When we experience something, often, an imprint remains.
The song in your head, as you drive to work or lie in bed at night, is a perfect example. Often, you can’t remember where it came from or when you even heard it.
The song is one minor example.
The subconscious mind is collecting information from our experiences constantly, without us knowing. How your friend reacts, the flavour of the food, the temperature, how busy you were at work and social media. This seems to be collected by the subconscious more readily. When we consciously focus our attention on something, we complete the moment. If it pops up again, it’s a little less random. There was more intention and the experience was “closed.”
Anecdotally, it seems that music, imagery, emotions all imprint quite powerfully. Perhaps the brain’s right hemisphere is more effective at this and perhaps this is why so many are addicted to social media and phones. Numbers, facts and logic seem to have less of a presence. We still remember them, but for me at least, they don’t seem to float to the surface at strange times.
This makes our passive inputs such as TV, radio, our friends, powerful. Through reducing particular inputs, we can start to reduce unwanted chatter. This is a great space for habit development. We see this powerfully on retreats.
Finally, in meditation, we get to do two things simultaneously:
1. For a time, eliminate further imprints – By sitting, alone, in silence, we stop piling on additional content. A little break from the daily onslaught.
2. We get Observe the imprints that remain – the conditioning and thoughts that arise from the subconscious mind
Note – We are kicking off a Movement and Meditation Retreat today. The group is arriving at around midday, before we go offline and get to work. At this point, they still don’t know the location of the retreat, but they have trusted me enough to fly to another state! I’m very lucky.
Anyway, I will be immersed in the activities of the week as well, so have decided to pause the posts over this time to be in line with the intent of the experience.
If you would like to find out a little more about these awesome retreats, hit reply or send me an email and I’ll connect with you when we are on the other side, next week.
john@johntmarsh.com
