Tag: habituated response

Resonance and the Art of Leveraging Energy through Meditation

Yesterday Ginny Whitelaw conducted a global Zoom launch for her new book, Resonate: Zen and the Way of Making a Difference.  Ginny contends that resonance is the “lynchpin” between our inner and outer world, it connects inner energy with outer energy.  She explained that energy is everywhere, everything is in a state of vibration.  If we can achieve integration of mind and body by developing awareness through meditation, we are capable of vibrating with many energies that enable us to create change in our world – personal, inter-personal and social change.

Resonance as alignment and amplification

Resonance involves “vibrating with” – achieving alignment with, and amplification of, energy.  Ginny pointed out that resonance is a “fact” – there are measurable, characteristic ways in which vibration occurs when energies come together.  For example, she provided an experiential exercise where participants in the Zoom meeting could experience in their body, the vibrations from the music of a large church organ.  When the notes were deep, people felt the vibrations in the lower part of their bodies, e.g. in their feet; in contrast, when the notes were high, the vibration was felt higher in the body.  She reinforced this experience with a final exercise that involved making sounds such as “oh”, “om” and “ng”, while progressively experiencing the different sounds in the relevant Chakra level of the body, e.g. the deep “oh” sound aligned with the “root chakra”, while the “ng” sound was experienced in the “crown chakra”.

Ginny explained that energy vibrations and rhythms surround us in daily life.  The vibrations of sound waves, the movement of a swing, and the differential impact of small and big waves are some of the ways that we can perceive energy and resonance in action.   According to Ginny, “energy creates form” and “form shapes energy”, e.g. when the flow of water down a rockface gouges out a clear channel for the water to follow over time.  So too, energy perceived through the senses can change our neurons, changing our form within us and shaping our energy output.

Leveraging energy through mindful meditation

Ginny pointed out that through breath meditation, employing deep breathing, we can slow our thoughts and calm our body.  The integration of the mind-body connection through different forms of meditation and other mindfulness practices, enables us to develop calm energy which impacts those around us.  She views meditation as improving our own resonant instrument, taming the dissipated energy of the ego, fears, and impulses.  Meditation heightens our sensitivity and enables us to overcome habituated responses.  Our life experiences influence our perceptions and emotions as we become sensitised to negative triggers that evoke difficult emotions that serve to misdirect our focus and energy.  Meditation helps us to tame the energy of difficult emotions, and to understand their message and wisdom so that we can redirect their energy and take appropriate action.

During the online launch, Ginny provided a three-step meditation process designed to change the “inner dialogue” and release energy (as if we are overcoming a “cramp” or energy blockage):

  1. Breathe deeply and lengthen your exhale beyond that of the inhale.
  2. Envisage someone in your group or team experiencing difficulty and direct kind thoughts and positive energy towards them.
  3. Focus on something in the room that you love to look at or experience and then “tune into” why you like that particular object.  Progressively let your heart expand to take in your whole room or external environment.

Ginny maintains that as our inner reality changes through meditation, our outer experience changes. We become more open to what is around us and better able to use our gifts to help others – achieving greater flow in our lives through alignment with our life purpose.   We can more readily tune into the wavelength of others and respond more appropriately and creatively.  Our inner energy flow and mind-body alignment shape the way we interact with the world and bring about personal, interpersonal, and social change.

Ginny highlights the need for leaders to develop leadership agility by adopting different energy patterns.  She maintains that leadership is about resonance, a skill developed by deep listening to others.   Listening, in turn, requires being in the moment, fully present, and consciously attuned to the other person and the source and direction of their energy.  This capacity for attunement is developed through meditation and mindfulness practices. 

Reflection

The challenge for us is to achieve what Ginny calls “the foundational flip” – the capacity to  overcome self-absorption and direct our energy outwards for the good of others.  As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and other mindfulness practices, we can become more attuned to the energy that surrounds us, more flexible and adaptable in leading others and more focused and energised to achieve our life purpose and make a positive difference in the lives of others.

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Image by Okan Caliskan from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Beyond R.A.I.N. – Remembering Self-Compasssion

In an earlier post, I discussed the R.A.I.N. meditation process – recognise, accept, investigate, nurture – as a way to address situations, including interactions with another, that generate strong negative feelings.  What happens, though, when your ineffective behaviour and negative feelings continue to recur after using the R.A.I.N. process?

We can be the captive of addiction, trapped in habituated responses to adverse stimuli, or stressed to the point that we have little control over our response when we are aggravated by an event or another person.  We may have lost our response ability through a lack of consciousness of our words and actions and their injurious impact on others, often unintended.

Tara Brach likens our daily life and its challenges to the waves of the ocean – we can’t stop the waves, but we can learn how to surf them so that we do not get “dumped” by them.  If we persist in blaming ourselves for falling off the surfboard of life occasionally, we can become paralysed by fear of failure.  This, in turn, can be compounded by our endless self-judging.

Self-judging imprisons us

We all have some form of negative self-evaluation – it may be stimulated by an event, adverse experience or over-reaction to a person we find annoying or critical of our behaviour.  We regularly blame ourselves or undervalue who we are or what we have contributed.  We might think that we do not “measure up” to our own standards, values or expectations or those of our family or significant other.

Our assessment of our response to a situation may be accurate in terms of inappropriateness, but the continual self-judging and self-denigrating disempowers us and detracts from our happiness and joy in life.  We become reluctant to engage effectively with our work colleagues, withdrawn in our conversations with our life partner or reticent to raise issues that affect us in other situations.   The way to regain our freedom and joy is through self-compassion.

Self-compassion frees us from the imprisonment of self-judging

Self-compassion enables us to break the trap of self-judging and be open to new responses to adverse situations.  It requires a radical self-acceptance and acknowledgement of what is human – our depth of suffering from previous experiences that manifests itself in our daily response to what is experienced as adverse events.  The perception of the impact of these events on us and our self-esteem is coloured by our recollections and interpretations of prior experiences.

As we grow in mindfulness through self-compassion meditation, we can break out of the cycle of self-judging and become open to different responses and to the freedom realised when we can break free of negative self-evaluations.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of cocoparisienne on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.