Dr David Rock, the first ‘Neuro-coach’ introducing practical applications of Neuroscience into the Coaching Process for Business Executives, explains how Mindfulness works for the brain in his famous book ‘Υour Brain at Work’:
‘People have two distinct ways of interacting with the world during two different sets of brain-maps. The default network becomes active when not much else is happening. It is the network used when planning, daydreaming, ruminating. When using this circuitry, you take information from the outside, process it through a filter and unconsciously add your interpretations. The other network is called ‘The direct experience network’. When you use this, you are experiencing information coming into senses in real time. The key here is that these two networks are inversely correlated, i.e. when the one is working the other shuts off!
When people practice Mindfulness, they become able to purposefully control the shifting between these two networks. That’s why they can dis-identify from their thoughts, help their senses become more acute, perceive more information around them, become more creative, more flexible and less imprisoned by their past, habits, expectations or assumptions’.
Το focus on your senses is the secret to exercise the 2nd Key of the Q-Mind, which is ‘to dis-identify from your thoughts’.
The Basic exercise, the ‘Mind-Pushups’ is about focusing on your breath, but you can gradually make it more advanced by focusing elsewhere as well. One way to do this is focusing in your body parts.
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Exercise:
Start the process of the ‘Mind-Pushups’ as described in the exercise in our respective previous post. After focusing on your breath for a while, focus the on the top of your head. Allow yourself to feel the warmth in this spot, perhaps in the form of a pleasant ‘tickle’. Focus on the tension on this spot, then let all the tension go and move to the next part of your body. Repeat the process for the forehead, the cheeks (first right then left), the chin, the neck (outside and inside organs), the chest (outside and inside), the belly (inside and outside), the pelvis, both thighs (front and back), the calves, the toes, the soles, the arms, the forearms, the palms, the fingers.
Give enough time to each part to really get into the feeling and deeply focus on the sense rather than the thought of it. During the process, as various thoughts will come in, activate the observer inside you and just watch them go as they came, without judging them and without sticking on to them.
Practice at least once a day for 10’ for a few days and thereafter as regularly as you can.
