Introducing Ten-Second Centering
Purpose-Centered Life
Dr. Eric Maisel
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Episode 28 - Introducing Ten-Second Centering

Today’s episode is episode 1 of the Ten-Second Centering Series

I am going to teach you a technique for centering that verges on the miraculous. You can dramatically improve your ability to center, become more calm and more powerful, and radically improve your life by taking ten-second pauses of the sort that I’m about to describe. You’ll be amazed to learn that such a life-altering strategy can come in a package as small as ten seconds. But it can! Hundreds of my clients have discovered this and so have hundreds of subjects who’ve volunteered to try out this technique. They’ve used this technique to center, calm, and ground themselves while caught in traffic, sitting in the dentist’s office, preparing to record a new album, or readying themselves to talk to their teenager. They know firsthand that this technique works.

Transcript

Transcript

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Eric Maisel:  Hello everybody! Welcome to today’s episode of Your Purpose-Centered Life. Before we begin, I have a little request. I’m taking an anonymous survey of my listeners and I hope that you’ll participate as your participation helps me get sponsors. Just drop over to PersonalLifeMedia.com and click on the Listeners’ Survey ad on my show page. Thanks so much for supporting Your Purpose-Centered Life. 

Today’s show is another episode in the 10 Second Centering series. This series is designed to help you grow calmer quickly, so that you can live your life purpose. It doesn’t matter how clear you are about your life purpose if you live your life in an anxious and uncentered way. The technique that I’m teaching can make all the difference between living an unfilled life and living an authentic one. I hope that you’ll follow the whole series.

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Eric Maisel:  Today’s show is called “Introducing 10 Second Centering.” Let’s begin… I’m going to teach you a centering technique that verges on the miraculous. You can dramatically improve your ability to center, become more calm and more powerful and radically improve your life by taking 10 second pauses of the sort that I’m about to describe.

You’ll be amazed to learn that such a life altering strategy can come in a span as small as 10 seconds, but it can. Hundreds of my clients and hundreds of volunteers have used this technique to center, calm and ground themselves while waiting in traffic, sitting in the dentist’s office, preparing to record a new album or readying themselves to talk to their teenager.

They know firsthand that this technique works. This 10 second technique has two components, a breathing part and a thinking part. The basis of 10 second centering is using a single deep breath as a container for a specific thought. First, you practice deep breathing until you can produce a breath that lasts about five seconds on the inhale and five seconds on the exhale.

Learning to do this will take you only a few minutes. Then, you insert a thought into the breath, silently thinking half the thought on the inhale and half the thought on the exhale. This too will take you only a short time to learn.

In an afternoon, you can familiarize yourself with the program that I’m outlining. If this 10 second centering technique sounds very simple, it’s because it is. It is simple to grasp, simple to practice, simple to use and simple to master. It’s nevertheless profound in its benefits. You’ll be able to do things that previously felt too painful or too difficult to attempt. You will be able to calm and center yourself before an important meeting or conversation. You will change your basic attitudes about life, moving from pessimism to optimism, procrastination to effort and worry to calm. These are the benefits that await you.

I’m adapting a word from the world of magic, “incantation,” to describe these breath and thought bundles. An incantation is a ritual recitation of a verbal charm meant to produce a magical effect. Those are exactly our methods and our aims. The magical effects are instant centering and instant calm. The ritual we use is breathing a certain way and thinking a certain thought for 10 seconds at a time. The verbal charms are the specific thoughts that I’ll teach you, 12 incantations in all.

I hope that you’re a little sceptical about the promises I’m making. By all means, hold on to your scepticism. Then, when you see that 10 second centering works, it’ll strike you as all the more magical.

We know from practices like yoga and meditation the importance of the twin concepts of breath awareness and mindfulness. Breath awareness is simply paying attention to the way we breathe, while reminding ourselves to breathe more deeply and more fully than we usually do. As we rush through life, we breathe shallowly as our mind shutter propels us forward, burdened by what Buddhists call “money mind,” that worried, needy, grasping, anxious, unaware mind of the everyday person, we fall into the habit of automatic shallow breathing  

A vicious cycle evolves where we maintain this shallow breathing as a defense against knowing our own thoughts. In a corner of consciousness, we know that if we were to slow down and breathe deeply, we would become fully aware of our thoughts and learn too much about what we’re actually thinking.

Out of a fear that acquiring such an understanding would upset us, we make sure not to engage in deep breathing. If we were willing to engage in conscious deep breathing, we would become more mindful. We would begin to see our own tricks. How what we hold as facts are mere opinions, how are usual ways of operating often sabotage us and how pain, resentment and disappointment course through our system. Therefore, mindfulness is much easier to champion as an abstract idea than it is to tolerate in reality.

From Western thought, I’m taking the basic ideas of cognitive therapy. The main idea of cognitive therapy is that what we say to ourselves, our self talk, is the primary way we maintain our problems, defenses, flaws and blocks. If we manage to change our self talk, we have done something profound, something more substantial than just making some innocent linguistic alterations.

10 second centering does not demand a full practice of mindful meditation or a complete course in cognitive therapy. In an important sense, I have done that work for you by presenting you with 12 incantations that you might have arrived at yourself through inside meditation, self reflection, pain and suffering.

When, for instance, I teach you the incantation, I expect nothing and explain to you why it is important to let go of expectations, though not of goals or dreams. I will be presenting an idea that you might have arrived at through years of ardent practice. The practice has been done for you and you can reap the benefits. This is not an illegitimate shortcut. Suffering is overrated. I would prefer that you change your life in a day and not a decade.

I hope that you agree. I hope that you concur that you have already earned your merit badges in suffering and that it is legitimate to quickly learn a way of centering that works rather than arriving at one by studying everything that the East and the West have to offer.

That ends today’s show. I hope that you enjoyed it and I hope that you’ll tune in next week for another episode of Your Purpose-Centered Life. If you subscribe to Your Purpose-Centered Life, you won’t miss a single episode.

To subscribe, please visit PersonalLifeMedia.com or look for Your Purpose-Centered Life in iTunes. You might also want to visit my blog where many guest correspondents write about issues of interest in the secular, humanist, sceptical, free thinking, existential and atheist traditions. My blog is available at the PersonalLifeMedia.com website.

If you’d like to drop me an email, I’d love to hear from you. My email address is [email protected]. I hope that you’ll visit my website to learn more about my books and services. To visit, please head over to ericmaisel.com. That’s E-R-I-C-M-A-I-S-E-L.com. Thank you for listening.

Oh, and a last reminder about the anonymous survey that I’m taking of my listeners. I hope you’ll participate. Just go to PersonalLifeMedia.com and click on the listeners’ survey ad on my show page. Thanks so much for supporting Your Purpose-Centered Life.

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