Cara Bradley hosts a weekly podcast series called On The Verge, short blasts of advice and essential practices and strategies to shift from “crazy busy” to living with more clarity and vitality.
Are you one of the millions that seek mindfulness practices to feel calmer and more at ease? Do you hope meditation will settle your thinking mind? In this episode Cara explains how breath training calms your nervous system and ultimately works to settle a busy mind.
Cara explains that when your body feels sluggish, your mind feels sluggish. When your body feel tense, there’s a good chance your mind will feel tense too. On the other hand, a calm body often reveals a calm mind. In other words, the state of your body reflects the state of your mind.
Welcome to On The Verge with Cara Bradley, weekly blasts of no-hype advice and essential practices to settle down, show up, and shift from crazy-busy to high-definition, high-voltage living.
I talk to a lot of people about meditation—a lot. A lot of people tell me “I’ve tried it, I know I should do it; I can’t stop my mind from thinking. I’ve got such a busy mind. What can I do? How can I do it? I can’t find the time.”
I’ve taken this all and really digested it because I feel like this mindfulness trend, this wave where everyone is now speaking about mindfulness practice, about the need to meditate, about the benefits of meditation—But I feel like most people don’t understand why. Why do I actually want to meditate. Why would I want to sit down for 15, 20, 30 minutes and follow my breath—what is that doing? I might feel a little better afterward, but really, why? And so I hope to answer some of those questions for you today. We’re also going to practice.
Why Do People Want to Meditate?
Why do we want to meditate, what does it do for us, what’s really happening, what is the purpose! Here it goes. What we’re really trying to do is to stabilize—to stabilize our nervous system. So what happens when we sit down for a few moments when we take a few deep breaths, as we’re going to do later on, is that we start to stabilize or balance our autonomic nervous system. Now you may remember some about your nervous system from biology in high school. Probably not. Some of you may be technical experts on the nervous system but I’m just going to give it to you really simply. We have these responses in our body. We’re either on heightened alert, stressed, kind of perched, right at the edge of our chair, ready for the next shoe to drop… or we’re relaxed, so relaxed that we’re sleepy, or asleep. But when we’re balanced, when those two responses are balanced, we feel clear and energized.
When we are simply humming along, sometimes heightened, sometimes relaxed, but really humming along right down the center, the midline, we feel awake and at ease. And that truly is the meaning of being mindful. Being alert to what’s happening but at ease in the moment.
But because of our conditioning in our society, we’re rarely there. We’re most of the time perched, stressed, heightened, right at the edge of our seat waiting for that next news alert, waiting for the next post that pisses you off on social media, waiting for the next confrontation. So we stay heightened, we stay stressed. We stay in this heightened state of alertness and this is very unhealthy as we all know. The stress response, a chronically stressed body, is incredibly unhealthy on all dimensions and at all levels of our system: physiologically, mentally, and emotionally. So why we meditate, why would we want to practice mindfulness meditation or some other form, is truly to stabilize and settle your nervous system, to bring your body into a more balanced state of being.
So when we balance our breathing—and the breathing is really the best gateway for doing this—balancing your breath is the entry point for settling your nervous system and ultimately calming your mind. So stabilizing our nervous system through breath, through rhythm, through movement as we teach at Verge Body Mind, helps you to come into a more stable and settled state of being. When you’re settled and stable, your mind will naturally calm down. Our mind produces thoughts, our brains produce thoughts, our nervous system has the synapses that are constantly firing such as seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting, thinking—it’s all the same stuff. Our nervous system produces these responses to our environment and produces these synapses, these little soap bubbles of experience that sometimes comes as a smell, and sometimes comes as a sight, sometimes comes as a thought. When our nervous system is agitated, naturally those synapses, those experiences are going to be agitated. When our body is agitated, our minds will be agitated. Our thinking will be more frenzied and frazzled. When our bodies are calm, when our nervous system is balanced, those neurosynapses will be more steady or be calmer, more settled.
Meditation simply means to become familiar with your state of being in this moment.
So we meditate and we can meditate, FYI, by walking in rhythm, by swimming, by gardening, by sitting down, and following y