The Power of Totems II: Mapping the Mind

Your mind is a world all its own, full of vast expanses and nearly infinite potential for a truly cosmic adventure. Understand that territory and lay claim to what is yours.

What You Will Learn From Reading

• Identifying Distractions: Learn the many different ways the mind gets distracted, sidelined, and rerouted to habitual negative thought patterns. Identify, categorize, and resolve these patterns so that you can enjoy the peace of a relaxed mind.

• Meditation Exercise: A step-by-step meditation exercise to assist you in identifying these negative thought patters to strengthen your ability to focus the mind to where you want it to be.

• The Mapping Technique: A powerful metaphor that uses the idea of map making to literally map out the mental terrain of your mind, providing you with a colorful and high definition insight of the territory within.

Securing Your Anchors

I recommend that you read “Power of Totems I” and practice the technique that accompanies it several times. It provides the necessary foundations of knowledge and practice required to move forward with these more advanced techniques.

In part one, you learned about the intrinsic power of totems as consistent physical reminders for breathing deeply and setting intentions to enter into, and remain in, general states of relaxation and mindfulness. In part two, we will be taking it a step further and learning about the power of observation. Bearing witness to your flow of consciousness and beginning to categorize and judge the qualities of those thoughts and feelings.

You may have noticed in the primary technique, that while breathing with intention, you struggled with maintaining your attention to that breathing, whether it was because you completely forgot what you were doing, or because a rogue thought or emotion entered your mind and took the place of intentional breathing and present awareness. Below are some examples of these “rogue impulses.”

1. An environmental distraction that causes you to redirect your attention (a sudden noise, an itch on your back, a pleasant or unpleasant smell that overwhelms the senses etc.).

2. A memory of the past that replays in your head. An example of this is could be an argument you had with someone or a traumatic event. It may play back just as it occurred or you might edit and alter the memory and your reaction to it as a way of trying to “solve” it.