We live in a rather rushed world with large amounts of stimuli from screens, work, leisure activities, other people, etc. Much of it is (hopefully) something we have chosen and want to spend our time on. But with all that we have to achieve, we rarely give our nervous system a chance to regain balance.
Imagine a scale where 0 is perfect calm (not dead) and 10 is a maximum attack of stress or panic. On that scale, many of us live a large part of our lives at perhaps a 7 (the numbers are not a scientific representation, they are just to illustrate the point).
We experience a lot of stress in our everyday lives, and we have very few, and often only short, real breaks where the nervous system is really allowed to calm down. When we need to relax, many of us lie on the couch with the TV or the phone. And relative to level 7, couch + a screen may also feel relaxing. Let’s say we get the system down to 5 on the scale. That’s better than nothing, but it’s still not really natural for us humans. What do I mean by that?
From a natural perspective, we are definitely not designed for this life. Our modern brain is still a hunter-gatherer brain that has not changed significantly in the last 10,000 years. In other words, it is adapted to a completely different world than the one we live in..
10,000 years ago, humans had a lot of “down-time,” where we just hung out in the herd and weren’t very stimulated. There was a lot of sensory silence. And when we moved, we might have walked around in the forest or in open landscapes. Our attention was mostly open and fully deployed, so we could more easily find food or prey. A lot of open attention, very little stimulation. It’s a contrast to today, to say the least, where we live in a lot of stimulation and with a narrowed attention span on our phones or other screens.
I often talk to people who feel they get a kind of revelation just by walking in nature. It could be a Sunday walk in the woods or a weekend hike somewhere. Quite simply, without a phone. When so many of us feel so good right here, it’s probably because it’s simply our natural state. We are actually evolutionarily designed for exactly that. And that’s why we are also “rewarded” for it by our system; with pleasure, happiness, curiosity, euphoria. Here our nervous system is probably down to a 3. It’s in those stages that we really start to take in the world in all its richness and actually experience that life itself is quite amazing. We don’t need to add anything, just be present.
But what if we don’t have a Swedish forest or a Norwegian mountain nearby? This is where meditation comes into the picture.
Meditation is a bit of a shortcut to calming the nervous system. For many, that’s the primary reason they use meditation. To get from a 7 to a 4 on the scale.
But meditation actually allows our nervous system to calm down even more than we were designed to by nature. Even when we’re walking quietly in nature and maybe landing on a 3, we operate with a certain amount of tension in our bodies; we always need to be a little bit on guard when we’re out there in nature or hanging out by the fire. Just a little.
Meditation can take us below 3. All the way to 0, where the mind and body are in perfect peace and balance. To a place where there is a peace and a joy that is difficult to fully describe. A very undramatic and completely natural form of deep, deep well-being. These are not stages that many of us will spontaneously experience without making an effort. This is probably because those stages are not particularly important to evolution’s plans for us. But they are there, and we all have access to them if we practice.
If you need help practicing, read more here:
Or contact me at: clausen.jon@gmail.com