As you read these lines are you fully focused on its content or are you somehow distracted with a lot of other things in your mind?
Do you know the state of the ‘monkey mind’? Is there a lot going on, often in parallel, and it feels a bit like monkeys running around?
Not only is it important to become aware of your state of mind, but also to find ways to calm your mind down. There are a couple of tasks that the mind is not able to achieve if you let the monkeys run around.
In the below table we describe 4 different states of mind:
The very first very practical implication of this simple categorization: if you are looking for ideas, for break throughs and innovation, you will not get there while fueling your busy mind. Or put differently, the colleague whose mind is about to create a new concept, idea or insight, could very well look like a day dreamer and not exactly look like a hard-working employee.
The second question is: how can you get from Beta to Alpha; and even more importantly to Theta and Delta? Is there a way to purposefully slow down your brain and prepare it for ideating, intuition or empathy?
For many people meditation is a useful practice to calm their mind; I have met people able to get from Beta to Theta within a couple of minutes. Many spiritual practices have been using tools to slow down and enhance consciousness, e.g. mantras, rosary in christian church or Zikir, the breathing meditation in the Sufi tradition. And yes, there are also all kind of substances, both natural and synthetic that have been used for centuries by indigenous medicine men or in modern psychedelic formats. There is quite some noise about increasing use of substances in Silicon Valley and beyond to broaden consciousness and foster creativity and performance on command.
I would encourage you to let mother nature do her trick on you. For me personally, being in nature and in particular in the mountains has an immediate calming effect. The fresh air and the slow movement in nature further stimulate the body. It becomes easier to be in the moment, to use and actually sharpen your senses.
Many famous thinkers have spoken about their strong relationship to and inspiration by nature, e.g. CG Jung or Albert Einstein. Ralph Waldo Emmerson in a speech at the funeral service for Henry David Thoreau described his friend’s many talents: “He was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably out-walk most countrymen in a day’s journey… The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in a house he did not write at all." (Richard Louv: The Nature Principle)
Intuitively we have been suggesting to hold our workshops at inspiring nature places. We do walk & talk and start the morning with some physical exercise or meditation to create a different state of mind. In the future we will further enrich these elements of our workshops and experiment with creative innovations.
Now, back to you:
More field notes that may interest you.