Physical Activity
Who did not make this experience of practicing a sport on a regular basis. This has a lot of advantages, one of them is counter intuitive in the sense that you would think that training would spend energy and so tire you. The contrary is true. If I train my body, I augment my baseline, if I lift weights then the force I have to apply in every day life feels lighter, activity becomes something natural. If you try and get pass a certain threshold, physical activity will energize you, your body will demand it, being energized changes your emotions, you feel more positive, because you force yourself to train, this little nudge you need to give yourself becomes part of you, you push yourself to get out and run under the rain even if you don’t feel like it… You just get out and after a few minutes you are enjoying it, all of it, the rain on you, your body in motion, the fact that you respect the contract you made with yourself.
Yoga
Even though I discovered yoga only about 3 years ago, I think it is of a crucial importance, it changed my life in a big way. I really think it links all the 5 sheaths, it goes beyond what we consider as Yoga in the west (physical activity only). What I noticed through a very simple and easy practice called Isha Kriya was the first time I was “untriggered”, which means the first time an automatic response to a trigger was simply not there. I can only link that to this practice.
Being triggered is something you know you are reacting to in a visceral manner. You can intellectualize it all, in every manner you want, you can know for sure that it is “no good for you and there is no way that the next time you will react” but believe me, I am “the triggered man” I fall into those traps all the time. Yoga helped… a lot…. and it is still helping me today as I am now practicing daily, this is the first thing I do in the morning.
Voluntary Cold Exposure
This push you can get as well through voluntary cold exposure [[Voluntary Cold Exposure and the brain]] which is something nobody wants to do, putting your body under or in cold water is… Horrible, your body absolutely do not want this and your mind is telling you not to… But this has two major advantages, you train to nudge yourself to do things you do not want to do, and it produces a host of chemicals in your body that have a long lasting effect on your positivity, your quality of life is enhanced by this… Try it! this is not easy but it has benefits you cannot begin to fathom. You have nothing to loose, you cannot die from this, it is hard at the beginning.
I do it like this, I take my standard shower and get washed, then at the end I turn the knob all the way to cold, and put my head under, starting a chrono on my watch. The ideal time for the all week should be 11 minutes. You can begin by one minute. and then push on from there.
Look it is simple. It will help you raise your dopamine level and wake you up no doubt.
What I feel is that it helps me snap out of things like procrastination or do something I don’t want to do.
Meditation and self awareness
I discovered meditation at a not so young age, I was 27 and this led to freedom from my mind.
The mind is something strange, it works on its own, it runs and re-runs stories, makes simulations, interpret things and can be quite alienating… Suppose like everyone that you have a problem with someone, at work, something happened today that you did not like and you did not react on the spot but this event put you in discomfort, in frustration maybe. Chances are you will re-run what happened in your mind, create hypothesis, self examine, prepare for the next time etc…
This will require a lot of energy and time, a time I consider stolen, a time that is no longer mine.
Meditation gives you the ability to observe your thoughts, to become the observer of your thoughts thus giving you the ability to detach from them.
The most simple technique (and there are so many) is to bring your attention to your breath for a set period of time, if your attention is taken off ( and it will) bring back your attention to breath, breath in, breath out.
This technique has the enormous advantage of being centered on the breath, you are aware of your breath, breathing is central, it is something we just do automatically. It is not stable however, notice how your breath is accelerated when you are angry, how it is slow when you are relaxed…
Being aware of your breath gives the ability to reverse engineer your emotional state.
If you are angry or have been scared by something, you can voluntarily slow your breath down and thus calm down your mind.
This is what I call super power.
Physical Work
I like physical work, I like to intervene in the material world, to transform it through my action.
If I do something with my body energy (do not discount the mind, the intelligence you have to use in this), I will, see the result of my action directly into the world and this is very satisfying to me.
Plus the fact that it is, most of the time a dare as things never really go as planned and you have to adapt to situations most of the time. You have to be creative in finding the solutions to the problems that inevitably will arise.