Books on Happiness / the happiness revolution - 2 students
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The seventh factor for good sleep is to remember the di erence between sleep and rest. Most people spend their sleep in stages 1 and 2 and in REM sleep. You can maximize your rest when you train your mind to go into stages 3 and 4. You can learn to rest when you practice yoga nidra and consciously control your states of sleep.
The eighth factor for good sleep is getting up on time. When you do not get out of bed on time, then your next night of sleep may also su er. Therefore, when you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to go, it is important to get out of bed immediately. When you go to bed at 10 p.m. it becomes easier to awake by 5 a.m. It is also helpful to immediately have some water when you wake. This will make you less likely to go back to sleep.
When you follow these eight factors for deeper, more restful sleep, you will begin to have the ability to control your sleep cycle. You will need less sleep, wake up more refreshed, and feel happier throughout your day. No longer will you be enslaved by your sleep cycle. For most people, it is possible to get the equivalent of eight hours of sleep in only 4-6 hours. Therefore, follow these eight factors for good sleep, practice yoga nidra, and you will gain freedom from the bondage of sleep.
Checklist for More Restful Sleep
•A fresh, calming diet.
•Meditation before bedtime to calm and cleanse your mind.
•Take the time for breathing exercises during the day.
•Go to bed on time every night.
•Have a bed that provides support, yet does not engulf you with too much comfort.
•Take 10-15 minutes to rest in the afternoon.
•Review and remember the di erence between sleep and rest.
•Get up on time.
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CHAPTER SUMMARY
•Sleep doesn’t always provide good rest. It is quite possible to sleep 8 hours and still be tired if the sleep was of poor quality. Therefore, it is important to learn to sleep properly.
•What you eat, watch, listen to, think about and do in the hours before sleeping will affect the quality of your sleep dramatically.
•Through the science of yoga and the practice of yoga nidra it is possible to gain deep rest in a short period of time.
ACTION ITEMS
•Take note of your behaviors in the four or fi ve hours before sleeping, and use the information presented in this chapter, along with the “checklist for a restless night” to determine which of those behaviors are helpful and which are not helpful.
•Begin either the prerequisite practices for yoga nidra or the actual practice of yoga nidra as described in this chapter.
•Experiment with not using an alarm clock. Instead, wake up immediately in the morning as soon as you feel rested and awake for the fi rst time.
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Chapter9
Creating More Space
for Happiness
Iwas short on time, my patient schedule was over-booked, and Karen said I was wound tighter than a drum. I was about to have a very bad day. And it was bad only because I feared having an extreme shortage of time and space to fulfill all my duties. In
those days I would become tense, irritable and hopeless in the face of an extremely busy day.
If I had only known many years ago that those tense moments were optional and changeable. I had no idea then how easy it is to illuminate and expand “crunch time” at the o ce into a field of time and space that comfortably seats every obligation.
I was not a chemistry or physics major in college, but I knew that there were solid particles smaller than the microscope could see. In the atom these tiny pieces, called electrons, whirl around the nucleus of the atom. But what caught my attention were my professor’s comments that there was more space than there was solid matter. Everything solid was floating in a vast ocean of space.
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The old science fiction television show “Star Trek” declared that space was “the final frontier.” And many years later a yoga class proved this to be true in ways beyond my wildest imagination. In theory and in practices that can be learned, it was the science of pranayama that helped me find more space in my day.
Prana is a Sanskrit term for the first unit of energy. It is not physical, but gives life and animation to matter. When your prana is depleted, you will experience a sense of weakness and lethargy. For example, flu-like symptoms of weak-
ness can appear in even the strongest athlete, completely overpowering the muscular strength in their heart and throughout their body. The body habitus of an athlete is no match for a lack of prana.
Pranayama is the science of learning how to control, expand and channel prana for healing and self-transformation. When you feel depleted of enthusiasm and lack the motivation to act, yoga science would state that the pranic pressure of your body has diminished. Increasing the amount of active prana within you will also increase the amount of space in which you exist. In practical terms, a muscle spasm is skeletal tissue that is lacking space. Feeling hopeless due to a lack of options is cured by increasing your field (space) of options. Increasing pranic pressure within you can repel stress and disease. In an expanded state of mind, you are the ruling monarch of your life. Nothing can enter your space without your permission. The power and potency of prana will return your vigor and charm.
“Stretch beyond your limitations! Expand your realm of possibility. Increase your personal power!” the seminar leaders would demand. It was the 1980s and, like many of our colleagues, my wife and I enrolled ourselves in various motivational seminars. It was an
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era focused on the conquest of the self. What “self” actually meant varied from seminar teacher to seminar teacher. And that was ironic because, beneath the guise of “motivation,” a sense of self is precisely what the attendees of these seminars were seeking. Karen and I were seeking it, too. But, in truth, we did not find it there.
The seminars inspired us to keep searching – and search we did. And as it often happens, the answer was right there in our own backyard. We were at an evening lecture in Wisconsin featuring a talk by Panditji. The moment he said, “By expanding the breath, you expand your concept of yourself.” Karen and I looked at each other and grinned. He had our full attention.
“The physical body floats in a sea of primordial energy called prana,” he continued. “When the physical body and the mental awareness contract, causing pain, fatigue or anguish, the unceasing bath of prana is ready to lift you up and nourish you. But like any sponge tightly held, when the death grip of fear and stress squeeze you, there is no room for
prana to seep in. That is when hatha yoga and pranayama can expand your capacity by literally helping you stretch and expand yourself.” Panditji continued to discuss the concept of pranayama. This Sanskrit word means “the control or expansion of prana.”
At first, pranayama is introduced through breathing exercises that promote relaxation and a gentle lengthening of the breath. Panditji taught us several techniques for expanding our breath and our selfconcept with very simple breathing exercises. As I started to practice his teachings, I realized that I was learning how to create more space
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in my day. Like everyone else, each year of my life was consistently becoming more hectic and hurried. These exercises were changing all of this.
The more I practiced, the more spacious my day felt and the more inspired I became about the possibilities. After several years, I felt I had finally perfected the most basic aspects of these practices – and so powerful are these basics that I found I could o er my patients a fiveminute solution for resolving feelings of being “crowded, cramped, rushed and depleted.” Eager to test my theories and solutions, I entered my waiting room filled with a sense of possibility.
I walked into the waiting room to find a nicely dressed pregnant woman with a face full of agony. It was obvious that her baby could arrive at any moment. For years she had worked as a physical therapist and was getting ready to birth her third child. She looked extremely unhappy as we walked back to my o ce with one infant in a stroller and another eager to be born. As she sat down, the tears began to well up in her eyes and I moved the Kleenex box closer to her chair. “I know you are going to think this is all hormonal, but it is not,” she muttered.
“I ran track in high school and college. The sound of the starting gun gave me a thrill and I loved it all. I loved the competition, the open air and the warm sun. But now I feel like a runner who has gone mad. The starting gun has been replaced with the alarm clock and I am just so…” She drifted o into tears. I waited for her to regain her composure. I kept my attention focused on her, hoping to convey my compassion and interest in her story. After a few moments she continued.
“My life is a race from the moment the alarm clock starts buzzing. I have kids to care for, a husband to get out the door and a job to go to. You always ask me to describe how I feel about my life. Over the past month the answer has been exceedingly clear. I feel rushed,
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crowded, cramped and depleted. The fact that this new baby is about to join us has completely broken me.” She became very quiet. She looked to the carpet for solace. I waited while the conversation continued quietly in her mind. When she was done, she glanced up. It was my turn. Sara and I had a long professional relationship and I could speak honestly and directly to her.
I agreed that I didn’t think it was hormonal at all. I thought her omplaints were very honest and very common. Since Sara and I had known each other for years, I pointed out how clearly I knew that she loved her children. She smiled. And I acknowledged how much she loved her husband, who was also my patient. Her eyes brightened. I also recognized that she was feeling over-obligated and stretched way beyond her capacity. Once again, she took over the conversation.
“I do love them all but I also have to work. It seems that I am so busy that I am starting to become forgetful. One of my coworkers told me that she actually forgot to pick up her child from daycare. She only has one child, but she forgot! She said she was just too busy in her mind. I do not want that to happen to me.”
Sara went on to explain, “I came to see you because I feel that my love and energy are at an all-time low.” There were no tears now, just honesty. She was intelligent, desperate and entering the zone of self-condemnation simply because she was so disappointed in her ability to respond to the life that she was living. She thought she should know how to handle every situation and when she didn’t and couldn’t, guilt and embarrassment overcame her.
My heart opened and the words flowed from my lips. “You definitely need more space in your day. If you learn how to have more space in your day, it will feel like you have more time. But you don’t need more time, you need more space. And creating more space is really quite easy.
“First, observe the flow of your breath right now. Gently sit still and close your eyes and observe your breathing pattern. Let your
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mind travel in and out of your nose with the air you are breathing. Just observe this for several breaths.” She closed her eyes and sat quietly. A few moments later her eyes opened, signaling that her observations were complete.
“Lengthen your breath by just a few seconds on both inhalation and exhalation,” I told her. Her eyes closed as she followed my instructions. I watched as her body settled more deeply into the chair. For the next several minutes she continued to make more space in her breath. The glow from her face and the change of her posture displayed the benefits of her lengthened breath. As she continued to gain more space in her breath, I knew that her mental clarity could further improve with a simple
memory exercise that Swami Rama had been teaching for years.
Today I use the analogy of the computer’s hard drive as a way to explain Swami Rama’s memory technique. Our mind and a computer’s hard drive both receive in-
formation to store that later can be purged and erased. Imagine the memory banks of a computer’s hard drive to be like a room full of shelves. Placing various boxes of data on the shelves is how you store information. Initially, the shelves fill up in a systematic order. Over time, as you purge unneeded data, it leaves random open spaces on the shelves throughout the room. In computer lingo, this state of disarray is called a fragmented hard drive.
Computer enthusiasts commonly run software to defragment their hard drives and put things back into order. This process eliminates the empty spaces and makes the hard drive run more e ciently. Swami Rama taught a memory practice that can defragment and organize your mind in a similar fashion. In the most simplistic terms, all
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memory is relational – meaning it is related or connected to something else in order to be found or accessed. This practice is a counting exercise that will re-establish orderliness in both an energetic and neurological manner.
“Now let’s re-organize your brain,” I said with a broad smile. “Bring your awareness to the point between your two eyebrows. Let your awareness hover in that area as we begin the counting exercise to improve your memory.
“As you continue to breathe through your nose in a smooth and slow manner, start to count from zero to 25 and then from 25 back to zero without a pause. Count silently to yourself, maintaining your awareness at the point between the two eyebrows. Your goal is to count this way without any pause or hesitation.” Quite pleased with her accomplishment, she opened her eyes.
I explained to her that the counting would increase by units of 50 until she was able to count to 100 and back again without error or hesitation. I playfully demonstrated that this was not to be an aerobic exercise and thus she should try to avoid bouncing her head or contorting her body as each number was counted. Like all internal practices, this exercise is best accomplished while seated with the head, neck and trunk in straight alignment. The body should remain calm and still.
This practice begins with a count of 50 and is gradually increased by 50. Increasing the count is only done after perfection is achieved and maintained for several days. This perfection implies that you are able to count accurately, rhythmically and consistently for several days or more before increasing the practice. Your counting speed will dramatically increase over time. The final goal of this practice is to count to 1,000 and back perfectly. (I have wondered if the goal of a 1,000 has a correlation to the fact that every single neuron in the brain is potentially connected to 1,000 other neurons.) My experience with others and myself has shown that counting to 1,000