Would You Like a Few Minutes to Relax?
Do you feel like your brain is too noisy for meditation? Do you think that there’s no way you can turn off your thoughts and calm your mind?
If you said yes, I can completely relate! My brain is going constantly. For the longest time I thought meditation had to be in complete silence or with a particular kind of music, eyes closed, focusing on your breath.
After reading You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hahn and taking a few classes at a local meditation center last year, I learned that meditation at its core is the act of noticing and finally everything clicked.
If you have a window open, notice the breeze and the birds tweeting. If you live in or near a city, notice the traffic noise. Is the traffic noise annoying to you? Notice your annoyance, then shift your noticing away to something else. That’s it! If it does get noisy in your head, like you can’t seem to shift focus away from how loud the traffic is, you can count your breaths or say to yourself “breathing in” and “breathing out” in rhythm with your breath.
When I realized that meditation can really just be hyperfocusing on the sounds and feelings of the world around me, the nagging thoughts stopped and I finally had a better understanding of what it meant to be present. Do I do it every day? Nope! I do it when things get really hectic in my head and I need to bring the world back into focus. It’s a great tool to have in my mental health toolkit!
That brings me to the mandalas I’ve been creating. My long term goal is creating mandalas that could be paired with sound baths, which are typically 30 minutes to an hour long. I will need to be able to create either one very long animation, or multiple 5-10 minute animations with different mandalas. To work towards this goal, I decided to create a longer, more detailed mandala animation as a projection for Earth Day.
I found myself feeling a little anxious about the speed and people getting bored and then I considered the difference between watching the animation during a sound bath and watching it sitting in my living room on my phone. Long and slow is relaxing, but Instagram and Facebook don’t want you to be relaxed, at least not for more than a minute or two! I don’t want to shift my vision, so I needed to find a place where I could share long animations and work towards my goal.
Introducing the Positively Disintegrating YouTube channel!
Here you’ll find 3 different playlists: Mandala Projection Mapping, Mandala Meditations, and Hypnotic Visuals. Mandala Projection Mapping is recordings of the projections I’ve done, Mandala Meditations is the original animations that I use for projection with different backgrounds added, and Hypnotic Visuals is upbeat VJ style looping animations.
My plan is to organize the meditations into playlists by time length so if you’d like to relax for 3 minutes, for example, you can go to the 3 minute playlist and select any mandala to focus on. I know a schedule will help keep me focused and I want to build this channel relatively quickly, so starting next week, every Tuesday there will be a new 2 minute mandala and every Thursday will be a new 3 minute mandala. Two minute Tuesdays and three Minute Thursdays!
There will also be a special playlist exclusively for Extended Version subscribers.
If you’d like to get access to this playlist, upgrade your newsletter subscription to the Extended Version! Subscriptions are pay what you wish and start at only $1 per month.
I would love your input! Click on the answer that applies to you.
— ON MY RADAR —
Watching: The Big Door Prize, Season Two
In the small town of Deerfield, a machine called MORPHO appears in the local grocery store. While it looks like a video game, its only function is predicting the “Life Potential” of those who sit inside its blue glowing form. In the sea of television choices, it’s always exciting to come upon a story that’s really unique. This quirky drama/comedy starring Chris O’Dowd is back for season two with 3 episodes having aired so far. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I recommend catching up!
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As always, thank you so much for your support!
Until the next newsletter, be well.
Giesla
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