The Improve Focus and Concentration download is one of the most popular sessions on hypnosisdownloads.com. Roger Elliott and I were chatting the other day, and Roj remarked how all (or even most) of the ‘mind-focusing’ rituals and exercises designed to train the mind to organize itself properly have traditionally been Eastern in origin.
That’s not to say there haven’t been any western equivalents, but so many millions have practiced Tai Chi, meditation, the Japanese Tea Ceremony, Zen line painting and traditional martial arts that it does seem that, until recently, the far east had a bit of monopoly on developing techniques for purposefully organizing the chaotic contents of consciousness.
We need this more than ever
Actually, we are supposed to be ‘in charge of our minds’. That is what the part at the front of your brain is for – the prefrontal lobes (1). But so often it seems that the mind is just chaotically and randomly flitting about from one thing to another – a whirr of irrelevant thoughts beyond our control.
Our modern media don’t help as they can inadvertently actually ‘train’ our minds into a pattern of uncontrolled ‘flitting’. Too much TV, for instance, has the effect of making us less able to persevere with tasks and concentrate (2). Its fast cuts and edits and zooming in and panning out and sudden changes of image and sound can make us less able to focus clearly and organize our thinking at other times.
A racing mind hinders proper sleep, and the inability to sort relevant (to the task in hand) thoughts from distracting ones paralyzes people and prevents them from being as effective, contented and efficient as they could be in life.
The Organize scattered thinking session was produced to encourage the effective streamlining and clarity of thought so often missing in modern life.
Mark
Notes
(1) See Elkhonon Goldberg’s book The Executive Brain regarding the role of the pre-frontal lobes in brain function.
(2) Kuby R and Csikszentmihalyi M (2002), ‘Television Addiction is no mere metaphor’, Scientific American, February, pgs 62-68.
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