“i am equal to this challenge.”
this is another of eric maisel’s twelve incantations. i have to confess that initially i was a bit sceptic of his book ten zen seconds (“is this going to be yet another book that uses the word “zen” in vain?) but the more time i spend with it, the more i like it. today i’m giving you more of a glimpse of what’s happening at the ten zen seconds blog book tour – a series of interviews with eric maisel.
i’ll be doing the interview on may 31. if there are any topics you’d like me to discuss with him, let me know!
here are excerpts of eric maisel’s answers to some questions posed in three recent entries.
from the independent stitch, a blog by writer/knitter deb robson:
one of the great tricks, tasks, and challenges that a creative person faces is “switching gears” between everyday life, where mistakes and messes are really neither wanted nor acceptable (you don’t actually want your checkbook not to balance or your customers to return their purchases) and creative work, where you must have complete intellectual and visceral permission to make big mistakes and messes, mistakes and messes on the order of spending two years writing a book that may never come alive.
since switching gears between two diametrically opposed ways of being is really so difficult, you want some tools that make this transition possible”and that’s where the ten zen seconds techniques come in really handy.
from painter and creativity coach pamela yates, who is interested how this approach can help people with anxiety and those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD):
it can be terribly hard for sufferers of severe anxiety disorders to handle their anxiety without medication. one of the important shifts for anxiety sufferers such as people with PTSD, is arriving at a place of remembering the trauma without having to relive the trauma. you want to have a certain kind of thought (a memory) without having a certain kind of feeling (a whole-body experience of the trauma happening again).
therefore you can use the name-your-work incantation: “i can remember without re-experiencing,” “i can remembering without reliving,” or some similar phrase that, coupled with the healing power of a deep breath, starts to separate the memory from the emotional charge, so that you don’t have to live in fear of your own memory.
from flowers of my mind, by claudia dose, who “shares in her blog her inner and outer worlds as an artist and spiritual being”
if you think a thought but don’t stop and mindfully alter your breathing pattern, it is entirely likely that your positive thought will go in one ear and out the other and not actually register.
by “dropping” that thought into a deep breath, dividing it up so that you think “half” of it on the inhale and “half” of it on the exhale, you provide yourself with a real stop and a whole-body and whole-mind experience of taking that thought in. suddenly they aren’t just words: they become more like verbal charms, which is what “incantation” means in the world of magic.
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