Edge – How Yoga and Meditation Helped Me Eliminate Anxiety
Posted by Edge in Technique, tags: Inner Game, meditation, self development, self improvement, self-help, yogaRoss Jeffries for years has been pushing yoga and meditation as one of the ultimate tools for inner game and self-development. I decided to start doing yoga based on his strong claims… and now I am a firm advocate of yoga and meditation as well.
One of our readers asked me to explain how yoga and meditation helped me get rid of anxiety. I’ll share my experience – for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to refer to it all as “yoga”. What I am actually doing is about 15 minutes of aligning simple yoga movements with my breathing (asanas), followed by sitting in the classic meditation posture and simply focusing on my breathing and being present to the moment.
How it helps:
1. When consistently practicing yoga, you gain a much greater awareness of your consciousness. When doing yoga, you’re doing your best to rest your attention on your breathing and being totally present to the moment. In day to day life, you begin to notice when your attention is fully present and when it is being “swallowed up” into some emotion or thought.
2. Yoga weakens the “grip” of emotions of negative emotions. Negative emotions can have a powerful, arresting effect on consciousness. Have you ever been caught in a bad mood and just couldn’t not pop out of the funk? That’s what I mean by arresting – you don’t have a choice to stop the internal negativity because you don’t have the internal clarity to recognize what is driving and fixating your thoughts. When that clarity is there, you recognize a subtle cycle of emotion leading to thought, leading to emotion, leading to another thought, etc. This recognition gives you the power to choose whether or not you’d like to participate in the emotions.
3. Yoga improves your overall mood. Since negative emotions don’t arrest your consciousness, you don’t get sucked into negativity. Free of negativity and negative thought patterns, life feels pretty good!
4. Yoga gives you amazing inner clarity. And not just consciously – you’ll notice that your head is clear and creative thought flows freely. I think this is because yoga gives your mind the space to (in the words of Shinzen Young) work out countless microscopic conflicts in our subconscious mind. Having had the experience of doing regular yoga, I think there’s a lot of truth to this. You’ll also notice that because you have a clarity and your emotions aren’t as “gripping”, you have a choice to notice your habits and negative patterns instead of just automatically playing them out.
5. Yoga makes you more present to the moment. Makes sense – since you’re aware of your consciousness, you’ll naturally bring yourself to be present in the moment since that’s what you’re practicing while doing yoga. Most people have no awareness of their consciousness, so when someone does something unexpected or undesired, your consciousness flows into your head or onto the negativity.
6. Yoga makes “bad” emotions feel “good” – in a way. This is tough to explain if you haven’t experienced it, but I’ll try to capture it. When we experience an emotion, it has a flow of feelings in our body. It lasts a relatively short period of time. But when we think about what’s happening, it can ratchet up the power of that emotion really quickly, prolonging and intensifying the emotion. One way this can happen is simply through our beliefs, frames and interpretations about a situation. One person labels a rollercoaster scary and is terrified – another labels it fun and is thrilled. Yoga gives you the choice to just experience – no labels at all, pure emotion. When simply experiencing emotion (without the added resistance of thought), even “bad” emotions can feel “good”… Kind of like a Swedish massage.
If you’re interested in learning more about meditation, how to meditate and its benefits, buy The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young Battle in Seattle
. Seriously, if you buy it, you’ll see it is worth its weight in gold. Spy School aka Doubting Thomas divx Impulse If I were a seduction/dating coach, I would make listening to this course required.
Have any of you guys worked with yoga, consciousness development or any inner game methods/tools? What are your thoughts? Babe video Kicking & Screaming hd Street Fighter buy
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“Yogas chitta vritti narodha”
Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.
Good post, you see I’ve been teaching this for years for GOOD reasons.
RJ
93/93
“Yogas chitta vritti narodha”
Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.
Good post, you see I’ve been teaching this for years for GOOD reasons.
RJ
93/93
Absolutely. I think it’s fantastic that you brought yoga and meditation to the table in the pick up / seduction realm. Thank you for that.
I’ve posted about yoga and meditation before, but most people seem to think: a) it’s fruity or too new age, b) it sounds like a good idea, but they have “no time” or c) it’s boring.
And yet these same people search endlessly for the “hot new inner game technique” or the “ultimate state generating technique”. Trying to find some high-octane “secret” to bust through some limitation they’ve decided was real (energetically, emotionally and mentally.)
But really, yoga and meditation (as I see it) is a participation in being natural. As yoga teachers have said, “It’s a participation in life.”
I was thinking about meditation and exercise this morning. I was thinking about how unnatural our modern lives are when we DON’T have meditation or exercise. Could you imagine a cave-man sitting in one place, all day long, yet not being present to the moment? That’s pretty close to a modern day person… throw on top of that a shitty diet and it’s no wonder modern people are so susceptible to unhappiness, obesity, illness, etc.
I would be stoked if my journal can inspire people to take on good habits like exercise and yoga. If nothing else, to supplement their pick up / seduction game.
More posts on this to come…
Absolutely. I think it’s fantastic that you brought yoga and meditation to the table in the pick up / seduction realm. Thank you for that.
I’ve posted about yoga and meditation before, but most people seem to think: a) it’s fruity or too new age, b) it sounds like a good idea, but they have “no time” or c) it’s boring.
And yet these same people search endlessly for the “hot new inner game technique” or the “ultimate state generating technique”. Trying to find some high-octane “secret” to bust through some limitation they’ve decided was real (energetically, emotionally and mentally.)
But really, yoga and meditation (as I see it) is a participation in being natural. As yoga teachers have said, “It’s a participation in life.”
I was thinking about meditation and exercise this morning. I was thinking about how unnatural our modern lives are when we DON’T have meditation or exercise. Could you imagine a cave-man sitting in one place, all day long, yet not being present to the moment? That’s pretty close to a modern day person… throw on top of that a shitty diet and it’s no wonder modern people are so susceptible to unhappiness, obesity, illness, etc.
I would be stoked if my journal can inspire people to take on good habits like exercise and yoga. If nothing else, to supplement their pick up / seduction game.
More posts on this to come…
Excellent article!
This area is long overlooked in the PUA world.
When one has the Center mastered, and are perfectly natural,
“picking up” becomes effortless and no technique is required.
Fact!
Here is an article on meditation Dr. Yates Canipe & I sent out a few months back. I don’t have it posted on the web yet so I don’t have a link to the full article, but here are the quick and easy 7 steps.
1. Get Alone In A Quiet Place where you
will not be distracted
2. Sit on the Ground “indian-style” where
you are rooted on firm ground close to
the earth, not on some soft man-made device
3. With Your Eyes Closed Breathe Deeply
and Calmly into your lower belly (about
6 inches below your belly button)
4. Let Your Thoughts Fly By And Away (do
not “grab” a thought and run with it -
just keep letting each thought fly by
like a bird in a blue sky. Do not “force”
thoughts away – struggling with them is
“grabbing” them and remaining attached
to them)
5. Enter into the state of “Mushin” -
which means mind/no mind. It’s a way of
“emptying the mind” which leads to a
total awareness in which nothing can
hide from you.
6. “Satori” or “Spontaneous Enlightenment”
can occur at this point. From this place
of calm and quiet, you can contact “your
higher power” or “high self”
7. Now, Ask The Question. The Answer will
pop up like a bubble coming up from the
bottom of the water!!
There are of course, many other methods and
steps to excellent yoga and meditation. This is
only one, designed to empower you.
Empowering You To Prosper,
Scott Bolan
Excellent article!
This area is long overlooked in the PUA world.
When one has the Center mastered, and are perfectly natural,
“picking up” becomes effortless and no technique is required.
Fact!
Here is an article on meditation Dr. Yates Canipe & I sent out a few months back. I don’t have it posted on the web yet so I don’t have a link to the full article, but here are the quick and easy 7 steps.
1. Get Alone In A Quiet Place where you
will not be distracted
2. Sit on the Ground “indian-style” where
you are rooted on firm ground close to
the earth, not on some soft man-made device
3. With Your Eyes Closed Breathe Deeply
and Calmly into your lower belly (about
6 inches below your belly button)
4. Let Your Thoughts Fly By And Away (do
not “grab” a thought and run with it -
just keep letting each thought fly by
like a bird in a blue sky. Do not “force”
thoughts away – struggling with them is
“grabbing” them and remaining attached
to them)
5. Enter into the state of “Mushin” -
which means mind/no mind. It’s a way of
“emptying the mind” which leads to a
total awareness in which nothing can
hide from you.
6. “Satori” or “Spontaneous Enlightenment”
can occur at this point. From this place
of calm and quiet, you can contact “your
higher power” or “high self”
7. Now, Ask The Question. The Answer will
pop up like a bubble coming up from the
bottom of the water!!
There are of course, many other methods and
steps to excellent yoga and meditation. This is
only one, designed to empower you.
Empowering You To Prosper,
Scott Bolan
No way around it. If you want to obtain a full spectrum of consciousness and climb to the higher levels of human maturation study after study shows that meditation is the only tool we have that can make it happen. We owe it to ourselves and the women in our lives.
Hell yes,
Dylan
No way around it. If you want to obtain a full spectrum of consciousness and climb to the higher levels of human maturation study after study shows that meditation is the only tool we have that can make it happen. We owe it to ourselves and the women in our lives.
Hell yes,
Dylan
I agree – to be honest, I have been really sloppy with doing yoga and meditation lately. I have let my routine slip – I’ve been productive and doing good things to move me forward in life, but when I’m not regularly meditating, life loses a certain richness of experience. My mind is less clear and I tend to not be able to think on my feet as well.
Most notably, I have a higher tendency to fixate on things and not want to “switch gears”. As a catch-22 though, it’s that tendency to fixate that keeps me from doing the yoga in the first place – I get going on a roll with something and then, before you know it, hours have flown by and it’s way past when I should be asleep.
It’s all discipline and moving towards balance – I need to just find a way to cut myself off of what I’m doing each night and do the yoga/meditation, no matter how I feel about it. Consistency is key to a meditation practice…
I agree – to be honest, I have been really sloppy with doing yoga and meditation lately. I have let my routine slip – I’ve been productive and doing good things to move me forward in life, but when I’m not regularly meditating, life loses a certain richness of experience. My mind is less clear and I tend to not be able to think on my feet as well.
Most notably, I have a higher tendency to fixate on things and not want to “switch gears”. As a catch-22 though, it’s that tendency to fixate that keeps me from doing the yoga in the first place – I get going on a roll with something and then, before you know it, hours have flown by and it’s way past when I should be asleep.
It’s all discipline and moving towards balance – I need to just find a way to cut myself off of what I’m doing each night and do the yoga/meditation, no matter how I feel about it. Consistency is key to a meditation practice…
I love yoga, but meditation … now that’s where it’s at. Especially meditation to biaural sound technology. It’s one of the absolute best ways to become more congruent because it literally flushes the static out of your mind. Cheers, – Erika
I love yoga, but meditation … now that’s where it’s at. Especially meditation to biaural sound technology. It’s one of the absolute best ways to become more congruent because it literally flushes the static out of your mind. Cheers, – Erika
I haven’t really done biaural sound tech recently – I used to though. I may give it a shot again then based on your comment. I’m all for great meditation.
I haven’t really done biaural sound tech recently – I used to though. I may give it a shot again then based on your comment. I’m all for great meditation.
I think the reason Anuj i gave up yoga was two reasons was it made me more negative and because it made me a very quiet and calm person. I became very content within myself and start to question each girl in my head i see or meet if there even right for me and then i close off. Im really struggling with this.
Overall meditation is a great mental high and i agree i am always in the moment and much more positive on the whole.
I still dont know what to do bout this.
I think the reason Anuj i gave up yoga was two reasons was it made me more negative and because it made me a very quiet and calm person. I became very content within myself and start to question each girl in my head i see or meet if there even right for me and then i close off. Im really struggling with this.
Overall meditation is a great mental high and i agree i am always in the moment and much more positive on the whole.
I still dont know what to do bout this.
Meditation is very subjective, but I can say that for me the experience is not like that at all. When I am regularly meditating, the unhelpful “mental chatter” decreases dramatically. I’m much more clear-headed and I am more positive, at peace and comfortable since it wipes out the tendency to go down a negative thought-path.
That’s just my experience though – what you’re talking about sounds like how I feel when I *don’t* meditate!
Meditation is very subjective, but I can say that for me the experience is not like that at all. When I am regularly meditating, the unhelpful “mental chatter” decreases dramatically. I’m much more clear-headed and I am more positive, at peace and comfortable since it wipes out the tendency to go down a negative thought-path.
That’s just my experience though – what you’re talking about sounds like how I feel when I *don’t* meditate!