Way back in THIS post I mention a little bit about what meditators influence me.

The difference between these guys and regular “single pointed” meditation is that I feel their techniques are more directly applicable to the real world.

In the fantasy book I’m reading, one of the characters is part of an elite warrior group, whose teachers trained and trained her to go on the offensive when attacked. People naturally have the opposite reaction, so it takes hundreds, if not thousands of hours of practice to instill a new instinct. It becomes a muscle memory, you react before even thinking.

I want to practice the martial arts of meditation.

I mention a lot of people who are very unorthodox - Hypnotica, Steve Piccus, Shinzen Young, Ross Jeffries. A lot of these guys come to meditation in an incredibly unorthodox way. But all of them work in a method that’s more about changing mental protocol rather than having a bracketed time in which you practice gently focusing on a single thought.

What do I mean?

When I get depressed, as I am wont to do, I want my first reaction to be to do mood-lifting mental gymnastics. Shinzen Young advocates an old Buddhist technique to shift away from specifics, and focus on bodily sensations of emotions. In this way you step back and get a grip. Ross Jeffries goes further and talks about transforming that basic energy, transforming it, and taking it back in as an energy of positivity and transformation. I was very skeptical about this when I first tried it, and after a year of doing it more and more it has the ability to completely turn around my mood.

I am a fearful person, especially when it comes to writing endeavors. Steven Pressfield talks about procrastination as the loadstone by which you know what you need to do most. Hypnotica advocates a program by which you immediately do the things that scare you for a couple of weeks so that you rewire yourself to be someone who faces fear.

Yoga has classically been defined by Patajanli as the “cessation of the fluctuations of the mind” - as such the end product of all this is to “bump back” - the instinctually turn around bad moods or fits of frustration in order to be a generally positive and unshakably calm individual.

I’m still thinking about HOW exactly I’m going to apply all this - these are all varied techniques that need a lot of repetition to become a habit. I’ll discuss my thoughts on that in another post.