Calm Your Mind
Use your breath, body and biology to calm your mind with mental fitness expert Cara Bradley
LISTEN to Episode 6: Calm Your Mind
LISTEN to Cara’s calming, energizing guided meditation
Cara Bradley is an expert in “calm clarity” that state of mind where you feel all things are possible, perform at your best mentally and physically, self-doubt does not intrude and you are “out of the cage” and into an extended flow state.
Having discovered the “flow” state of mind at 19 and researching it ever since, Cara is a mental fitness coach, expert, author and all around amazing, inspiring woman. She is dedicated to helping you exit your “cage” of self-doubt, find your flow state and live in what she calls “high-definition.”
That is, living with a calm, clear mind, feeling alive, vibrant, aware of your senses and fully present in the moment.
How do you do that?
Deep breathing and rhythmic movement are some of fastest ways to move your mind from a high-anxiety state to feeling like you can deal with whatever life is throwing your way.
Join Cara & Anne as they talk about
using breath to calm your body, calm your mind
getting out of your cage of self-doubt
why small acts of self-compassion are so important
letting go of your need to control
remembering who you are as a way to dissolve your old patterns and conditioning
developing your sense of presence
“flow triggers” to achieve your peak mental performance
how your gut biome influences your mental health
Yes, please!
PRACTICE: SELF-AWARENESS DAILY BOOST
At the end of this episode, Cara leads a “high-definition” PRACTICE: Self-Awareness Daily Boost which you can use everyday to shine your awareness and wake up your senses.
About Cara Bradley
Mental fitness coach, author and wellness entrepreneur, Cara has been teaching people how to find their peak performance for three decades.
“Mental fitness is how we come alive”
Every day, she asks: What will make me come alive today? Her answers - and suggestions- include:
Get into nature
Tune into your body
Challenge your mind
Connect with another human or an animal
You can connect with Cara at Cara Bradley
Tune into her podcast at On the Verge
Her latest book is On The Verge: Wake Up, Show Up and Shine
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Calm Mind
Rhythm is one of the fastest ways to move from a high anxiety state into a more grounded place where you feel like, okay, I can deal with this.
Five to six seconds on the inhale and five to six to on the exhale is what allows our body to get into an autonomic coherence which is the same sense of calm clarity that we call mindfulness.
When we don't exhale fully, our body stays stressed.
Our breath is like a direct knob into tuning the nervous system.
Finding Presence
When we multitask we really don't experience the vividness of what we're doing.
We keep missing the moment that we're in.
Meditation is becoming familiar with ourselves in different states, becoming familiar with different patterns and conditions.
We can tap back into who we are. We may use prayer, a meditation practice, a walk under the night sky or the morning sunrise.
Take five minutes every day without anything. No earbuds, no phone, just you and the earth, the sky and the woods.
Getting Out of the Cage
We believe we're in a cage, due to accumulated patterns and life experiences.
Negative self-talk holds us back.
When you feel free of doubt you are capable of anything.
Letting go of the need to figure out your life will liberate us.
It takes self kindness for the cage to dissolve.
I don't want to miss my life because I'm so busy doing too many things at one time.
Turn your devices off.
Clear Focus
We can take the time to train ourselves to recognize the importance of our own existence.
For 25 minutes I make myself sit and nothing else gets seen or done except writing.
Have a very simple goal. The goal should be a subset of a bigger goal.
Make sure that the task is not too challenging or too easy.
Biology of the Biome
If our gut is imbalanced, then there's going to be a sub optimal production…not feeling as motivated…and brain fog..
The serotonin, the dopamine, and norepinephrine, all of these neurotransmitters make us feel good and perform well.
We can actually train our gut to be more balanced.
EPISODE BREAKDOWN
[00:01:00] Moving rhythmically helps our nervous system come into autonomic coherence which is the sense of calm clarity that we call mindfulness.
[00:03:43] A five to six second inhale and a five to six second exhale allows our body to become mindful.
[00:04:10] When we don't exhale fully our body stays in a stressed state.
[00:07:00] Repeating a mantra settles your system and focuses your mind.
[00:09:50] We often feel locked in a cage. We accumulate these patterns and the patterns become the cage. Each little wire is patterns, conditioning and life experiences.
[00:15:10] Take five, ten, fifteen minutes every day without anything. No earbuds, no phone, just you and the earth.
[00:18:20] We're always so quick to fill our time.
[00:19:41] Meditation is becoming familiar with ourselves in different states, becoming familiar with different patterns and conditions.
[00:21:20] Letting go of the need to figure out your life will liberate you.
[00:23:10] We keep missing the moment we're in.
[00:27:30] Explore how to live a fully alive existence and also manage a busy life and the stresses that come with that.
[00:33:20] The challenge skills equation means that when we do something that is way above our pay grade, we get frustrated. We don't do it. We procrastinate. When something's too easy, too tedious and task oriented we get bored.
[00:35:42] The gut brain connection: the stomach has more serotonin in it than the brain. We can actually train our stomach to be more balanced.
[00:39:12] PRACTICE: High Definition Guided Meditation Practice with Cara Bradley— shine your awareness on different senses.
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