The Power of Totems I: Anchoring your Totem
Learn the Amazing Power of Totem Reminders for your Meditation and Mindfulness Practices.
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The Power of Totems I: Anchoring Your Totem
What You Will Learn from Reading
What are Totems?: Learn what they are and why they are such powerful tools for meditation, mental focus and physical well-being.
How to Use Them: Learn the techniques of anchoring, prompts and protocols for implementation of intentional thoughts and behaviors.
Create Your First Totem!: Starting with a simple breathing prompt, learn how to create a totem and begin using it immediately.
Step-by-Step Exercise: A detailed meditation exercise that will turn you into an expert practitioner of Totems
Understand How Tension Effects the Body: Take the first steps in using your totem to assist in scanning your body-mind to recognize how mental tension creates physical strain.
The Power of Totems
Totems are an incredibly simple and effective way to help center the mind and body through their assistance with meditation and mindfulness practices
A totem is usually a simple object that is meaningful to you, but also, not so valuable or precious that it would be a detriment if you lost it. You will be carrying this object around almost everywhere you go, so keep this in mind when selecting your object. The totem acts as a simple reminder to think or act. Think of it as a quiet alarm clock for mindfulness.
The totem we’re creating here will remind you to breathe correctly, and evolve into a meta-tool for various practices, exercises, states-of-mind and meditations as we progress through the “Power of Totems” series.
Practicing the techniques in this introduction will prepare you for the really exciting techniques in the future. For example, if you are trying to save money; seeing, touching or thinking about the totem can remind you to be careful with your spending, to put intention and prayer into the idea of prosperity being brought to you, and to keep an eye out for opportunities to acquire wealth.
States of mind and emotion can also be anchored to the totem. Consciously entering into states of relaxation and gratitude can be triggered by your awareness of the totem. In addition, totems can be taken to an even higher level, as you learn to use your personal energy and consciousness, to influence reality, transforming space and time at your will. We will discuss this in future posts.
Anchoring Your Totem
The essential action in totem creation, is called “Anchoring.” Anchoring is the act of attaching a concept to the physical object. Your mental awareness of the the thought, emotion or action will be triggered whenever you are made aware of the object. For instance, you can anchor “Doing 10 Pushups” to your totem, so that every time you see it, feel it, or think about it, you drop and give me ten, soldier! Below we discuss several beneficial anchors that are simple and useful for everyone, no matter what your goals are.
Spend some extra time becoming intimately familiar with the process of anchoring. It’s not just assigning a task or a thought to the totem, its a profound change in the way you connect external reality with your internal world . The connection, when done correctly, will change you at a fundamental level in your being. It also imbues the totem with what you might call “etheric” energy, that also changes the nature and structure of the totem in unseen ways. The bond you form with your totem is physical, mental, emotional and even spiritual in nature. In later parts in this series, the anchoring techniques will become more advanced and yield even more powerful results.
Additional Considerations on Totems
Getting acquainted with the true nature, power and potential of your mind will be strange at first. You may have never thought to use your mind to intentionally enter into emotional states for instance. When you are in a bad mood, the last thing you are thinking about is getting into a good mood. Though, maybe that’s why we get stuck in sunken places. Maybe, by “being in a bad mood” we reinforce that bad mood as if we are giving an unconscious command to our mind to remain in this state.
What if, while in a bad mood, we intentionally moved toward getting out of that state of mind. If we imagined our brain producing all the feel good chemicals and electrical impulses that reset our mind, can we bring it into a peak state of mood and thought? It may not occur immediately (at first), but maybe it sheds a few minutes, then an hour, and then days of a “slump” as you progress in your mastery of the mental and emotional alchemy of transformation.
The totem technique is unique in how quickly it will facilitate powerful changes in your conscious states and behavior patterns.
In this first part of the “Power of Totems” series we will focus on some simple prompts that will initiate you into being an active observer of your flow of consciousness.
Breathing Exercise I: Anchoring the Totem
Pick an object that is easy to carry around, something that will fit in your pocket.
Become familiar with the look, feel and overall presence of the object.
As you shift the object around in your hand, recognizing its facets, watching the way light, shadows and color express themselves, breathe deeply. Attach the idea, deeply in your mind, that there is a profound relationship between observing the object, and breathing deeply.
Do the same thing with the physical examination of the object. Move the object around in your pocket. Feel the sensation of it pressing against your leg as you stand still or walk around. In the same way as in step three, attach deeply in your mind, the intrinsic relationship between these sensations and breathing deeply.
Every time you see, think about, touch or feel the object, breathe deeply. Think of the object like an alarm clock for correct breathing.
Do the same thing with time. At a certain time past the hour (For example, 8 minutes past the hour). Every time you see that specific time (12:08, 1:08, 2:08 etc), remind yourself to breathe deeply until you forget that you are doing it.
To enhance this technique, increase the frequency to ANY time you look at the clock.
To advance the practice even further, make several objects in your daily life the same kind of reminder. Breathe deeply every time you see a specific person, or any person, your bed, the book shelf, etc. This is particularly beneficial for people as totems, as it is always good to be breathing deeply when interacting with another human being.
As you are more successful with more reminders, add in particular thoughts and emotions as intrinsic reminders. Like when you think about work that has to be done or when you are feeling tense or frustrated.
The Importance of Breath
Starting with a simple breathing prompt for your totem allows for additional discoveries about your mind and body. The breath is the beginning and end of all meditation. It is the thing which unlocks all other doors of discovery. With that in mind, let’s take this opportunity to become more acquainted with the incredible potential of the totem tool.
You might have noticed how hard it is to stay focused on this simplest of tasks (breathing correctly for any extended period of time without getting distracted). When I started out with this practice, I wasn’t able to hold the thought of breathing deeply for more than ten seconds between mental interruptions.
The untrained mind is akin to a busy highway, full of random thoughts speeding past, ignoring the lines between lanes and crashing into one another. With practice, those thoughts will slow down, take turns, and even park themselves, so that you decide what is allowed on the road of your present awareness.
Recognizing Tension
Another important revelation will be how your physical body is connected to your thoughts and feelings. You may have noticed that while you were reminding yourself to breath properly, muscle groups like your abdomen, back, chest and other parts of the body, felt tense, strained, and even out of place. The abdomen may have felt like it was all the way up in your chest, and as you took more breaths, you started realizing that you were actively flexing the muscles this whole time. Once you released, the abdomen felt awkwardly heavy sitting down lower than what you’re used to.
When you release these muscles, it will feel unnatural at first, but this is only because you have been straining them for a long period of time, causing them to develop the habit of being in the wrong place. With practice and patience, you will be able to relax the muscles more often, until they return to their proper alignment with the rest of your body and stay there, even when you’re not looking.
This constant flexing and straining of the muscles, and your lack of connection to the overall body, is a result of tension. Tension that started as an emotion or thought. You might have picked it up from work, due to some menacing co-worker that is always trying to steal your ideas and take credit for your work. It might have happened due to a tense relationship with a mother or father. At some point, no matter where it came from, your thoughts and emotions communicated their displeasure physically.
Returning to Relaxation
These physical tensions are the culmination of sustained tension, grief and trauma. Often times its a physiological response to a perceived threat: a way to “protect” you from external dangers. The mind doesn’t distinguish a physical threat from a psychological one in this respect. With further study and observation, you will start to see how a specific strain of a muscle reflects the quality of the mental tension behind it. For instance, if you feel that you always have someone “breathing down your neck”, you’re likely to strain your shoulders, neck and upper back. The “primal” mind does this to protect the vulnerable and vital parts of your body from this psychological attack that is perceived as physical.
Continue working with your totem with the breathing prompt and work more body relaxation into the practice as you are able to hold your attention to the breathing longer. In the future, I will be introducing a full series on “Grief Mapping” which will teach you how to get to the root cause of these muscles strains, feelings of anxiety and lack of focus. That series will build on all the basic practices you are learning in the Totem series.
Looking Forward
In the next part in the series, we will be diving more deeply into observing how the mind works and how it effects the body. New exercises will help you to be a conscious observer of your flow of consciousness and help put you back in the driver’s seat of the mind.
Keep practicing these techniques, as they will continue to reward you for years to come. Prepare to take things to the next level in “Power of Totems II”, taking the another step closer to becoming a master of your own mind.
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Good luck to everyone implementing this in daily life . I’m feeling really hopeful. :)
Mann I wonder what the next read going to be like?😁😆