Month: March 2019

There is untapped creativity inside you that will enrich your life if you learn to identify and remove the creative blocks in your way. Identify Your Creative Block and Thrive! By Lien Potgieter      Untapped creativity is detrimental to your life, relationships, business, and career. If you believe that you are not creative or that there is no need for creativity, you could even become obsolete. According to the World Economic Forum, the Future of Jobs report creativity will be third on the list of the top ten critical skills by 2020. In the short space of just five years, creativity has moved up seven places from ten to number three. You can increase your creative intelligence (CQ) despite the outdated notion that people are either right- or left-brain dominant. New research shows that we need to use both sides of the brain to be successful. Unconventional paths often lead to brilliant solutions. Color, which you find all around you, could act as a catalyst to identify what exactly is causing you to feel, think or believe that you can’t connect the dots. Many problems can be solved, and challenges overcome with the help of these vibrational energies.   How can color help? By becoming aware of the colors in your environment, you can pinpoint your creative block. It is a simple yet powerful method. Your color attractions and rejections demonstrate where you are stuck: Physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. Only when we know what the heart of the matter is can you take action, unblock your creativity, and live a life of success and happiness.   Tell-tale signs of a creative block and how to overcome it How do you know where the block is? Here are a few signs to look out for. Body: If your block has a…

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Question:

Are certain events in life set? For instance, is your death set – if you are going to die in an accident, is that something that has been predetermined, and if so can you change that by becoming more “awake” – or is it something you have been creating with your thoughts? Same with the people in your life – are relationships predetermined?

Guest post by Mallika Chopra

As my phone exploded with texts from friends about the college admissions cheating scam, my reaction was sadness and non-surprise. It also forced me to reflect on my own achievement orientation and parenting style.

During meditation, we should not develop a mind which accumulates and holds on to things, but instead we develop a mind which is willing to let go of things, to let go of burdens. Outside of meditation we have to carry the burden of our many duties, like so many heavy suitcases, but within the period of meditation so much baggage is unnecessary. So, in meditation see how much baggage you can unload. Think of these things as burdens, heavy weights pressing upon you. I like to begin at the very simple stage of giving up the baggage of past and future.

Abandoning the past means not even thinking about your work, your family, your commitments, your responsibilities, your history, the good or bad times you had as a child…, you abandon all past experiences by showing no interest in them at all. As for the future, the anticipations, fears, plans, and expectations let all of that go too. This future is known to the wise as uncertain, unknown and so unpredictable. It is often complete stupidity to anticipate the future, and always a great waste of your time to think of the future in meditation.

When you have abandoned all past and all future, it is as if you have come alive. You are here, you are mindful. This is the first stage of the meditation, just this mindfulness sustained only in the present.

Ajahn Brahm, Sustained Attention on the Present Moment

Carl Eisen was at the height of his career in the fall of 2007. An Airbus A300 captain in his mid-forties, he was confident and assured, with more than 10,000 hours of experience in the cockpit. His profession required calm, unflappable, singular focus, and Eisen was proud of his ability to perform complicated maneuvers under extreme stress.

Then he bought his wife a new horse trailer.

“I was towing it with my truck to have electric brakes installed,” he remembers, “and as I was driving down the road, I thought, it has no brakes, maybe I’m going a little fast—” and as if on cue another vehicle pulled out in front of him, cutting him off. Eisen managed to get his truck and trailer under control and safely off the road, but as he sat there in the immediate aftermath of a near wreck, adrenaline pumping, he had a terrible realization. “I didn’t really feel any different than I did any of my other waking hours.” Eisen had been living in a constant state of heightened alert, unable to turn it off.

“Pilots are expected to be superhuman, to suppress feelings of anxiety.”

He made an appointment with his doctor, hoping he had “a heart condition or brain tumor,” he says, knowing that a prescription of antidepressants and therapy would jeopardize the job he loved. “Pilots are expected to be superhuman, to suppress feelings of anxiety.”

A pilot who is diagnosed with depression or anxiety and doesn’t disclose it to their airline is at risk of prosecution from the Federal Aviation Administration. A pilot who’s diagnosed and does disclose it faces immediate grounding.

Eisen was grounded for a year. He took antidepressants and explored cognitive therapy, and when he still felt anxious after nine months, he found his way to insight meditation. “I understood immediately that that’s what had been missing.” He meditated for twenty minutes a day and after a month his “anxiety level was almost to zero.”

Staying Cool When Instruments Freeze

Eisen soon had ample opportunities to practice his new mindfulness techniques on the job, and one of the most dramatic came on a hot summer afternoon in 2014, when he piloted his Airbus A330 through a line of thunderstorms as he departed Dallas for Newark. “Almost immediately, the needles on two of my airspeed indicators started fluctuating, then slowly dropped to zero.” Eisen, like all Airbus pilots, is well-trained for this. There’s a procedure pilots are required to commit to memory. “The first item on that checklist is Disregard All Airspeed Indications, because you don’t know which ones are correct.”

Eisen followed the procedure and took the engine power to 84 percent. “Then, to my surprise, the other two remaining airspeed indicators showed that we were slowing down. But were we actually slowing down or are they icing up too?” Mindful of the checklist that says Disregard All Airspeed Indications, Eisen waited and watched, but the situation didn’t stabilize as the procedure indicated it would, and his intuition told him the plane was indeed slowing down. He bucked the procedure and bumped the engine power up to 87 percent. “At that point I became a test pilot, abandoning a mandatory recovery procedure. I had no way of knowing exactly HOW fast we were going. If I put in too much power I risk overspeeding, losing control and/or breaking the plane apart in mid-air. But If the two remaining airspeed indicators are correct, I really AM slowing down to the point of a stall, which means the plane stops flying and starts falling out of the sky.” With autopilot off and turbulence tossing the plane in all directions, Eisen tuned in to the feeling of the plane. “I could feel the air flow burbling over the wing. That’s a sure sign—we’re on the verge of stalling!”

So Eisen free-styled—and called on his mindfulness training. “Rather than get wrapped up in figuring out the details, I remembered one simple fact about the 160 tons of aluminum I was piloting: If you cut the power to zero and pitch the nose down 2 degrees, you can hand-fly without any airspeed indicators at all and stay in the normal speed range making the jet one very expensive glider.”

Eisen knew from experience that would allow him to get control of the plane. Sure enough, the iced-up systems started working again in the warmer air, and Eisen and his co-pilot were able to emergency-land without further problems.

A subsequent investigation revealed that it would have taken 90 percent engine power to stabilize the aircraft. “If I had fixated and followed the procedure to the letter, we would have stalled and lost control.” When the unexpected happens, and the prescribed procedure fails, Eisen says, “you need to be present for what IS and not stuck in stories about how things SHOULD be. Non-reactivity and non-fixation (open and inclusive awareness) really help me exercise discernment. Meanwhile, improved concentration and focus free up working memory so I can think more clearly, in a less distracted way.”

Coming Out of the Meditation Closet

Despite the transformational effect of his meditation practice in his own life, personal and professional, Eisen kept it to himself. And he might have continued as a “closet meditator” if Andreas Lubitz had not crashed a Germanwings airplane into the Alps in March 2015.

“I thought if I can’t talk about this openly, we are not going to make any progress for pilots’ mental health. If I have to become the poster child, I will.”

But Eisen discovered no one wanted to talk about it. “The letters I wrote about my own experience” —letters he sent to his airline and union— “they wouldn’t even respond to me.”

So he continued his own studies with Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), and became certified as a mindfulness teacher. He started mindfulaviator.com, an online resource that demystifies meditation and makes it accessible to airline pilots. He connected with Matt McNeil, a commercial pilot and mental health professional who started an organization called Lift Affect to offer mental health services to pilots. And he noted that although pilots and other crew were using mindfulness apps on their phones, and were receptive to his message, the real resistance came from airlines, the unions, and the Federal Aviation Administration. “My experience with trying to introduce mindfulness to the airline industry is the sound of doors slamming all the way down the hallway.”

The skills and abilities that make pilots able to fly a 300,000-pound aircraft through inclement weather with ease can also be their downfall.

Eisen says those doors need to open. A recent study indicates that 13.5 percent of the 130,000 pilots surveyed meet the threshold for depression. “That study should have been a wake-up call, the Germanwings flight should have been a wake-up call. The approach the airlines are taking is very old fashioned.”

Meanwhile, Eisen says, the grassroots effort made by him and a few others is taking off, and not a moment too soon.

“When we deal with pilots, when they finally do come forward, they wait until their ass is on fire. They wait until they’re on the roadside bleeding out before they come for help. I was one of those guys, too.”

Eisen says the effects of mindfulness meditation are particularly acute for pilots, who tend to be goal-oriented. “Attachment to outcome is one thing pilots are into, we create certainty in our minds. It’s essential if you’re going to become a pilot, but you don’t know how to disentangle yourself from that in the rest of your life.” The skills and abilities that make pilots able to fly a 300,000-pound aircraft through inclement weather with ease can also be their downfall.

“The first time you check out an airplane it’s massive and intimidating, but like anything else, you become accustomed to it. But there’s a level at which we’re fooling ourselves. We should be in awe all the time. After all, one mistake and it can kill you and everyone on board,” Eisen points out. “But with mindfulness practice, I find that the experience of fear regarding a future task is optional. Some people use fear to motivate themselves, to give themselves an edge or to remain hypervigilant. I used to do this myself. Now I choose curiosity and wonder. I’m in awe of the machine and grateful for the people who make it all work so reliably and safely. Gratitude and awe, without fear, give me lots of motivation and comes with a more open and inclusive awareness.”

Eisen hopes talking openly about mental health will someday be as common among pilots as any other topic. “With the drug and alcohol program, they introduce it at training. But we do not have conversations about mental health in training. We just need to have the conversation for real, out in the open.”

The post How A Grounded Pilot Used Meditation to Fly Again appeared first on Mindful.

The wise person uses the mind as a mirror.

It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing.

It receives but does not keep.

Chuang Tzu, 4th Century BC

Question:

My question today is about kleshas which I believe are sometimes described as defilements and I understand them as character traits rooted in the unconscious mind which give rise to unwholesome behaviour, such as fear, greed, envy etc.

Following my shift in consciousness I spent about 5 years in a blissful state. Emotions arose but seemed to pass through and I didn’t have the sense of being driven by them. It was as though life was living itself through me and there was a lack of a personal self.

About 2 years ago I began to experience very strong emotions. It was as though the emotions were suddenly back and the gloves were off. Things that had not bothered me at all, suddenly seemed very important and after a while I had to admit that they were definitely driving me. I found this very confusing. About a year ago, I met an Indian gentleman who is a Hindu and has studied extensively in that tradition but also in the Buddhist tradition. He was able to help me with an explanation. He makes a distinction between levels of Samadhi and levels of enlightenment. He said that there are 4 levels of Samadhi which can be experienced in a human body and that the shift I experienced in 2002 took me to the third level. I had described it as feeling as though nobody was driving the bus and he said that I could think of it as moving from a relatively small bus, to a huge bus, so huge that I could no longer find the driving seat. The driver was still there but at a subtler level. There are also 4 levels of enlightenment which can be experienced in a human body and the first level is attained when the kleshas of wrong view, envy, avarice and doubt are gone. He said that through the mantra meditation I had done I had dealt with the branches and trunk of the kleshas but that the roots were still there, hence the strong emotions. I’ve since read up on some of this in Theravada Buddhist books and have also read Joe Dispenza’s “Evolve Your Brain”. After a big shift, the mantra didn’t seem to do anything anymore, so I hadn’t had a daily practice since then. About six months ago I learnt vipassana meditation from my Indian friend during a 10-day silent retreat that he held for a small group. My program now is about 2-3 hours in the morning comprising physical yoga, yogic breathing and vipassana meditation. I also do about an hour of vipassana meditation in the evening. I am enjoying this and feel it is right for me at the moment, however, I’m finding these very strong emotions quite hard to deal with even though I now have a greater understanding of what is going on. I have another 10-day silent retreat coming up soon so I’m sure that will help.

I would be very grateful for your insight.