Reframing

Hello Gang,

I hope you’re all feeling fine and dandy now that Spring is truly kicking in and that your Vedic Meditation practice is going great. Its funny how our external circumstances can affect our mood so much! All of a sudden, things feel more positive than they did when we deep in the winter gloom, and there just feels like such a sense of greater possibility.

And on this note, I wanted to touch upon the subject of Reframing, because how we view things often dictates how we end up experiencing them.

Cognitive reframing is a technique that consists of us identifying and then changing the way we view situations, experiences, events, ideas, and/or emotions. It’s a process whereby such perspectives and thoughts are challenged and then changed.

So often in life, the way our nervous system is activated dictates our perception of something. When you’ve had a cracking nights sleep (perhaps having listened to one of our guided sleep meditation s), or your head over heels in love (flooded with serotonin and oxytocin), you find yourself unconcerned by little challenges, you feel positive and ready to take on the world. Your glass feels half full, rather than half empty.

But when there is chronic background stress (adrenally fatigued and in sympathetic state), the glass is half empty and everything has a more negative tinge to it. Little challenges cause you to react, withdraw, get down about stuff, and before you know it, you’re in an endless loop where life feels a bit empty, or depressing.

Now the twice a day application of vedic meditation helps underpin a sea change in this dynamic, but we can still give it a helping hand by paying conscious attention to the thoughts and fears we have, and particularly the assumptions and extrapolations that we then draw from them.

For example, we’ve now got dear Vlad cutting off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, telling the UK we need to be reciprocally punished for daring to support Ukraine’s attacks on its supply lines, and his lapdog Sergey rattling the nuclear sabre. They’re clearly trying to rattle enough people’s cages that the strong and relatively united peoples of Europe begin to fragment into disunity.

Now if you’re neuroplastically wired into fear and anxiety mode, or if you have yet to process the sadness and grief that is holding you down, then you may well end up finding yourself playing into their hands. But let’s look at these 3 items of information for a moment and see what they really mean.

So realistically, it just didn’t look like we had sufficient motivation to sort shit out. And because of the lag effect of carbon emissions to climate catastrophe, we were going to be reacting far too late, and it was destined to kill vast numbers of people, far more than who live in Ukraine.

So in actual fact, thank you Vlad. You have just given everyone a major reason to make energy independence top of their agenda, and now everyone is looking to invest heroic levels of expenditure in renewable technology. You may just have saved the planet from the worst effects of human ignorance, and I’m glad to report that two members of the Beeja community have developed a technology that is far more compelling a proposition than Wind or Solar, more on that to come 😉

Secondly, Vlad has united us. I was seriously concerned about the level of cultural fragmentation that has been occurring in the last 10 years. It hasn’t come as a surprise to me, because resource scarcity and the tough economic circumstances brought about by the 2008 financial reality check always go hand in hand with fragmentation. But that doesn’t mean to say I like it. However, now? He has given eveyone a very clear counterpart to unite against. For most people, he is self evidently misbehaving, and the once divided tribe are now having to come together and collectively deal with the rogue member of the tribe.

Thirdly, their sabre rattling suggests they are really not happy with the trajectory of the war. It almost smacks of desperation. Now desperate people can do ill-judged things, so we’re not out of the woods yet, but desperate people also make mistakes that often result in their downfall. If we avoid falling for their tricks, and stay strong, the good will out.

So whilst we’d all wish the Ukraine situation wasn’t happening, let’s at least do our best to reframe it, so that we can have a more positive experience of life, and a more constructive influence on life.

What else in your life can be reframed? What do you find yourself getting down about? Feeling anxious about? Feeling angry about? Or simply dissatisfied? What are the assumptions and extrapolations that you’re making? Are they really accurate? And are you doing you twice a day meditation to put yourself in a place whereby reframing comes easily? Or have you allowed things to get on top of you, and allowed self sabotage dynamics to keep you locked in a sub-optimal state?

If you manage your inner world well, your sense of the outer world will reflect that. So here’s to putting our best foot forward today, and every other day henceforth. Harnessing the motive force of Spring to power us to a better life for ourselves, and a better life for all those around us. And in doing so, we will co-create a better world.

Stay safe guys, and enjoy the possibilities of Spring.

Will and the Team at Beeja Meditation xxx