practice 1 meditate like the horizon

Unplug your brain when it is running all time

Diagnostic

One of the most devastating symptoms of stress is our inability to stop constantly thinking. Thoughts run through our brains day and night. We are slaves of an infernal machine. Every day, we overextend our cognitive capacity, leaving our minds and bodies overstimulated. The pressure to achieve our goals – whether it is to make more money, to stay connected though our phones and computers, to excel in meetings – gets greater and greater, year after year.

For the past hundred years or so, human exhaustion was mostly physical, due to the demands of manual labor; now our fatigue is mostly psychological and neuronal. Neuroscientists like Dr. Mario Beauregard believe that there is a link between our brains running all the time and degenerate illnesses, like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. In a few years, we may see young people struggling with these illnesses usually associated with old age. Just as we can maltreat a muscle with overwork or an organ with alcohol or drugs, we affect the brain's ability to function if we don't take proper care of it. This is especially true in today's world, where we are constantly facing mental stimulation-we probably spend more time looking at a screen than we do into one another's eyes.

This fatigue, this discomfort, day after day, year after year, becomes a neurochemical addiction: We are fooled into thinking that higher stress levels result in a higher quality of work. However, through neuroscience we now know it is exactly the opposite. When we are stressed, we tire more quickly, our minds become cloudy, and we have reduced access to intuition and a lower ability to synthesize information. Making decisions becomes fearful, difficult, and anxiety-prone. When our brain is running all the time, we are in a state of mental confusion, because we have too many toxins. And we find ourselves unable to separate our situations at work from our private lives.

During a typical workday, we receive an overload of information over eight or nine hours of intense and high activity. When we come back home we need to rest, but instead we keep our brains active. We are unable to stop our overworked brains.

We act in the exact opposite manner of that which would benefit our mind, body, and spirit. Just as we take time to exercise and stretch our bodies, we must take time to release the tensions in the mind. This expansion of neuroplasticity in the brain is essential to our mental health.

We would all like to stop this machine and breathe. We would all like to put a stop to this pattern and we are drawn to meditation, yoga, and other techniques to do so. We have tried these experiences, but when we go back to our workplace, our daily life, the benefits simply disappear.

We are in an emergency situation, and we don't know any practices or teaching that will help us cope. We allow stress to slowly destroy us. We need something that we can do to feel better immediately.

We have no choice but to face our computer and be surrounded by pressure and colleagues engulfed in their own stresses. And on top of this, we are simply exhausted; mentally and physically we feel we are unable to do anything, really. And this feeling of hopelessness is at best devastating, and at worst, lethal. It's time to give your mind a rest and to break the pattern of stress addiction.

Visualization: Meditate Like the Horizon

When our brain is running all the time, what is our fantasy? To unplug. To feel fewer waves of emotion, less "up and down."

We need our brainwaves to register as "flat," to reduce our running thoughts to a flat line.

Pure. Quiet. Uncomplicated.

We can meditate like the horizon.

To visualize a horizon, follow the two steps below.

1. Stabilize your mind. Imagine you are seeing a scan of your thought patterns. See the machine that is used to measure the movement of these thoughts. Perhaps it's similar to the way we see a heartbeat; visualize a machine with a black screen and a green line that moves in sync with your thoughts. Now, see this same green line as horizontal, flat. In this moment, our thoughts have stopped, we focus on this visualization, and we unplug from the chaos around us immediately.

The picture of the horizon is a straight line, with no waves, no jolts, no complications.

It is a relaxing mental picture because of its purity and stability. We know that the geometry of this line structures our mind, and hence, changes our cognitive process. And the change is registered in every one of our cells.

In the Middle Ages, workers built cathedrals with special attention and regard to geometry, particularly sacred geometry. They did not design buildings of worship with only beauty in mind; lines were chosen to mimic the sensation of the horizon. This is also true in the Japanese Zen tradition. The lines of the tatami are used to create a sensation of simplicity and purity, like the horizon, to counteract the jolts of information that agitate the mind. So to visualize the horizontal line, the flat brainwave, allows us to find peace immediately.

2. See beyond our reality. Most of the time, we are inside of our daily stress, like being in the ocean, in the waves, and we can't see the horizon. In this situation our vision, our perception of life, is just waves. Visualizing a horizon helps us experience an expanding reality. Yes, we have our problems and our stress, but we see that there is life beyond this stress. The more we visualize the horizon, the more readily we open our minds to another dimension, to a greater perspective. It is like a dilatation of our consciousness.

Guidance

I have written the instructions below to mirror the way I guide meditation in person. You will feel all my heart, all the inspiration from my lineage, from the monastery where I studied, and from my masters, like Chepa Dorje Rinpoche. The energy will be transmitted through the...