BRAIN WAVES


Anna Wise (2002). Awakening the Mind: 

                               A Guide to Mastering 

                               the Power of Your Brain Waves.


Wise has an MA in Humanistic Psychology and founded the Anna Wise Center (http://annawise.com/). She traveled extensively to create and test protocols for brain wave training, over 6k hours studying brain waves, and she worked with Max Cade for 8 years to develop the Mind Mirror (in it's 6th iteration at the time of this writing: https://www.themindmirror.com/) to measure and test protocols for brain wave mastery.

While one can measure brain waves of both the right and left hemispheres with the "mind mirror," Wise contends that you don't need this instrument to develop mastery of your brain waves. To test this proposition, she provides 42 guided meditations to assist people in attaining states of the "awakened mind"...a combination of beta, alpha, theta, and delta brain waves that she calls "mastery," combining compassion, detachment, nonjudgment, clarity, equanimity, service, and love. The chart of subjective landmarks of consciousness and their brainwave counterparts on pps 30-31 alone is worth the price of the book.

learnings:

  • if you relax your tongue completely, you can greatly decrease self-talk, making it harder to think and easier to meditate without thoughts
  • counting your breaths allows them to slow down as does using your forearm as a lever for inhaling (raise) and exhaling (lower)
  • alpha eye roll: with eyes closed, inhale and raise the eyes to look toward the center of the forehead...temporarily boosts level of alpha brain waves (caution, use sparingly, no more than 3x in a row)
  • set an intention, then forget about it...let go!
  • add beta (words used as landmarks) to alpha imagery to be able to "bring back" ideas from consciousness after meditation

practices:

  • try out the relaxing tongue practice and see if it decreases the number of thoughts you have...it takes some practice to completely relax the tongue--the principle is that micro tongue movements accompany our silent thinking, and that if we can decrease these tongue movements, there will be a corresponding reduction in our thoughts...try it and see if it works for you.
  • there are 42 guided meditations to explore for more practices...I've completed and benefited from all of them...for me, Wise is a trusted and competent guide in the realm of brain waves and mastery as defined above.




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