Your Mind = Complete Excellence
A. Dumont-Namin
Copyright © 2017 A. Dumont-Namin All rights reserved. ISBN: ISBN: 9781520291031
DEDICATION This book is dedicated to my wonderful wife Nasim who makes such things possible with her patience, intelligence and loving-kindness.
CONTENTS Epigraph Introduction
7 8
1
What is the Mind?
Pg. 13
2
What Can Your Mind Help You To Achieve?
Pg. 22
3
Where Do People Go Wrong?
Pg. 27
4
The Restriction of S.M.A.R.T. goals –
Pg. 50
Go Even Further! 5
How Do I Use My Mind to Get Complete
Pg. 53
Excellence? 6
Practices to Achieve Excellent
Pg. 77
Use of your Mind 7
Final Words
Pg. 92
If you aim high enough to climb the highest mountain yet fail, You will still have reached more than most people ever dreamed of.
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
Introduction Hi. Firstly, I’m really happy that you’re reading this book. It has been an absolute pleasure for me to write it. It is my passion to aid people wherever I can and I am completely satisfied with this book – life is about excellence – there are certain techniques to getting that excellence into your life – and I know that this book is completely able to bring those techniques to you. Secondly, I’ve got to say – I was not the guy who this all came natural to. A few years ago life was really difficult. It seemed that the harder I tried – the worst things got. It was as if there was a recipe to life – and I just kept putting in the wrong things – what I got out tasted awful. It got really bad – to the stage where I just really didn’t know where to turn – well, guess what – I started finding answers. There were certain practices that I started doing which totally transformed my life. It may have been said before – but that really doesn’t matter too much. The important point is that there truly is a recipe for living an excellent life. There truly are certain that will enable you to create great things in your life, to feel great, to be successful. Perhaps even more importantly – these techniques don’t stop working. You can use them any time throughout your life – and they will always produce clarity, vision, peace of mind and great results - lasting results. This means that you are guaranteed to wake up feeling excellent every day. Your life will take on whole new perspectives. Your horizons will expand and your life will blossom into pure excellence! There are so many ways that this subject matter could be approached. We can call it human development, excellence training, reaching your potential or whatever you would like but the main thing is that if you are feeling that something is not
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
quite right – for example that you feel stuck or that 2016 is coming to an end and you just don’t feel great about 2017. Or that you feel burdened and weighed down by problems or that you just know that life can be lived more but you just haven’t figured out how yet – this book is for you – it WILL change your life. It will make you feel excellent. It will give you the drive to wake up and seek an amazing day no matter whether it is cold and grey outside or whether it is a sunny morning. It will give you a lasting set of techniques to totally transform your life into something amazing – all the time. The practices and information in this book come from hard-won experience, study and the learning of techniques from various sources which have already transformed my own life beyond recognition. To get the most out of this book it is strongly recommended that you skip to the exercises in Chapter 6 (also Chapter 3 (iv)) and practice them at any time. It is not necessary to wait until you have read the other chapters before doing this. Going through these exercises will give you an experiential understanding of the theoretical knowledge presented to you in the book. It is likely that the more you have a go at these exercises, the more lucidly and vivid the words of the book are likely to glow for you – so dip in and out as often as you can! The exercises contain a power. They can aid growth, facilitate peace, bring wellbeing, provide clarity and help you work with the magic of the unconscious mind – that magic is you. This is not a book which ‘takes you away from reality’, or encourages you to live with the fairies! Though using an energetic language it provides real world solutions to the eternal questions of how to achieve wellbeing and satisfaction in a complex and extremely busy world. The underpinnings of all of it are the workings of the human mind. It is understanding how the mind works, or rather,
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
how we ‘work’ the mind which creates everything that is excellent, in your life. Failure to do so often creates the opposite – negative and undesirable results in our lives. As you sit there reading this, at Christmas-time in 2016, I want you to use this point as a marker – because if you use these techniques you will absolutely love 2017 and all the years that come after that. Life is a magical mystery tour, as a famous band once said. Understanding the mind is the same as getting a driving license to drive that amazing bus through all the beautiful colours of your dreams. Your mind really is completely excellent. Learning which tools will get the best out of your mind will show you this is true. This is a promo selection of the book – to read the full version, please visit Amazon. The link currently is https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1520291035 Without further ado – let’s begin.
1 What
Is The Mind?
So many people have tried to answer this question – what is the mind? From great philosophers and eminent psychologists to taxi drivers and people in the local pub – all have come up with different theories – some better than others but all managing, in their own ways at least to reveal some part or another of the human condition. However, I would posit that theory alone cannot give you a truly useful understanding of the mind and that it is through the practice of certain exercises that its greatness will be revealed to you. Throughout this book I refer to these techniques and describe them to you in full in Chapter 6, and also in Chapter 3. Sigmund Freud spent his whole life discussing and providing theories on the human mind. I respect those theories greatly BUT, even though they run into great collections and anthologies, even though streets are named after him, even though there are no doubt statues of him in the city of his birth – and while I respect anyone who devotes their life to such an undertaking – he still didn’t quite manage to explain it all – there are so many accounts
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
of people who have gone to psychoanalytic therapy for years and years (and years!) but there are not ‘cured’. Part of the reason for this is that you cannot just ‘theorise’ the human condition – it is more than something that can be captured by words alone. Freud often looked for a way to get into what has become known as the unconscious or subconscious mind. We will cover the short fallings of the great man’s work shortly but for now let us just consider that he was somebody who, though spending a huge amount of time, indeed devoting his life to understanding the mind, and though creating some excellent works in pursuit of his goal – still left much undiscovered. The main reason that I conclude this is that the psychoanalytic method isn’t the best one for getting at the sub or unconscious mind – ironic as that may sound! What did Ancient Greece have to offer us on the subject of the mind? Firstly, let’s look at Plato. Taught by Socrates, and later the teacher of Aristotle – he is often known as the ‘Father of Philosophy’ and was as widely respected as any man throughout history for his theories and teachings on the human condition. As one of the most influential philosophers of all time Plato’s view on the mind should really be considered. What did he think? Well, Plato’s views were amazing because they were extremely creative, even a bit mystical. Plato believed that most people are living lives as if they are just shadows on the wall of a cave, which have been cast by the flames of the fire, i.e., they are looking at the shadows cast and thinking that this is real life but were they to really wake up, they would see outside of the cave to the real, amazing world that exists. This is really very in tune with the message of this book. Life is a beautiful amazing, splendid experience. There are not enough superlatives to describe it. And yes, it really is the case that many, many people seem to be living dull lives without really ‘waking up’ to the true experience of life. The only problem with Plato is that there don’t seem to be any accounts of how we should
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
actually go about ‘waking up’, or said in another way, how we should go about ‘realising how excellent life is’, or even another way, of how we should learn what techniques enable us to master our minds, to see that our mind = complete excellence. In this book we will truly cover these techniques and you will learn, if you are prepared to give a bit of time, how to experience life as truly excellent and amazing. As mentioned, Plato's teacher was called Socrates who was an aristocrat from Athens. He was well known for reducing people to rubble in terms of their arguments. He would simply ask question after question – a method which is indeed extremely insightful and can be used extremely well by ourselves when trying to get to the root of a problem. However, we hardly know anything about Socrates and what we do know doesn’t seem to shed much light on how we get the very best out of our own minds! What about other views of the mind – A modern western view of the mind could be wellexpressed by words such as ‘rational’, ‘reductionist’, ‘psychology’, ‘neurological’. If we go back in time a little we can see early developments of the western view of the mind in schools such as phrenology which was really the forerunner of modern psychology. You may well have seen interesting drawings from this time or actual busts with certain traits or characteristics mapped onto various parts of their skull – the belief was that a certain part of the anatomy of the brain was responsible for a different behaviour or characteristic of that individual. So, for example, you would see a part of the head with the word ‘lust’, or ‘empathy’ or ‘aggression’. It might sound a bit odd now but people really believed at the time that the shape of your head determined what sort of person you were. They even thought that the size, shape or degree of protrusion of these areas, as they differed on each individual person, would tell you whether he/she would likely be a good or a bad father, a reliable or an
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
Any life that is dominated by association and conditioning that doesn’t know how to break out of it is likely to live a duller and more stagnated life than they possibly could – and often through no fault of our own – maybe some people are really lucky and are taught how to really use the mind to get the best out of it at an early age – but many aren’t. Perhaps it’s even the majority who aren’t. Few would deny that in order to be fulfilled we want to be living at the highest level and enjoying all the amazing things that life has to offer. In short, we want a positive experience of life and we want to experience our minds in the best way possible. There are certain techniques to bursting through this kind of thinking – and this is really necessary because if you don’t you will find it very difficult to reach the heights that you really are able to reach. Every human has the same potential. Every human can live a life of pure excellence once they understand how to use the tools they need to get the most out of the mind. So, we are getting closer to understanding what the mind is. Ultimately, it really is a sense, just like hearing, just like touch, taste, sight and smell. Things just imprint on the mind and unless we know how to really use it – we can be left with negative experiences which mar our experience of life and stop us achieving great results. Poor self-esteem, anger, shame, frustration, poverty, depression, anxiety can all be symptoms of not using the mind properly – soon, we will see techniques to blast these clean out of the water and to go on and achieve the most amazing things in your life - you are the only one stopping that at the moment. So basically the mind is not really the brain. The brain is its physiological counterpart in many ways. The brain is our most complex and amazing organ – but it is not really the mind. The mind remains something else which is
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
somehow both individual and collective. The mind is almost reality itself. It’s as though, in a way, we all share the mind and it is excellent but we just have to find the right ‘tools’ and ‘techniques’ to experience it as such. There is no reason why we can’t experience states of absolute excellence, of sublime serenity, of great joy, of total wellbeing, of brilliance, of oneness – and, of excellence and the ability to reach what you want to achieve in life. This is what we are here for on earth – excellence. Let’s achieve it!
2 What Can Your Mind Help You To Achieve? What can your mind help you to achieve in your life? Well, there are complicated ways and there are simple ways to answer that question. So let’s choose the simple one. As Occam’s Razor states, why choose the more complex answer or solution when an easier one is at hand – The answer is – anything. Your mind can help you to achieve anything in your life. That is the absolute truth. Don’t believe me? Well how could it have been possible then that Nelson Mandela achieved such massive change in the fortune of a nation? How was it that Martin Luther King achieved likewise huge and far-reaching change within his nation? How is it that men or women can rise from nothing to become world leaders? How is it that sportsmen or women like Usain Bolt, Venus or Serena Williams can perform at such an incredibly high level for many years? Now you can brush these all aside and say, yeah, well some people are just lucky. Or you could even say, hey, that’s not so amazing – it might look incredible but their lives are just as dull as many other peoples – WRONG.
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
On both accounts wrong! These are lives being lived at the highest level. And if you are feeling that your life is a bit dull and you are saying that these people’s lives are dull – you might be rationalizing things a little bit by doing so. The case is, however, that these people are living lives at the highest level, and also they are not lucky. I’m really happy to tell you that is a complete falsehood. There is no luck involved at all! These people have mastered the processes necessary to become truly excellent in their chosen areas. You can do that. We will look at techniques to enable you to progress hugely, helping you to get much closer to your goals, if this is an area where you feel you could improve in. Whether I can give you the techniques or strategies to become president or prime-minister? Well, let’s see. Even if not quite that, I can get you to an excellent place where you are experiencing a great, great life – and let’s be honest – that is pretty much as good as it gets! As I say, there is no luck involved here. Just as you learned to walk, just as you learned to talk, just as you learned maths, just as you learned to sing – ALL are processes. We have unlimited learning power as human being and we can become everything that we set our minds to. Again, you will notice the importance of the mind even in the phrase we’ve just used – ‘set our minds to’. One of the real keys to understanding this and therefore to understanding what you can really become is contained in a word we mentioned earlier when talking about Sigmund Freud – the ‘subconscious’ or ‘unconscious’. The discovery of the sub- or unconscious mind is so important in personal/human development that it cannot be understated. It is YOU who is the greatest creature on earth but you must find out just how this is so. To see how you must gain access to the processes that are contained within you. To do this you have to have access to the sub/unconscious mind which is the lower level of the
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
mind where you find all the associations that we mentioned earlier. The associations that you find in the subconscious may have been there for years. Often, when people are experiencing problems in their lives it is a matter of gaining access to the subconscious processes in their minds and changing the patterns – this really is a golden key within the field of human development. To view the processes within yourself is to open door to a set of choices on the way you want to live life – it is so important to be able to do this – and it is totally possible – we will talk about it here, and I will show you exercises to truly understand, experience and change these automated, conditioned complexes later on in the book. Believe me, once you have access to this level of your being, there is nothing stopping you from achieving everything you want to in your life and you will see the truth that – You are free to create your life as you like to. You are free to fly, free to soar, free to walk with kings, queens and emperors. When I say there is nothing stopping you – the only thing that could be stopping you at that stage is you. But again, we will look at techniques to make sure you don’t do that. So, back to our original question and the title of the chapter – what can you achieve? You can achieve anything. Everything in life comes down to processes. Processes and hard work. Mohammed Ali became the greatest fighter in the world by learning certain processes. Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Picasso – all masters of their own fields. They had complete determination and didn’t stop trying to be better. One thing they all had in common was the ability to learn
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
3 Where Do People Go Wrong? So where do people go wrong in trying to get the most out of their minds and in trying to achieve their dreams? There are many explanations for this but they can all be summed by saying that they veer from their chosen goals – they are far too easily blown off course. Like little boats in the sea they journey here and there, going on one trip then another but then, when the seas of life become rough they end up in danger and unable to get to the point where they wanted to go because they never really decided on a destination in the first place. Life must be definite. You dare not live half-heartedly. A sports teacher at school once gave me a great piece of advice with regard to the game of rugby – always go in for a tackle with 100% , otherwise you are likely to come away injured. This is actually true in a wider sense as well. You will come away from many experiences worse off if you do not keep to your original intention and give it 100% effort. To give 100% presupposes that your focus is engaged. There are, however, some well-defined areas where focus may not be engaged at all, or it is engaged in the wrong way. We can define these as areas where people commonly go wrong. Here are some really common examples -
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
(i) Trying To Please Others Too Much It is completely natural in life to want to please others – at least at certain times or stages of our lives (such as childhood) but potentially large problems can arise if we do this too much or beyond those stages in our lives where it is adaptive. People can easily start to become reliant on the idea that pleasing others is a way to effectiveness in their lives – it is not! In fact, trying to please others per se is unlikely to achieve many good results at all. The reason for this is that we humans need excellence in their lives. ALL humans need to be achieving the best they can on a daily basis – that is what life is about! When you understand how to really use your mind you will see that trying to please others is like asking for completely the wrong answer to your question. Whether you have realised it or not yet – the point of you is to achieve, to evolve, to be the best you can - that is what you are here for. All of us need to be excellent! All of us love to be excellent! All of us can be excellent! Slowing the mind down, you will see that everything that happens to you is the result of choices that you have made and choices that you are making on a minute-byminute basis – we are making choices all the time. One key to using your mind properly is to see these choices or potential choices and then pick the very best one. Again, we will look more closely at this in the chapters and exercises that follow. The exercises will help you slow the mind down or rather, become more in tune with it so that you are better able to pick the right choices to get what you are really looking for in life. Trying to please others is going to get one result only – guess what it is? Well, you will please the person you wanted to please – that’s it. You will achieve that result.
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
You will indeed please the person you wanted to please. The problem is that it will not get you anywhere. What do you have from the effort you put in? Nothing really. I am not saying that it is never good to make people happy – of course there are very many occasions when it is - but your life is so much more than just this. You have bigger and brighter horizons! An important thing to realise here is that you do get what you ask for – in life. And if you are seeking to please people – that is what you will get. You have to ask yourself – is this really enough? If you are consciously choosing to make somebody happy – great, but if you keep repeating this and it has become part of your behaviour patterns and you are doing it too much – you could experience a lot of frustration as a result. If you are stuck in this sort of pattern, the exercises in the last chapter will be lifechanging – they can help you move passed these habits and see them for what they are – un-useful ways of behaving which you can change by using the techniques offered in this book. Said another way – once you learn to use your mind effectively then frustrating, outdated ways of behaving will no longer bother you. Let’s look more closely at how this really works. As we discussed in the first chapter the mind works with associations. Remember Pavlov’s Dog. What happened with Pavlov’s Dog was this – An experiment was set up in which certain behaviours were elicited from a dog. The results were amazing and changed the way people viewed psychological processes. The dog’s owner (at least for the duration of the experiment) gave it some meat. The dog naturally enjoyed this and had already built up behaviours associated with food – it salivated at the sight of the meat. I am paraphrasing this a little so if the details aren’t exactly the same as in the experiment as it’s written down – don’t
4 The Restriction Of S.M.A.R.T. Goals – Go Even Further! This chapter is not to poke fun at S.M.A.R.T. goals – S.M.A.R.T. goals are excellent. They are a superb tool for living a great life and using the mind properly. However, what I am saying here is that there is one aspect of SMART goals that can cause confusion and we will look at that. Ok, so, S.M.A.R.T. goals – what are they? S.M.A.R.T. goals are a set of guidelines used to achieve great results – and as said they really do this very well (despite the point I am going to make). What does it stand for? Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Timely As said, these work really well and they equate to a set 38
5 How Do I Use My Mind To Get Complete Excellence? (i) You Have to Focus We have covered this quite well so far but there are still reams which could be written about ‘focus’. Let’s take some great examples of focus. Firstly – sports stars. Sports stars are masters of focus. Part of doing what you do as an athlete of any kind, is visualising your success. This is an extremely useful skill to learn because it can be used everywhere, not just on the sports field. But think about the focus that is required to run a marathon, or more, to become a world-record breaker at running the marathon – it takes pure concentration. It takes developing the ability to block out all other things except that which you are focusing on. This is mostly to do with thing – effort! But it is also to do with your ability to visualise things. The exercise we just gave is excellent at developing this skill so you have all you need to do so right here in this book. In truth, the world is a blank canvass – we paint on to 41
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
it the picture we are best able to paint. Without a shadow of a doubt, the finest paint brush is focus. The brush is held in place with the hands of your willpower and the picture created is chosen by your free will – something that each person owns but not all chose to use. Think about how much effort it must take a top athlete to train for the Olympics – days, weeks, months, even years of effort. You cannot, of course, do this, without focus – but you see where it can get you – it can get you to be the best in the world at what you do – now that’s rather worth striving for isn’t it? But focus is much more than just a tool to achieve with – it is also a tool to pull you out of adversity. How many people have got themselves into dire circumstances in life – how many young people become involved with drugs and end up in difficulty? In one sense, it is of course, completely natural to experiment and many are able to do this without experiencing any great problems in their lives but there are some that may have more difficult circumstances or an absence of guidance figures in their lives to give them a nudge in the right direction and they find themselves in trouble. Focus can get any one out of trouble. The sublime combination of focus and awareness of one’s thought processes is magic. Well, actually, it’s not magic – it is the result that you get from using two of the minds most powerful tools – awareness and focus. There are many people who just seem to find themselves ticking along in life. They don’t seem to be in dire circumstances but neither do they seem to be excelling. This can be a dangerous place to be because we aren’t meant to be coasting along – we are meant to be the best we can be. By definition that means that we need to employ focus to achieve the best results possible. In that last exercise we looked at two key methods for using the mind properly – awareness of current thinking 42
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
processes and focus. We will repeat both parts of this exercise in the last chapter. Feel free to skip to that at any time if you want to do the exercise and then read the information in the book – doing those exercises will give you the information experientially which will help you to understand the theory even better! Through this book we have said that it is not enough just to read things, not enough to just know things intellectually. This is important, yes, and there are principles which we can understand by doing so but we must understand with more than our brains. We must understand experientially. The exercises will teach you that it is certain techniques that give you the tools of using the mind to create excellence in your life. As we have said, focus is a key to living the best life possible. It also unlocks certain secrets for you. The first of these is that it is YOU and only you who determines what quality of life you experience. Two common kinds of problem you often hear that people are suffering from are anxiety and depression. Focus has a hugely important role in making sure that you don’t suffer from these. Depression causes all sorts of terrible feelings and it could be really well described as being the feeling that something is just not possible – that there is no way that the things you want to happen will happen. What is essential to realise is that, ultimately depression is extremely closely linked to thoughts and thought processes. When you slow all those thoughts down you will see that they are not facts at all. They are just thoughts. In developing as a human being we see that focus has a major part to play in our being healthy, happy individuals and groups of people. Focus is the faculty that enables us to rise above the group mentality (which can be very limiting for people) 43
6 Practices to Achieve Excellent Use of Your Mind Ok, well we have talked about these exercises a lot through the book. We have already included one fairly thorough version of parts (i) and (ii) of the exercises in Chapter 3 (iv) but here are those exercises repeated and expanded a little as well as two equally important exercises additionally. These last two exercises are just as important as the ones already talked about. (i) Detaching – Releasing Old Complexes, Allowing New Structures into your Life Find a comfortable place to sit. It doesn’t matter if you sit cross-legged, on a chair or kneel down. Just be comfortable and try and maintain an upright spine. Try and find somewhere you can remain undisturbed for twenty minutes or so. (a) Relaxing and becoming aware of the breath Ok, now just ask yourself to relax a little. Maybe you have had a ‘noisy’ day. You might have a thousand-and-one things going through your mind – just 65
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
encourage yourself to relax. Encourage yourself to let go of anything you are keeping hold of that you don’t need to. (We will deepen this aspect as we go further into the practice). Great. Now, as you relax, just start to become aware of your breathing. Let all your thoughts just ‘be’ where they are and just move your awareness to your breath. Just feel it going in and out. It is actually really enjoyable to just experience the breath, going in and going out. You can feel it as it moves within you, in and out. Just become aware of it. If your thoughts start to demand your attention, just move your awareness back to your breath and experience the ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the breath once more. Allow yourself to enjoy the breath. The trick is not to try and stop yourself thinking things, but rather to engage with the breath as a positive process. Your breath is a process just as thinking is. Just as your thoughts exist, so does your breath. You are just choosing to engage with the breath. Don’t try and force yourself to do anything. Be gentle with yourself. There may well be a real ‘unwinding’ process going on. Give yourself time. Let yourself be with your breath for 5-10 minutes. (b) Becoming aware of other parts of you Ok, now we’ll move our awareness to other parts of our body. While you are sitting there, let your palms of your hands face upwards. Then let yourself become aware of your little finger (right hand). If you keep with it, even just for a short time you should begin to be able to notice difference between your thoughts, which may be ongoing and quite noisy and a higher area of your being. This is a very importance difference. You have choice in what you do. Allowing all the thoughts to just be there, while you 66
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
decide to be aware of your little finger (or any other part of you) should give you a good feeling. Just let all your thoughts 'be' there, but be aware of your little finger – it may seem tricky at first, but if you persevere with it you will get better at it. So, be aware of your little finger. Is it the flow of blood in your thumb? Is it a sort of electro-chemical energy? Regardless of how you define it, you can become aware of this area. Ok, now say to yourself that you want to become aware of the next finger along, your ring finger (right hand). Voice a gentle command to become aware of your pointer finger on your right hand. ‘Experience’ it. What does your ring finger actually ‘feel’ like? This is not the same as when you feel something with your hand, you are ‘experiencing’ it with your awareness. Now command (gently) to yourself that you become aware of your middle finger (right hand). Then move on to your pointer finger. Start moving more quickly. Only stay for about one second on each area/part of body. Thumb (right hand), palm (right hand), back of hand (right hand), wrist (right hand), lower arm (right arm), upper arm (right arm), shoulder (right arm). At some point this will start to feel really nice. It could be within a few moments, it could take a few repeated sessions but it is really (really!) worth persevering as the feelings you can get from this can range from enjoyable to profoundly satisfying. And continue … … back of head, top of head (the area above your head), forehead, left eye, right eye, nose, tip of nose, upper lip, both lips together, teeth, inside of throat, whole neck, left shoulder, upper arm (left arm), lower arm (left arm), wrist (left arm), back of hand (left hand), palm of hand (left hand), little finger (left hand), ring finger (left hand), middle finger (left hand), pointer finger (left hand), thumb 67
Your Mind = Complete Excellence
(left hand). … chest, abdomen, genitals, upper back, lower back, buttocks, left thigh, left knee, left calf, lower left leg, left ankle, sole of left foot, upper left foot, little tow, fourth toe, third toe, second toe, big toe. … right foot – big toe, second toe, third toe, fourth toe, little toe, sole of foot, upper foot, ankle, calf (right leg), lower right leg, knee, upper thigh. You can easily go through this entire process again if you would like to. Now, go back to your breathing. In and out. Experience it. In and out. Stay with this for about 5 more minutes. (c) Becoming Aware of Thoughts, Feelings and Emotions As the last part of the exercise (and for the remaining time), just allow yourself to become aware of your thoughts. This is an area where there can be some real resistance. Thought processes can be complex. Many things can happen with thoughts. Just allow them to be there. In the same way that you gave yourself a gentle command to become aware of your little finger etc., give yourself a gentle command to allow all thoughts, feelings and emotions to come and go exactly as they like. Just allowing yourself to do this will probably bring you an amazing amount of relief and a real feeling of wellbeing. Allow all thoughts, feelings and emotions to just come and go as they like. They are all welcome in your experience. Just allow them all to come and go as they like. Feel free to move back to experiencing the breath or move your awareness back to your toes, feet, ankles etc. But what you will start to notice is that these processes are not ‘you’. A real big problem in terms of our feeling well or not in life is our tendency to ‘attach’ to our thoughts, feelings and emotions. 68
7 FINAL WORDS As with all of these exercises – it is practicing them which changes your life. Nothing is fixed in life – all are but expressions of habitual ways of thinking and acting which either work well for you or not – but nothing is truly fixed in the universe – you will change your life if you change your habits. You have it in you to change everything about your existence. There is never any point to being fed up about anything, neither is there any point in emotions like guilt, fear, shame or regret. You have to be active and practice these things to experience the amazing results that are possible though. Only you can decide whether you do that but then, this is in keeping with reality itself – because only you can determine what your life becomes. Our own use of our mind really does determine the quality of our existence. Adapting the right techniques and practices we will see that ‘Your Mind = Complete Excellence’. Good luck. I hope you have enjoyed reading the book. I hope you practice the exercises. You have some really 80
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useful tools here and I hope they change your life as they have mine. All the very best for your future.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR A. Dumont-Namin lives in Bristol, England with his wife and their cat, Bella. A life-long interest in the human condition, intense practice of meditation techniques and study of various texts, scriptures and books has led Adrian to write this book.
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Us i ngourmi ndsc or r e c t l yc a nhe l puspe r f or m be t t e ri na l la r e a sofourl i ve s . Noma t t e rwha ti ndus t r ys e c t orwewor ki n,wha t pa r t i c ul a rj obwedoorwha ts t a geofourl i ve swe f i ndour s e l ve si nwec a na l lbe ne f i tf r omus i ng e f f e c t i vet e c hni que st oe nc our a get hebe s tus e ofourmi nds . Fr oms a l e st oma na ge me nt ,f r omc r e a t i vet o a dmi ni s t r a t i ona l ,f r ompe r s ona lr e l a t i ons hi ps t obus i ne s sne t wor ks-t hi sbookwi l ls howyou howt ode ve l opt het woke ys ki l l soff oc usa nd c ompos ur et oge tt hebe s toutofa nys i t ua t i on ore ve nt .