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The Genius Within


within, meditation, meditate, mindfulness, soul, spirit, searching, silence, quite, soul searching

In the spiritual community you hear over and over again: "All the answers you need are inside of you."


When I first heard this (before I started on this journey) I called total bullshit.


My teachers would harp on this concept over and over again throughout the years.


"Okay I get the concept, but tell me the steps to get there, tell me how!" I would respond back to my teachers countless times.


I need a step 1, step 2, step 3 process. It's just how my mind works.


My father is a mathematician and my mother a social worker so I got equal parts logic and humanitarian. My crazy brain tries tirelessly to combine the two and what comes out is a never ending need for a linear process to soul searching (a very non-linear process).


Damn this linear soul searching mind. And yet because of it I set out to figure out what it meant to access The Genius Within.


I found my answers in the depth of meditation.


I'll skip all the in-between stuff and get right to the point. Which is best illustrated in an experience one of my clients had. He has given me permission to share.


At this point in the story, Dave has been through the foundations of creating a mindfulness/meditation practice.


In session that day, Dave and I were working on a particular concept called "cancel, cancel". It is aimed at stopping the ruminating of the mind. It's a simple technique: the mind wanders, you say cancel cancel and bring the mind back to the breath.


I offered Dave the words cancel cancel or to use whatever words best suited him - i.e. whatever was the most effective verbiage to stop his thoughts.


We did some simple breath work to set the stage for the meditation and after the practice I asked Dave how it went.


"Well, instead of cancel, cancel I just imagined a set of gears and placing a cog in the gears so that the gears came to a halt. That's how I stopped my thoughts. Did I do it right?"


Yes! Dave had done it perfectly.


But in reality he hadn't done anything at all!


Dave's mind had effortlessly given him the imagery that was the most effective in stopping his thoughts. You see, Dave is an engineer and has an engineer's mind - thus his mind produced exactly what he needed,


We discussed this concept of The Genius Within. I told him to keep using that imagery until it worked. When it stopped working, his mind would give him another image or another word that would work.


And in this way, Dave began to follow his own mind into himself, finding The Genius Within.


I want to say here that Dave is not the only person I've seen this happen with. It happens with every single one of my clients. Without fail. And every time they are surprised at it.


If we listen to what's within we can follow it into the depths of soul - a true process of soul searching.


I also want to add that it's important to note that we did breath work practice to ease the mind from coming off the street. What I like to call "Street Mind". Street mind is crazy, full of excessive thoughts, running around, wild etc.


It's hard to get much of The Genius Within from Street Mind. Doing some breath work helps to ground and center back into Self with a capital S. The place of soul, spirit, a deeper knowing - however you define it for yourself.


When we are in that place we can truly follow The Genius Within.


Much Love,


Carisa

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