The fast and simple explanation to do this: sit in a quiet place, set a simple timer that will wake you gently, close your eyes, breathe in through your nose for 7 seconds, breath out through your mouth for 8 seconds, repeat until timer goes off. It’s not easy at first, but it will get easier, as it does you will experience some interesting improvements.

For more on deep breathing and meditation, check out my friend, Sam Boys, book An Ancient Sound for the Present Moment , and look for his new tunes on this site in the next few weeks.

Think

Thinking, somewhat like breathing, can be unconscious or automatic, as well as conscious and focused. Very often, sometimes too often, our unconscious thoughts, those that are the result of everything we take in around us, all the stimulation we experience both known and unknown, are the main focus of our conscious minds. When these unconscious thoughts spend too time in the forefront of our minds, we can experience confusions, disorientation, frustration, and a myriad of other negative experiences.

The answer; spend time in conscious thought. Pay attention to those things going on in your head. Look at what kind of unconscious stimulation enters your mind through the forces, of advertising, marketing, and all the other “noise” that goes on around us. Ponder the questions about YOU:

Who am I? What do / don’t I believe? Why do don’t I believe? Where have I been? What have I experienced? Where am I going? What do I want to accomplish? What is my legacy? Where do I want to be in 5 years? What am I doing to get there? How do my beliefs help me? How do my beliefs hinder me?

There are a lot more to ask yourself, but if you start with these, you might be interested to find out where these questions take you.

Read

Turn off the continual stream of unconscious information entering in to your brain through television, radio, and internet, and focus on a conscious decision to put some particular, specific, and conscious information in your head. Take an active part in what goes in to your mind by doing the work of reading, and stop the flow of passive information – what other people want you to think – for a short time.

Even better, challenge yourself in your reading. If you find through “Thinking”, that you have a particular set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes, read something that challenges them. If you want to learn more about yourself, pay attention to how you react to information that may differ from what you believe to be true. Are you Christian? Check out some of Richard Dawkins' work like The God Delusion. Evolutionary Theorist or Darwinist? Check out Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. Not sure what you believe yet, take a look at Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Whatever you decide to read, read. Take a look at all the information that enters into your mind from outside sources without your knowledge or will, and make a conscious effort to put something else in there. For more on that idea, I recommend Morgan Spurlock’s upcoming release POM Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

There are many, many ways to learn about yourself. There are many, many more ways the outside world conspires to keep you from it. You have a choice. You can choose to consciously grow in a direction you design and implement; or you can grow in a way that Facebook, Fox, MSNBC, Coke, Pepsi, Nike, McDonald’s, et al. want you to grow.


(Disclaimer: all links in this article are Amazon affiliate links.  If you make a purchase using any of these links, Amazon pays A New Direction Counseling a percentage of the sale.)

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