Body Mind Mastery. Audio Book Review

Law of resistance

Don’t try. Just set the goal and let it go, while trusting the process.
Set the clear goal and accomplish it every day, but politely, with no rush, no time limits, just trusting and enjoying the process (using visualization and other techniques meanwhile)

Balance

If you are too calm, be more active. Practice both in order to find the middle and feel yourself being centered.

Law of nature

The process can’t be rushed, its all programmed with the nature order. Only the human being is in the hurry. Calm down, don’t rush yourself, don’t make deadlines for yourself.

Awareness

Awareness is the beginning of learning.

Awareness of the problem is the beginning of the solution.

Bring more consciousness to your life!

Focusing more on behavior rather than trying to fix our insides and only having positive thoughts and only positive feelings, we focus only on one thing we can control on our will, which is our behavior. This is a great secret to success – focus on behavior.

Preparation. Series of small steps.

Everything is difficult until it becomes easy.

Meditation practice whether you sitting, standing or moving develops inside into the process of your thoughts. Paying attention in this way you are able to recognize, acknowledge and accept thoughts and feelings, but no longer let them drive your behavior or ruin your life. This is the beginning of body mind mastery.

The first step in transcending the mind is to notice how sometimes you blame external circumstances for your anger. And understand that problem lies not only in circumstances themselves, but in your mind’s resistance to what is. Body mind master isn’t concerned in controlling of fixing thoughts or feelings, but rather focusing on what he/she can control – action. Behaving in positive productive way no matter what thoughts or feelings may be arising.

Attention remains focused on here and now.

4 obstructions:
1) Limited self-concept

If you expect to do poorly, you’ll be less motivated and interested; will consume less time and energy. You just need to reinforce that limiting believe.

If you expect to believe, that you are a great dancer or that you are very likeable, you set emotions, behaviors that will fulfill your expectations.

Self-concept is no more real as a shadow of a shadow. It is illusion, until you see it. The best self-concept is none at all.

List of your abilities.

Competence brings confidence and competence comes from practice. So pay attention to each small success. Patch yourself on the back more and kick yourself less. Above all – keep training.

By constantly taking the shot in your own life, you increase chances of success.

Just for fun, start making positive rather than usual negative statements about your work, skill, potential even if you not fully believe them. Put every positive statement to yourself: I perform well under pressure, I remember names and faces – you open doors to new possibilities.

Visualize your dreams in detail. The subconscious mind doesn’t clearly differentiate between what picturing your mind’s eye and what you see with your physical eye. So the more you visualize positive outcomes, the more you attract them into your life.

2) Fear of failure

Failure is a natural part of learning process, a guide to progress.
We never really failed that way, cause we never really tried.

The fear of failure produces tension, which results of the contraction of the muscles. Such tension constricts the blood flow, slows the reflexes, which produces shallow breathing. All this reduce coordination ending in what is most feared.

To break this, you need to make a peaceful failure. You need to appreciate failure and use it.

3) Distructive self-criticism

Babies are free of self-criticism, they just keep practicing.
We often punish ourselves for the errors which are natural and essential.

4) Lack of concentrated attention

Focus on one thing at a time.

So when the time comes to act, remember to loose your mind and come to your senses, focus on a present, one pointed attention.

Although motivation comes and goes, you can always rely on your will. By applying our will no matter how we feel. Body mind masters do not deny or repress their feelings, but learn to stay physically relaxed even under stressful conditions.

Even when feeling angry, fearful and sorry-full, breathe deeply and evenly, and fully, keep your body relaxed. You are much more in control of your behavior than you do over your thoughts and emotions. So paradoxically the best way to master your emotions is to let them be, accept them as natural to you at the moment, while staying relaxed and focusing on constructive action.

3 rules of success:

1. Accept you emotions as natural to you at the moment without trying to fix them
2. Know your purpose and goals in the moment
3. Do whatever you need to do to reach those goals whether or not your emotions or moods help or hinder you.

The breath is an emotional state, because it both reflex and affects your level of tension. Learning to breathe properly gives you ability to literally inspire yourself. The breath is unifying link between body and mind. Proper breathing.

You can feel good physically no matter what negative thoughts or emotions arise. Negative thoughts don’t have to mean negative tension. If you willing to let them go by relaxing and breathing.

Fear, anger and sorrow are parts of life. You can’t make them go by wishing it.

You may feel fear but you don’t have to behave fearfully.

Feel what you feel, but act well.

“Heroes and cowards feel the same fear. Heroes just act differently”

Developing and care for the body also helps the mind and emotions.

The body will change slowly, but it will change.

Symptoms are the sign of the body re-adjusting.

The period may last from 1 to 6 weeks or longer. Unless the desire to change remains strong, body and mind tend to reform to the old familiar paterns. Be patient and persistant.

You absolutely CAN reshape your life paterns and body through instant direction and energy.

Study the literature, keep your eyes and ears open, above all pay attention and trust your instincts.

Notice the difference between what you want and what you need.

Relaxation – the master key to physical talent. Tension – licks energy.

Study of efficiency and movement shows, that people tend to waste effort and create unnecessary muscular tension in even simplest movements such as lifting a fork for a food, holding a book or sitting on a chair. They also showed that the muscles are tensed even not related to the movements being made. As your body gets use to relaxing in stillness and in motion you more easily notice tension as it begins to develop.

First, ask yourself are you relaxed? Can you relax a bit more?
Second, are you breathing? Take a deep breathe.
Am I doing whatever I’m doing are in elegance and attention?

In order to become stronger, you need to relax more.

The first step in releasing chronic tension is to become aware that it exists. Notice when you begin to tense, then shake loose and relax. Do this more and more.

If you ask your body to change, it will. But ask nicely.

Apply patience. It doesn’t have to hurt.

Injuries are usually because of the fears in a body. Insensitivity, impatience, inattention.

Satori – Japanese ideology of mind and body state.

Recognize and accept the transitions.

Cup of water in the morning.

Mental warm-up: determine a clear course of action for the day. Realistic goals based on your energy level and circumstances of the day.

Emotional warm-up begins with a few deep calming breaths. Focus on what excites you about training, picture yourself succeeding in reaching your goals.

Mental and emotional warm-up might seem long and involved, but they can actually take place at the speed of thought.

Exercising body, breath and attention.

Don’t repeat the same mistake twice. Consciously make each attempt different – you simply experimenting, exploring the many possibilities for error.

Awareness and practice: if you practice hitting 500 golf balls every day, but pay close attention to only 100 of those swings, then you are wasting 400 swings a day. In fact, those 400 semi-conscious swings may do more harm than good, because you can form incorrect path ways without noticing it.

If you make an error, don’t just automatically repeat the attempt. Take a moment of being fully aware of what was wrong. If you don’t identify the error, you may tend to repeat it.

Don’t practice many repetitions at first, instead begin with very few conscious repetitions maintaining intense concentration and interest. Continue practicing while concentration and interest are strong, but if you begin to repeat and error or concentration and interest fade, if your approach becomes casual, then stop and return to your practice later.

Practice is like gambling – you have to know when to quit.

Only begin to do many repetitions of the skill for endurance and stabilization when you can consistently repeat the correct pattern.

Learning studies showed that we can maintain our best concentration for 3 attempts. So practice everything in 3’s and then pause, relax, take a short brake before practicing another series of 3. Check yourself, take a deep breath, shake loose, relax. Feel awareness tingling through your body, your finger tips and toes, feel your concentration to the earth, then continue.

When you perform an incorrect movement pattern over a period of time, you become comfortable with that pattern. Any changes, even toward a correct pattern will feel strange and will be more difficult. Because we all become comfortable with established patterns of moving and acting in the world and because changes, even improvements, feel awkward for a time. We tend to under correct. We stick close to home, to the old familiar patterns. So after working both sides: too high and too low, too right and too left, too fast and too slow, you find a correct centered place. It may seem like a waste of time. However, those willing to do just that to work both sides tend to get the result in more success, more efficient and in less time that those unwilling to explore both sides.

Ideomotor action and mental practice. Your power of imagination can help you enhance all skills and learn new ones. The interaction of mind and body makes it possible.

Clear image even without actual movement develop correct muscular responses. It will also program you for success. The main requirement of mental practice is to stay relaxed, with no muscle tension. You can lie down or sit quietly. Once you know how the movement should feel like, practice and repeat it in your mind.

Visualization, imagery and mental rehearsal – tools for success in sport and life.

If you want power and speed, then practice precisely in slow-motion. Slow down in order to speed up.

Pay attention to a perfect beginning and ending position (you may not know where you are in the middle of the movement though)

Breaking each skill into relatively simple parts: the beginning, the middle and the end. Then put parts together. It’s more fun because you can feel small successes every day.

Children are the masters of imitation. Don’t envy for other people to have better qualities – copy them and progress.

1) Prepare yourself physically
2) Appreciate that it is ok to copy
3) Make sure you choose good role models

All games involve overcoming an obstacle to achieve a goal, but nowhere it is written that obstacle has to be someone else. See your opponent as a teacher.
Have I done my best today? All winning, loosing, titles and fame fall under the shadow of this question.

The important thing is to do more in training than you need to do in competition.
Don’t fight your nervousness, use it – move.

In any stressful situation you can remember to relax and breathe fully. The only reason between fear and excitement is whether you are breathing.

A game is just a game.

If you treat every day, every moment as a learning experience you ultimately can’t loose.

Stop thinking and jump!

Create a ceremony out of every moment. Do everything with the same attention which might give a championship game.

Balance between rationality, intuition and instinct.

I finished listening to audio book of Body Mind Mastery! :) With 7 pages of notes! :) I wanted to do it for a long time and finally I did it! :) Now I want to watch Peaceful Warrior’s work out! Am I gonna do it? Yes – is the answer :)

Right Time. Right Things

"It is always the right time for the right things"

by Dainius

John Assaraf's Tips For Goal Achievement

The clearer you set the goal, the easier it will be to achieve it.

Write down precisely what you really really want to achieve in each area of your life.

To know what not to look for as well important as to know what to look for.

Put a time line: 1 year, 3 years, 5 years life goal and see what you can do today, this week, this month, year.

It takes a little bit of planning and time to focus on what it is you want to do.

1) it will teach you what you don't want
2)it will help your brain to focus on what you do want
3) you will give instructions to this incredibly intelligent universe

Writing the goal down is the first step of really achieving the goals.

When you focus on these goals every single day and you create a plan of actions for it, when you will have significant and measurable results.