Innerscapes


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Questions & Answers



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What is the point of meditation?





Every day we process thoughts, emotions, and sensations. This processing keeps our brains nearly constantly active. How often do we take time to calm our minds? How often do we take a moment to have our time, alone, and cultivate inner peace?


Daily interacting and processing is important and it is also important to know how to refresh the mind at any time. Many people cannot calm the mind properly and they become stressful, anxious, obsessive, angry, etc. This leads to pain and frustration.


Calming the mind allows us to take a break and put things in perspective through insight. Skilled meditation coaching indicates eclectic methods used to embody a meditative state. See Sanskrit terms "upaya" and "upaya-kaushalya". These methods foster changes in neurological sensation.


Many people practice "guided meditation", which is mostly hypnosis. Hypnosis is useful and it isn't meditation. Meditation entails stillness, nonjudgmental concentration, receptive awareness, equanimity, calm abiding, and insight.


Mantras help in controlling the auditory nerve. A mantra can, briefly, impart a meditative state by creating feedback. This is similar to the dissociation of forgetting who and where you are while viewing a film in a cinema. Coaching in "mantra meditation" among people who can't build meditative quiescence seems a disservice. Visualization is useful for controlling the optic nerve, etc. Meditative stabilization allows use of these tools after cultivating meditative capacity.


The first Innerscapes meditator received socioreligious conditioning from childhood. Psychedelic experiences regularly occurred while intuitively meditating and the religious considerations made discussing this with anyone around impossible. Many others would string such a person along for years without really helping. Innerscapes imparted structure, turned stress into composure, confusion into clarity, timidity into confidence, and turmoil into peace with a one-session solution that got results!



is there a deeper point to meditation?





So much fights for your attention. Television, radio, internet, billboards, people in your life, and even people on the streets constantly bombard you with information and noise. Innerscapes Meditation helps you moderate the information, manage the noise, and confidently relax into a better life.


We mostly live in a world of narrative, concepts, and symbols. We became acculturated to living this way through sociolinguistic conditioning that began in childhood. We often forget this as we age and we get distracted by the social world. If we do not take time to recharge and refresh ourselves, we lose our connection to the world. This disconnect can cause frustration or delight.


As an example, we can take two bottle caps and create a story about each and bring children to greater and greater excitement by narrating an epic battle between good and evil. And, in a way, those concepts and symbols have meaning and that meaning influences our audience. Only we ascribed narratives and abstractions to the bottlecaps and convinced our audience to get emotionally involved in our little show.


Meditation helps us move beyond the "the show" of symbols, abstractions, words, and concepts and into our immediate, unspeakable world of objects, feelings, and happenings. A relationship with the unspeakable world begins with meditation.


Among deeper points, Meditation can help unify the conscious and subconscious mind.



What is mediation, exactly?





Meditation is an activity that tends to clarity & equanimity through relaxed stillness, non-judgmental concentration, and receptive awareness. Also, from another point of view, meditation is simply a matter of sitting down to see what happens. Understanding of meditation depends on skill and point of view.
Eastern and Western traditions involve forms of meditation. Shamanism seems to have roots all over the world and shaman have various techniques to enter altered states of consciousness. These trance states can occur in meditation.


One can have a natural aptitude for meditation — though it is rare today. Most seem to agree that meditation, as humanity currently knows and practices it, came from ancestors in the East. More specifically, we might credit certain people of the Indian subcontinent who seem to have the furthest reaching traditions where Yogis and Sadhus of various orders e.g. Aghoris, Naga Babas practiced for more than 5,000 years.


Innerscapes Meditation is an eclectic practice involving several meditation methods with personalized coaching. Focusing on the individual meditator, Innerscapes signature coaching enhances health and quality of life. And so we come to understand that meditation has no specific point any more than music or life itself have a point. Alan Watts once said that if there was a point to music we would have one note symphonies because the point of the composition would be the crescendo. So why bother with the rest of the piece? When the music is playing, enjoy it...dance. Meditation is a way of dancing it's a science and an art it's a musical thing.


If you practice meditation, something may happen to you. You can see this in music as well. If you watch The Animals do "House of the Rising Sun" (1964), in the beginning you see them moving slightly in suits.


Meditation is about stillness, being much more still than moving slightly in a suit. And these men are all non-judgmentally concentrating on their music. They all have instruments they're playing using another language and another way of using time through Music Theory. In meditation, we are more still. Our music is our nervous system. As the song goes on, the men start to change. They start to walk in circles, similar to how your heart beat causes you to gyrate slightly when you sit in lotus position. And then the music begins to pop. Watch the men at 2:00 compared with the beginning of the song. Then at 2:27 they're back to baseline except the drummer. And we also see it in the keyboarder's hands. Like the grin at 3:35, how do you explain it? When the music gets inside your soul, you feel it. And meditation has a quality reminiscent of music.


Mathematics creates the abstraction we call the "number". Geometry allows us to put the number in space and form relationships. We can build houses. Music puts the number in time and forms relationships. This allows music. Meditation puts life in now. This allows depth, peace, and even joy.



How does the Innerscapes journey look?





After an evaluation to screen for potential concerns with meditation, you decide if a coaching relationship makes sense. If so, you'll discuss framework, standards, core concepts, and related course information. In the lead-up to the first session, Joshua customizes your course after an evaluation.


If the evaluation goes well, Joshua contacts you for the second portion. At your request, this includes a psychometric tool developed by Jason Owens, et al through the Department of Veteran's Affairs and the National Center for PTSD to test for disposition to mindfulness. This valuable tool can help you learn where you stand, meditatively! Many people find this time invaluable to their personal orientation.


Your first session can run one hour or more. It discusses pitfalls, common concerns, and best practices. Joshua presents one or more meditative exercises with a Q&A session after! At that point, you are prepared to do that exercise alone.


A second session occurs after one week minimum. Three sessions over three to five weeks is common. In subsequent sessions, you would follow-up on earlier work and add to your repertoire. Each session adds at least one exercise needed to build meditative skill until you're a proficient meditator. You'll have the skills you need to do seated meditation daily!


Distance coaching options exist and do not require an evaluation nor do they offer as much support.





PROVE TO YOURSELF THAT MEDITATION IS EFFECTIVE WITH THIS EXPERIMENT





This exercise is not meant to diagnose or treat any medical condition. Consult with a medical professional if you believe you have a medical condition.


You will need a home blood pressure monitor or you may ask your nurse or doctor for help.


• Before you begin, take a reading of your blood pressure.


• Using the diaphragm, inhale slowly and deeply through your nose for about nine-seconds or until comfortably full. If you feel pain, you're going too fast or too harshly.


• Gently hold the breath for approximately two seconds at the natural pause that occurs after filling your lungs. • Slowly exhale through the teeth and slightly opened lips for about nine seconds or until comfortably empty.


• Repeat this sequence for three to five minutes.


• Now, take a second reading of your blood pressure.


Did your blood pressure decrease? Breathing properly is usually part of meditation. This alone has measurable effects on the body. Articles below offer a small selection of other effects meditation has on our bodies. Please conduct your own research as well.



How can coach joshua help?





Meditation is a very deep and personal experience with subtleties that require personal attention and tailoring. An effective meditation coach provides tasks, conditions, and standards necessary to train your mind and your nervous system in meditative exercises and methods. An effective meditation coach is there to answer your questions. Like a doctor, an effective coach will help you get you where you want to be so you can get back to your life.


An effective meditation coach will consider your goals and your situation while adapting their coaching methodology to you. Integration is an important and often overlooked phase in meditation coaching. It's difficult to get personalized integration from an app designed to generate annual subscriptions and dopamine addictions. When Chad McGehee became the world’s first Director of Meditation Training for the University of Wisconsin Athletic Department, he seemed to grasp the significance of meditation and integration: “Sixty years ago, most athletes weren't lifting weights. They thought it would wear their bodies out. Now, of course, it's central to every athletic training program at every level…we'll look back in five, 10, 15 years, and training the mind in this way will be just as normal as training the body.” Mr. McGehee is in the vanguard of meditation coaches, bringing these benefits to all levels of society for those who are committed.


You may consider Joshua as you might consider a baseball coach. Baseball is a game with certain rules that entails certain skills. We can consider meditation as a game that requires certain skills. Innerscapes can help you develop. If you invest 30 minutes a day practicing Joshua Jordan's coaching methods, you will get more from the other 23 and half hours in your day.



What are other people saying about meditation?





Elizabeth Monk-Turner



in The Social Science Journal found meditators had better initial conditions and more preferred outcomes with mood, drug use, stress management, and other bodily difficulties.


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Colin Allen



in Psychology Today reported on neuroscientific data that shows meditators are calmer and that meditators process stress & fear more effectively than non-meditators.


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Alice G. Walton



in Forbes shared data indicating meditators are less egocentric and have more interconnectivity in the brain. Evidence also supports improved stress regulation, emotional management, improved focus, and a better outlook.


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ES Epel, et al.



in Translational Psychiatry demonstrated that meditation and vacation effects cellular health and diseases. More importantly, meditation provided greater benefits over the longer term when compared with taking a vacation!


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© 2015, 2022 Innerscapes. All rights reserved.




Individual results may vary. All testimonials are real and not intended to represent or guarantee the same or similar results.
In fact, your efforts determine your results.

Meditation can complicate certain medical conditions, please advise your health care professional before embarking on a meditative path. Meditation is no substitute for professional, medical treatment. Coaching is not therapy and is no substitute for therapy. Meditation coaching requests will be screened for authenticity, please be realistic in your expectations.