Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

At an early point in my professional career, I learned about and eventually taught hypnosis and self-hypnosis. One of the techniques that hypnosis experts use to get individuals into a so-called trance is called induction. Simply put, we teach people how to change their brain waves. All someone has to do in order to be hypnotized or to hypnotize him- or herself is to move down from high- or mid-range Beta waves into a more relaxed Alpha or Theta state. Thus, meditation and self-hypnosis are similar.

I could have included induction with the preparatory information in the last chapter, because induction prepares you to enter a coherent brain-wave state that is conducive to meditation. By mastering induction, you will build a solid foundation for the meditative practices you will learn in upcoming steps. However, unlike those arrangements that you will make before you begin each day’s meditation, such as turning off your phone and putting your dog or cat in another room, induction is a step you will include during the session—in fact, it must be the first step you master, and it will lead off every session.

Just to head off any confusion, after opening each meditative session with induction, you will not be in what the entertainment industry misleadingly depicts as a hypnotic trance. You will be perfectly primed and able to complete all steps in the process that follows over the next three chapters.

I urge you to spend at least a week of daily sessions, or more if needed, devoted to practicing induction. Remember that this process will take up the first 20 minutes of every meditation session. You want this to become a familiar and comfortable habit, so don’t rush through it. Your objective is to “stay present.”

Preparation for induction. In addition to the aspects of preparation I discussed earlier, here are some further tips: First, sit up straight and close your eyes. As soon as you do so, blocking some sensory/environmental input from coming in, your brain waves lessen in frequency, moving toward that desirable Alpha state. Then surrender, stay present, and love yourself enough to move through this process. You may find that soothing music aids in the progression from high Beta to Alpha, although it isn’t necessary to use sounds.

Induction techniques. There are many similar variations on induction techniques. Whether you use either the Body-Part or Water-Rising Induction, alternate them on different days, employ some other method you’ve used in the past, or devise a different one altogether isn’t important. What is important is that you move from that analytical Beta state to the sensory state of Alpha, and focus on the body, which is the subconscious mind and the operating system, where you can then make the changes you want.

One induction technique may at first seem contradictory—you’ll focus attention on your body and environment. Those are two of the Big Three that you have to overcome, but in this case, you’re in control of your thoughts about them.

Why is it desirable to focus on the body? Remember, it and the subconscious mind are merged. So when we become acutely aware of the body and sensations related to it, we enter the subconscious mind. We’re in that operating system I’ve mentioned often. Induction is a tool that can be used to get into that system.

The cerebellum plays a role in proprioception (awareness of how our bodies are positioned in space). So in this induction, as you rest your awareness on different parts of your body in space and the space around your body in space, you’re using your cerebellum to perform this function. And since the cerebellum is the seat of the subconscious mind, as you place your consciousness on where your body is oriented in space, you access your sub-conscious mind and bypass your thinking brain.

Moreover, induction shuts down the analytical mind by forcing you into a sensing/feeling mode. Feelings are the language of the body, which in turn is the subconscious mind, so induction allows you to use the body’s natural language to interpret and change the language of the operating system. In other words, if you’re sensing or putting your awareness on different aspects of your body, you would be thinking less, shifting your analytical thoughts from past to future less, and broadening your focus more to encompass a very different scope—not narrowly obsessive, but rather, creative and open—and you would move from Beta to Alpha.

All of this happens as you move from that narrow-minded range of attention to an expanded focus on the body and the space around it. Buddhists refer to this as an open focus, occurring when brain waves naturally become orderly and synchronized.¹ Open focus produces a new, powerfully coherent signal that allows parts of the brain that were not communicating with other parts to now do so. That enables you to produce an extremely coherent signal. While you can measure that on a brain scan, more important is that you can feel the difference in the clarity and focus of your thoughts, intentions, and feelings.

Specifically, you will focus on the location or orientation of your body in space. For example, think about the location of your head, starting at its top and gradually moving down. As the induction progresses from body part to body part, sense and become aware of the space that each occupies. Also sense the density, the weight (or heaviness), or the volume of space that it occupies. By focusing your attention on your scalp, then next on your nose, then your ears, and so on, moving down the body until you’ve focused on the bottoms of your feet, you will notice some changes. This movement from part to part, and the emphasis on the spaces within the spaces, is the key to this.

Next, become aware of the teardrop-shaped area surrounding your body, and the space it takes up. When you can sense that area of space around your body, your attention now is no longer on your body. Now you are not your body, but something grander. This is how you become less body and more mind.

Finally, become aware of the area that the room you are in occupies in space. Sense the volume that it fills. When you reach this point, this is when the brain begins to change its disorderly wave patterns to more balanced and orderly ones.

We can measure these differences in how you are thinking—we can view your thought patterns on an EEG to see how you’ve moved from Beta- to Alpha-wave activity. We’re not interested in just getting you into an Alpha state of any kind, though; you want to be in a highly coherent, organized Alpha. That’s why you will concentrate first on your body and its orientation in space, then move from those individual parts to the volume or perimeter of space surrounding the body, and eventually focus your observation on the entire room. If you can sense that density of space, if you can notice it and pay attention to it, you will naturally move from a state of thinking to feeling. When that happens, it’s impossible to maintain the high-Beta state that characterizes the emergency mode of survival and an overfocused condition.

Another similar induction technique you can use is to imagine water moving into the room where you are sitting, then gradually rising. Observe (sense) the space in which the room is situated, and the space that the water occupies. At first, the water would rise to cover your feet; move up the shins to the knees; spill over them and into your lap; move up your abdomen and chest, covering your arms, rising to your neck … up past your chin, lips, and head … until the water fills the entire room. While some people may not like the idea of being covered completely by water, others find it soothingly warm and inviting.

WEEK ONE
GUIDE TO MEDITATION

As a reminder, during your Week One meditations, your job is to practice the induction technique. If you record this induction yourself, make certain that you repeat the same questions that I have provided in my guided-induction instructions in the Appendices, with their emphasis on words and phrases such as sense, notice, feel, become aware of, become conscious of, and attend to. Also, words such as volume, density, perimeter of space, weight of space, and so forth will help you focus your observation.

Instead of moving quickly from one part to another, allow some time to pass (a good 20 to 30 seconds or more) for those sensory inputs and the feelings of those parts in space to really settle in. Roughly, allow about 20 minutes to do the Body-Part Induction from head to toe, or in the case of the water immersion, from toe to head. If you have meditated before, you will no doubt understand that eventually you lose any sense of time passing as your brain waves diminish in frequency and you move into that calm and relaxed Alpha state where the inner world is more real than the outer world.

CHAPTER TEN