What if you could see inside your brain while you meditate?
Meditation and other practices are core to contemplative traditions around the world. There are hundreds if not thousands of different practices and each practice has an impact on the brain. What if you could see what was happening to your brain while you did those different practices?
Over the weekend I rediscovered a meditation practice I had learned years ago from the world’s oldest printed book. I was curious about what was happening in my brain while I did it, so I grabbed my headband and went to the Tracker function in FocusCalm.
The Tracker function lets you see your Calm Score while you do any activity such as meditation, a breathing practice, or anything you want (you can even see what your brain looks like while you wash the dishes)! It’s for people who are interested in experimenting to see how their brain responds.
The practice I rediscovered was from the Diamond Sutra in which the Buddha and one of his students have a conversation about the teaching that the Buddha describes as the ultimate teaching, one that cuts like a diamond through our minds’ illusions (hence the name of the teaching).
There are thousands of ways to meditate, and they typically rely on concepts like the mind or our ego. In some teachings, we hear about concepts like a “higher self” or some universal state of mind or becoming enlightened. The Diamond Sutra cuts all of that out and delivers a straight to the point practice without any need for conceptual thinking. In fact, one point of the Diamond Sutra is to get rid of all those concepts.
Teachings like this one hit people differently and different points in their lives. For me, this time, the Diamond Sutra left me with a specific feeling of feeling very normal, very centered, at ease, and without the need to solve any problems (like my mind is typically doing) or do anything in particular except just be. I’ll let you find a translation that you like the best, but for me, the teaching left me with a quiet, still, and happy mind.
Then, when I put my headband on, opened FocusCalm, and leaned into this feeling my Calm Score jumped the highest it has ever been within a matter of moments. It was validation that the teaching I had rediscovered was impacting my brain in a real way.
You can use the Tracker function to see how different practices impact your mind. If you find anything interesting from your experiments, be sure to share it with me. I’d love to hear from you.
And if you want to learn more about FocusCalm, click here.
