Meditations.
Attention Training for the Shaolin Sword Style
You must decide now. Choose the sword and you will join me. Choose the ball and you join your mother, in death.
Where do you put your attention?
Attention is an invaluable resource like time, light, and energy; but like these resources it often slips through our fingers like so many grains of sand. Attention is how we direct our mental energy towards the internal and external environments we exist alongside.
The drip check in the morning before you head out the door?
The app check to see the green and red arrows on the train or at the stoplight?
The vibe check with the new contact you met in person from last weeks social event?
The quality of our life is dictated by where we invest our attention.
Invest in doom scrolling social media, with peaks of dopamine from a sexy Gandalf cosplay, followed by troughs of despair when your Tinder message gets left on read, and watch the quality of your life dwindle.
Attention is a finite resource, we all know the feeling of brain fog when attention is depleted; but we also know the flow state where our attention is piqued and our affect is positive. Things just go better, with the same or less effort. The mind is at ease, the environment is clearer, and we can follow through with challenging or boring tasks to a satisfying completion point.
Meditation proven to increase thickness of precuneus region of brain, and Kyoto University research points to precuneus region as center for happiness in brain. Their studies show study participants with higher subjective happiness scores had larger gray matter volume in the precuneus region. The Precuneus region is where happiness is forged through integrating the emotional (relative pleasure in the short term) and cognitive (satisfaction with life in the long term) components of our experiences.
In 2019, researchers proved that through 40 days of applied mindfulness, meditation, and attention training practices, the precuneus region of the brain physically grows thicker. We can literally change the structure of our brains through how we place our attention(!!!!). Truly amazing stuff given how much control we actually have over our environments through exercise, food/water quality, sunlight exposure, and now the thickness of our brain matter.
What does this mean for Sauce Marines?
The method used to literally grow new brain matter was 45 minutes per day of breathing exercises and meditation for 8 weeks. Participants would do the following
Enter the practice space with their guide
Perform breathing exercises for 10-15 minutes including
Box Breathing (covered in last week’s newsletter here)
Alternate Nostril Breathing (physically plug one nostril with finger tip, inhale through one nostril, exhale through other nostril)
Belly Breathing (in cross legged seat, inhale to belly, up into lungs, and deeply exhale through the belly to perform a Kegel contraction, repeat)
Lion’s Breath (after inhaling deeply through the nose, open the jaw and stick tongue out, exhale through mouth to make “haaa” exhale sound)
Pursed Lip Breathing (2 second nasal inhale, 4 second tight lipped exhale)
Continue to sit with eyes closed, observing thoughts that pass the mind’s eye without reaction, judgement, or solution. Upon completion of 45 minute session, gently return to regular activity.
This process is free, and comes at no cost to our bodies. There is no recovery period or training risk. Meditations give us back mental clarity, improve mood, and physically strengthen our greatest asset; our mind.
With most people’s mental health trending downward, and more people than ever living alone, meditation provides both a health boost and solace to live a more engaged life in private and public.
You know that you could be already pissing away 45 minutes a day on social media, gaming, youTube, podcasts; each of these takes away from your attention span because they provide too much infromation to digest. Bascially, too much data comes in through the eyes and not the other sensory organs. The eyes and visual data digestion pathway gets clogged up (much like a lesser mortal’s digestive tract after completing the Bronc Special Weight Gain Protocol of 2 McFish Fillet, 2 Big Macs, 1 Large Fry, 2 Apple Pie, and Large Chocolate Shake, a calorie bomb so delightful its proven to cure Coivd) from too much data, the muscles fatigue and you simply have too much information to acknowledge, understand, and respond effectively.
What happens through continued assault on your attention from these channels is a dulled response where even though you are so overstimulated you can’t sleep at night, your brain just goes “meh” to all of the digital, visual stimulus (nudes, social medias, image sharing sites, gaming, financial/crypto apps). Your attention quality then spirals downward into the dirtiest shitter in Glasgow.
Nothing feels right even though on paper “its all going great!”. Numb. Void. Empty.
Much like the fat man who simply can not stop eating after the tipping point and becomes a 600 lb shut-in, there are countless dregs shuffling aimlessly among us barely keeping it together (terrible finances, poor social skills, no cool factor, can’t be left alone due to gaming/xxx/drugs/hobby/junk food addiction, doesn’t plan future activities) who will never even attempt to be better. These dregs will normalize all the nonsense they accept (i think sex work is cool! if its not a marvel movie i cant watch it! i scrolled 15 second videos in bed for 95 minutes last night!) and hope you also become trapped on the hedonic treadmill.
But.
That’s not you.
That’s not why you are here.
You want to be better.
You want your mind back.
You want to climb your way out of Glasgow’s dirtiest shitter, never to return.
You can do it mate, 45 minutes seated cross legged with your ass on a cushion. Done.
Close your eyes.
Breath in through your nose, out through your mouth, and be still.
Thoughts come, thoughts go.
Observe them non-judgmentally with compassion.
The tension will drop off, and when the bell rings to end the session, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start this earlier.
Per usual, grifters have tried to make this more complicated to help fools part with their money.
“Come to my seminar on how to sit still and shut the fuck up!”
“Download our app so we can run ads targeting your poor mental health!”
“Buy this eBook on recently discovered ancient methods for meditation you simply won’t believe!”
This shit is 100% free, always has been, always will be. No apps, books, seminars, videos etc. needed.
Got this far and still don’t see the value? Here it is in 39 words:
Sit the fuck down. Close your eyes. Breath In. Breath Out. 45 minutes a day, 56 times in a row (8 weeks) and the happiness center in your brain matter gets thicker so you feel better for life.
Facts.
See ya in the next one where we talk about Building Bigger Bodies - the workout edition.