Meditation

Several years ago I was on a trip to France with my 6th form Media class and staying at the Disney Land Paris resort (the ‘ranch’ type one). During the day we went on lots of rides while pretending to be doing work while in the evening we snuck out and went exploring.
We met girls, found alcohol and did flips into bushes. Then we threw a tennis ball at each others crotches. I decided I was in love with one girl in particular but as usual ballsed it up and came back to my room at about 3am yearning but still buzzing none the less.
Without thinking I flicked on the light to be greeted by the site of my roomy. I felt pretty bad - I’d forgotten this guy had opted to stay in. He wasn’t sleeping though, he was just sitting their frozenonto the spot. I waved at him and got no response. I thought this was odd but decided he’d probably had some kind of epileptic seizure. Unsure what to do I decided to look around for a pen to draw a willy on his head or perhaps some other amusing image (I’ve matured since then... maybe...).
As I crept closer with the pen in hand his eyes suddenly flickered open like something out of a horror movie. I let out a loud yet manly scream then collected myself.
‘Sorry if I’ve disturbed you...’ I said pretending to be writing on the wall.
‘No don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sleeping.’
‘Ah okay...’ I sat in silence for a moment before my curiosity got the better of me. ‘Just sitting... and... doing nothing then eh? Nothing better than a bit of sitting and doing nothing while everyone else is out exploring Paris...’
‘Meditating.’ he corrected me. Freak.

This event had put me off the idea of meditation for several years. It seemed to me that the only people who did it were weirdos and social rejects. I still suspect this may be the case.
However, having thought long and hard I remembered that I actually was a weirdo and as I got into this whole self-improvement malarkey the idea began to spark my interest.
Meditation has been said to have many benefits including clearer thinking, better moods and energy and even gains in intelligence. Some practitioners also speek of reaching different states of consciousness which sounded trippy and interesting. I decided then to put my preconceptions to one side and give it a go.
Sticking to the format of my previous experiments I decided that once a night for a week would be long enough to determine whether or not this was for me. So on the Monday I read up on the topic and learned the basics. There are various different ways you can meditate but the most popular way is to sit somewhere quiet and focus on a mantra. This being a word or sound that you repeat to take you mind off distracting thoughts. Other methods can include focussing on a point in your mind or a sound such as your own breathing.
Some people do it by just not worrying about the thoughts. They don’t purposefully start new threads but they don’t stop thoughts that do float by either – they just let them pass through and kind of ‘observe’ them from an outside perspective until they eventually stop being a problem.

The first thing I noticed when trying to meditate is that I instantly become thirsty, then itchy and then I need a piss. My back aches from sitting up and it feels like everything is against me. I’m certainly not used to sitting still for more than ten minutes without bobbing around, yelling obscenities or worse, singing. I go to the toilet every thirty minutes and constantly clear my throat which is a strange and annoying habit that makes me seem nervous and little bit mental. Basically I’m not a very relaxing person to be around and I find it very hard to sit still and unwind.
Writing this article right now is the closest I ever come to chilling out and later I plan to do a workout. If I’m lucky I might let myself play Bioshock for like an hour before bed.
The way I learned to overcome this problem was the same way I learned to improve my sleep (read the article) – to not worry about it. Basically I realised that when you’re meditating you’re allowed to itch your face if necessary and slowly this becomes less and less necessary anyway. Once you finally do enter into a peaceful state it starts to get weird. I recommend that you do sit in the traditional pose with your legs crossed and your fingers forming the little circles (your index fingers lightly touching your thumb). It’s important to be sat up so that you don’t fall asleep (although I personally like to lean against something to prevent back ache) and the two touching fingers give you something else to focus on and give you a strange sensation once thing start getting trippy.

To get to this stage has taken me a little while so don’t be put off if you don’t get the same effects immediately. Basically what starts to happen is that areas of your brain will be shutting down while others remain active – this is what puts you into the ‘trance’ or whatever and has been attributed with feelings of ‘oneness’ or ‘enlightenment’. The effects are actually very similar to certain types of drugs and they can be pleasant, healthy and productive. The coolest part is the feeling that you have no body – the oneness that makes hippies believe they are flying or one with mother nature (you’re not). This is because you have become completely unaware of your own body. To accelerate this experience you can actually imagine yourself expanding outwards and just being ‘everywhere’. Try it, it’s weird. Although it becomes old fairly quickly too...

Doing this regularly for 10 minutes a day for the past week has also lead to me feeling more calm in general and perhaps a bit more clear-headed. I guess this might be ‘zen’…
They have also left me with slightly more energy – acting as kind of power naps without the feelings of grogginess and fatigue that those bring.

I haven’t achieved any states other than the aforementioned one-ness, but as you get further some people have reported seeing vivid colourful patterns, having the sensation of an OOBE (out of body experience), reliving memories or gaining new perspectives.
The problem is that all that stuff sounds mental and also I can’t really be arsed with it. If you want to dedicate tonnes of time to it then go ahead, but I’m perfectly happy with just a bit of focussed chilling every now and then (it also recently helped me out when I was trapped in the back of a van. I thought ‘what would Bruce Lee do?’ so I sat there meditating in the pitch black. That’s how I was found – I looked well cool (in that sense it is a cool way to preserving energy)).

So try it if you want, I just won't be joining you. Whatever you do though don’t miss out on Disney Land because of it.

What is NLP?

When it comes to NLP (which stands for Neuro-Linguistic-Programming) people generally tend to fall into one of two camps: those who think it’s this amazing tool that can totally change your life and get you everything you want, and those who think it’s a cult full of weird idiots along the lines of Sceintology; neither is completely true.
From what I can gather it’s a few money grabbing con artists who have given the practice a bad name (and some dubious attempts to connect the principles to wider pseudo-scientific theories);
and this is a shame as there is actually a fare bit of useful information to be gained from it. Many of the ideas revolve around the use of communication, language and gestures to understand cognitive processes and build a ‘rapport’ with another individual. In particular it is useful for sales people as a means to help persuade a potential customer to buy a product.

NLP was co-created by Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder in the 1970s and contains several key areas:

Modelling
Modelling is the broad term for the systems used by a ‘modeller’ to adopt their client’s gestures, patterns, beliefs and more to make themselves more agreeable and persuasive.

The Meta Model
The Meta Model focuses on errors and assumptions in a client’s language to gain insight into the speaker’s thought processes and looks to respond to the construction or a sentence rather than its meaning and content.
For example if you were to say ‘everyone loves me’ the NLP expert might respond ‘everyone?’, or ‘what would you say love is?’. In other words – annoying.

The Milton Model
The Milton Model has the NLP practitioner using language that is purposefully vague or ambiguous to allow the listener to project their own meaning onto what’s being said and so almost certainly agreeing.

Representational systems
This is the idea that we use visual, auditory and kinesthetic methods to understand ideas and that different people prefer to use different ones. Our language is supposed to give away which we are using – for example people who say ‘I see’ or ‘see what I mean?’ might be visual types, while people who say ‘you hear what I’m saying?’ might be auditory.
By adapting our behaviour and language to suite the representational system of the intended
recipient it is thought that we can build a better rapport more quickly.
Personally I believe that they have left out an important fourth option that being lexical – where ‘know what I mean?’ might be an indicator. I’m fairly certain that I’m that type.

Accessing cues
Accessing cues refer to the way our eyes give away our thought processes where basically we look up and left or right when visualising, level and left or right when processing sound, or down and right for kinaesthetic.

Mirroring
Mirroring is a technique by which you subtly mimic the posture and body language of whoever you’re talking to thereby building rapport. This is also taught in crappy self-help dating books as a technique for pulling.
Apparently it can be very powerful but subtlety is really the key here – make it obvious and you will find it has the reverse effect with people just ending up pissed off at you.
NLP also has various techniques that use these principles to therapeutic effect. These include ‘Anchoring’ by which you associate a word or movement with a positive memory as a way to instantly recall a good mood or feeling; and ‘Framing’ where you try to change the way you view or remember a painful event or anxiety inducing thought. For example you may re-frame the image of a phobia with a comedy soundtrack and all in pink so that when you visualise it it causes humour rather than stress.
This is only really a taster but it gives you a basic understanding of NLP’s key principals. A lot of it from there is common sense.
Bare in mind that the methods have little scientific verification, but the rapport building stuff at least is widely used in business and generally accepted as effective.

Never Back Down Review

Having just bought the DVD I have recently re-discovered the awesomeness that is 'Never Back Down'. Unfortunately it seems the majority of reviewers fail to share my enthusiasm of the film (at the time of writing Rotten Tomatoes has it at around 20%) and so I felt I needed to give it some love right here.

There's one way I can get you to see why the film is pure class. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So here goes:

Serious, how can you not love a film with that in it??

Amber Heard aside however, the main problem most reviewers seem to have with the film is that it's uninspired in that it very closely follows the conventions of the fight film. That is to say it ticks all the boxes: wise guru, father issues, romantic sub-plot, revenge as the motivation, training montages and final showdown. In this sense they claim the film offers nothing new that we haven't seen before in Rocky or The Karate Kid.

My point however is: what's wrong with that? The genre is one that very rarely sees a new entry and as much as I love both Rocky and The Karate Kid I feel that an update is long overdue. For fans of those films Never Back Down offers everything you could hope for - a contempory take on a classic formula that plays down the cheese and plays up the stakes, the brains and the acting skills. This is a mixture of Fight Club and Step Up but structured in the familiar Karate Kid formula.

And to say it offers nothing new at all is also unfair. For starters this is the first time we've seen MMA in a mainstream film, something which was long overdue and which makes for spectacular, visceral fight scenes.


The film also offers a fairly in-depth meditation on the ethics of combat, using some clever imagery and literary references to make its point. Other reviewers have again missed the point here reading the film's message as 'sometimes it's better not to fight'. For this reason they complain that the fight at the end is contradictory and caters only to the studios with no thought for integrity. The title of the film alone however should be enough evidence that this is not the case. My understanding of the message is that sometimes you do have to do something - to fight - if only to prevent yourself from having to fight in the future and to protect the things you care about. Like the shield of Achiles.

The slightly deeper nature of the film is also reflected in the characters who aren't your usual two dimensional stereotypes. Each one has their own 'fight' in the film and each is likeable and charismatic in their role. Our protagonist Jake in particular is a very well fleshed out character, played with gusto by Sean Faris, and his problems are easy to identify or at least sympathise with making you route for him all that much more when he goes up against bad guy Ryan.

Throw in a rocking 'high school' style sound track, an awesome cast and some nifty directing and editing (both of which nicely compliment the contempory setting and technological themes) and you have the best film for getting pumped since Rocky 4.

*****

My Week Without Caffein

Allot of people/wesbsites have advised that I give up caffeine. 'Why?' I ask them. 'Because it's good for your health.' they answer. 'How is it?' I ask intrigued. 'Because of... the health...' they mumble. Thing was, despite allot of people knowing it's good for your health, few people seemed to really know exactly what the advantages are. Search on Google 'giving up caffeine' and you'll get hundreds of relevant links. Search 'reasons to give up caffeine' however and you find far fewer results show up. I decided that there was only one way to find out exactly what the effects were - try it myself. So here it is - my diary from my week without any caffeine. Just to put this experiment into perspective you should know that I was really hooked on it up until this point. I mean I would drink about four cups of coffee at work, then five or six cups of tea when I got home. That's one big caffeine injection. This challenge certainly wasn't easy. No Caffeine Day 1 It's day one of my week without caffeine and I already want to die. It started badly when I arrived at work and a colleague had already made me a coffee. I had to actually poor it away, which was painful but also like a symbolic commital to my fast. People didn't like it either. I'm known as one of the guys who always has a hot drink. When I refuse they just look at me like 'you've changed...' Drinking tea and coffee is a social thing aswell, you don't notice that until it's gone. By 12 I already had a headache, which is terrible. Normally I'd be on my 3rd drink by then. I was all stressed out too about my MOT which was booked for 5pm. I'd have given anything for some caffeine... injected straight into my eyeballs preferably. So at lunch I decided to buy some decaff coffee. It's better than nothing as I enjoy just the calming effect of any hot beverage, but it still tastes like dirt in mug of water. Mmmm dirt... It's like a mockery - sacrilege - against real coffee. And it's expensive. I prefer tea anyway, and I don't think you can get de-caf tea can you? And green tea is just like putting a leaf in your drink - pointless. No Caffeine Day 2 So today was the second day of my caffeine fasting and it's again been a struggle. I did find it marginally easier to get out of bed this morning but that could just be down to the fact that I went to sleep an hour earlier - because of the headache I was suffering due to lack of caffeine! It reached its worst point at work when at 12 it became almost unbearable (not helped by Rachel taunting me). At lunch time I just ambled around then sat on a step with my head in my hands like a tramp. I wanted to cry... Fortunately for some reason it actually improved by about 2 but then my day just got really weird and stressful and tested my vigil to the full. All I wanted was to go home and sleep, maybe vomit a bit, but sadly that was not to be as I ended up at some horrible weird gypsie party that was going on next door. Alcohol actually helped however as did the fear which took my mind of my caffeine problems. When I got back though I was full of nerves (I'd snuck out and was hoping they weren't going to come looking for me) and found I have never wanted a mug more. I held out though. No caffeine day 3: Or middle actually. It's more the middle of the tunnel seeing as it's only the third day. It's light though as I haven't had a headache today, and have actually been feeling quite healthy. Except randomly I've been feeling crippling pain in my bad wrist/hand (and also my back actually), but I don't think those are related. Part of the solution I found was milkshake. I've always loved milkshake, and its actually even more soothing than tea during my Adam time. The other thing that helped was to look at it as a challenge. Even if I'm not sure about the reasons I'm doing this, it's still an opportunity to test my will. My iron will. Just like the gym. I've made it through the rain - just like Barry Manilow. I'm still planning on going back to drinking tea and coffee after the experiment but maybe I'll drink a bit less if it means I'll always have this extra energy. No Caffeine Day 6: Day six of my no-caffeine challenge and I actually feel pretty good for it. I feel loathe to admit it, but I seem to have more energy and my body clock is now almost like that of a normal human. I'm pretty sure I sleep better (and I've been having some bizarre dreams - Saturday night I joined the 'Labrador resistance movement' (I was the only non-dog member)) and I feel more awake as a result. I feel less of a jittery wreck and have been relaxing more too. Saying that I did still lie-in until 2pm on Sunday, but Si had been round the night before and didn't leave until 4am which is late even for me. Without my usual caffeine boost I was nearly comatose by the time he left. I've possibly been less productive overall, but that's a good thing in a way as I was beginning to tire myself out. Infact I'm so pleased with the results that I'm strongly considering staying this way and being a permanently decaf guy. No Caffeine Day 12: Although this was meant to be just one week it actually seems to have become nearly two without and with no clear end in sight. I've finished the test now so I can drink as much as I want but I've found I quite like feeling a bit more fresh and a bit less jittery. You know how you drink alcohol to loosen up and be more sociable? Well if you're really hooked on coffee I find it's kind of the opposite of that... I'm a lot more relaxed now and my body clock is no longer that of an owl. Conclusion: Well it's now day 15 and I'm still going strong having had only one weak mug of tea when I had a particularly bad headache (I don't really count chocolate as the amount is so small). The way caffeine works is by blocking receptors in your brain that normally tell you you're tired. In other words you're still tired, but your brain thinks you're not. This obviously isn't particularly good - our body gives us cues for a reason and ignoring them will only worsen the problem. I'm still going to have a mug of tea every now and then because I love it. But I'm not longer going to be hitting myself with 4-5 coffees at work and tea will now be just a special treat. So here are the reasons that I found first hand to give up caffeine. If they seem appealing to you maybe try giving it a go: Better sleep More normal body clock More energy in the mornings Less jittery and more relaxed When you do have caffeine you feel the effects more Additionally if you're one of the unfortunate people who have high sensitivity to caffeine it could even cause heart palpatations, panik attacks and insomnia. Not cool.