No Patience for Meditation? Use Bop It as a Meditation Tool.

No patience for meditation? You can use Bop It as a meditation tool. I use this technique all the time when I need to ground myself in the present and calm the brain down.

How it works: Due to the way the game is designed, you are forced to give full attention and mental focus to the task at hand and abide by the game's voice commands. After doing a couple rounds, you might be surprised to find yourself in a bit of a trance state.

Tips for success: The more you relax, the more successful you'll be. Predicting what moves will come next in the future will cause you to tense up, and produce varying levels of stress in your body and mind. As is life. If you simply remain in the present and focus on one task at a time, you'll be surprised at just how relaxed you can stay, even while the pace speeds up.

Yes, Bop It is a Zen philosophy all to itself.

How I discovered this creative meditation hack: Sheer curiosity! During the pandemic, I found myself reaching for nostalgia and escape to keep me sane. And one of those purchases was a Bop It. At one point, I set up an experiment where I would perform one round of Bop It in between my creative assignments for work, or between my screenwriting sprints. Not only did I find it mentally refreshing, but I felt relaxed and renewed. And I soon realized that my Bop It was placing me in a meditative trance state, time and time again.

Closing statements: if you're someone who has struggled to stay present during meditation (or in my case, stay awake without going to sleep) get creative! Get yourself an old school (or new school!) Bop It and have at it!

#bopit #hasbro #meditationtechniques #mindhack #brainhack #lifehacks #writertools #meditationtool #meditation #meditatedaily #nostalgiagames #1990s #90skid

The Amazing Thing About This Julia Cameron Quote

When I think of this quote by Julia Cameron, I'm always reminded of an interview I heard with American novelist and freelance journalist Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke). In September of 2020, Tim Ferriss interviewed Palahniuk on the Tim Ferriss podcast, and one topic of discussion that came up included Palahniuk's appreciation for Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World.

The following is a lightly edited transcript from the Palahniuk interview:

"The other aspect of Lewis Hyde that I’m really fascinated with is in his book The Gift, he writes a great deal about how, according to the Greek and Roman tradition, each of us is born with effectively a guardian angel. But it’s more along the lines of a guide that represents our fullest potential. And this guide wants to see us reach our fullest potential, our greatest form of power. And the ancient Greeks and the Romans, they would make a sacrifice on their birthday to this, whether they called it their genius, or their daemon, or their genie.

...And according to this ancient Greek and Roman idea is that if you fulfill your potential, if you sacrifice and you develop your skills, that are kind of your destiny, according to this, this potential you’re born with then you free that guardian spirit, so that that guardian spirit can move on to another level.

In effect, you are freeing the genie from the bottle. And if you do it wrong, the genie has to go back into the bottle. According to the Greeks and the Romans, if you did it wrong, then the genie, the daemon, the genius becomes a malevolent household spirit that will destroy you and destroy your home. And how many of us kind of know a creative person who just didn’t follow through with it, and ended up drinking, and doing drugs, and kind of destroying their lives, because they didn’t have the whatever to really pursue the passion that should have been their destiny?

...When I’m writing, all of that negative, all that anxiety goes into the work and my life is so peaceful and so productive....when you’re really deep in a project, there is a sense that you’re so protected and so embraced by something that nothing bad can happen to you. You really feel like you’re just completely protected when you’re in the creative act. And when you’re not, you’re just completely anxious." - Chuck Palahniuk

Find the full transcript on Tim Ferriss's blog here: https://tim.blog/2020/09/05/chuck- palahniuk-transcript/)

What I'm listening to: Bernard Parmegiani's “Questions of Time”

This year, I've been trying to explore music that really hits differently. Like freight-train-to-the- face differently, or blast-me-into-an-entirely-different-realm-of-consciousness differently. Bernard Parmegiani's intense acousmatic soundscapes take me to that place, and they'll take you there too.

Bernard Parmegiani was a French composer and genius of electroacoustic/acousmatic music.

What's acousmatic music? It's a form of electronic music/soundscape that's hyper-focused on characteristics like timbre + spectrum, and it can include sounds derived from things such as musical instruments, voice, electronically generated sound, manipulated audio, field recordings, and just about anything else you can dream up into auditory experience.

But enough of me trying to describe it.

Here's the real reason Parmegiani gets my ears all hot and lost in a Jungian space-time continuum.

The sounds of Parmegiani work beautifully as a tool for creative/active imagination extraction. I've been using Parmegiani as a background soundtrack for free writes, where I attempt to build the connection rod between the conscious mind and the unconscious/flow state/soul tunnel/muse.

Whatever you wish to call it.

Parmegiani's music forms an incredibly peculiar backdrop to this writing exercise. You will get something unexpected. Something fresh. Something unusual. Every time you try it.

While I primarily use Parmegiani's music during freewriting experiments, you'll also find me listening to 30 minutes at a time while exercising on a stationary bike for a unique trance-state.

If you're looking to experiment with your creativity or simply experience an insane palette cleanser and really spice/fuck up your listening patterns + streaming algorithms, put on "Questions of Time", close your eyes, and enjoy the trip down the cerebral rabbit hole.

Warning: do not listen before bed unless you and your nightmares like to live dangerously.

Listen responsibly!

#music #bernardparmegiani #questionsoftime #electroacoustic #acousmatic