The exercises below are designed to prove that you can consciously direct the flow of energy and information in your body. There are major benefits to be gained once you begin to consciously use your awareness:
• You can tap into subtler levels of information in the form of bodily cues you have been ignoring. Your body will tell you what it needs when it needs it—this is the exact opposite of being driven by habit, which will never precisely fit the body’s actual wants.
• You can focus attention on parts of the body that are expressing discomfort. Simply by localizing your awareness on a source of pain, you can cause healing to begin, for the body naturally sends healing energy wherever attention is drawn.
• You can activate desires and intentions to fulfill them more efficiently. An intention is basically a disguised need, and the mind-body system is set up to meet all needs directly and spontaneously. (This is very different from the addictive or compulsive desires that our old programming has built into us.)
When all three of these areas are operating properly, conditioning starts to dissolve at the deepest cellular levels; this has to happen to prevent the body from growing old. There are numerous spiritual teachings in all areas related to the power of awareness, and the techniques of Native American shamans might differ extremely from those of Tibetan monks or Hindu yogis. In general, however, awareness is used as a healing power: It restores balance wherever it is allowed to flow freely.
Bringing awareness into contact with frozen patterns of old conditioning starts to melt those patterns, for ultimately everything we can sense or think about is simply an aspect of our awareness. The discomfort the body manifests as pain, numbness, spasm, inflexibility, and trauma are all knots that awareness can undo by itself. Through practice and dedication, you can heal any imbalance in the mind-body system through awareness, once the appropriate techniques of relaxation, release, and insight are learned.
Below are some beginning procedures for localizing attention and fulfilling intentions. We will progress to deeper, more powerful techniques in later sections, but even at these stages, the connections being forged between mind and body are extremely helpful for breaking out of the old pathways that create aging.
Although we all know how to pay attention to something outside ourselves, and we all feel our attention drawn to a pain in the body, such as a toothache or muscle spasm, there are many subtle cues that escape us in everyday life. Awareness has many levels, and it must be allowed to flow from one to the other, for flow is its natural state. In this first exercise, you are asked to easily direct your attention to each area of the body; as this happens, the act of paying attention releases deep-stored stresses. Like a child, your body wants attention and feels comforted when it receives it.
Sit with your eyes closed in a comfortable chair or lie down. (Choose a quiet room that is free of distracting noises.) Place your attention on the toes of your right foot. Curl them down until they feel tense, then release the tension and feel the sense of relaxation that flows into them. Don’t rush either the tensing or the relaxing; take time to feel what is happening. Now let out a long, deep sigh as if you are breathing out of your toes, letting all stored fatigue and tension flow away with your breath. Don’t puff or blow; just let the sigh release itself in one long exhalation, like a sigh of relief, without holding back. If you let out a moan or groan, all the better—that is a sign of deep release.
Now repeat this procedure with the top of your right foot, first placing your attention on it, then tensing the muscles (by arching your foot backward), and finally relaxing them. When the top of your foot feels relaxed, let out a sigh as if you are breathing out through your toes.
Once you have this basic technique down, take your attention to all parts of the body in the following order. Remember that this is not just a muscle relaxation technique; your attention needs to linger comfortably at each bodily location.
Right foot: toes, top of foot, sole of foot, ankle (two stages: flexing back, then flexing forward)
Left foot: toes, top of foot, sole of foot, ankle (two stages: flexing back, then flexing forward)
Right buttock and upper thigh
Left buttock and upper thigh
Abdominal muscles (diaphragm)
Lower back, upper back
Right hand: fingers, wrist (two stages: flexing back, then flexing forward)
Left hand: fingers, wrist (two stages: flexing back, then flexing forward)
Shoulders (two stages: flexing forward, then flexing upward toward neck)
Neck (two stages: flexing forward, then flexing backward)
Face (two stages: screwing face into tight grimace, then tensing brow and forehead)
This exercise sounds rather complicated when described verbally, but flexing various body parts simply follows the natural way the joints and muscles move. After one session, you will be able to feel your way around your body effortlessly.
Short version: A complete circuit of the body as described above takes about fifteen minutes. If you are pressed for time, a short version involves only the toes, diaphragm, fingers, shoulders, neck, and face.
This exercise demonstrates that having an intention is enough to accomplish a result. When properly focused—which means easily and without strain—awareness has the ability to carry out quite specific commands. An intention doesn’t have to be a verbally expressed thought; in fact, our deepest intentions are body-centered. Our most fundamental needs—for love, understanding, encouragement, support—permeate every cell. The desires that arise in your mind are often clouded by ego motives, which are not true needs; people get caught up in the pursuit of money, career goals, and political ambitions in ways that are disconnected from the fundamental need for comfort and well-being that every healthy organism must fulfill. Many of us are so alienated from our basic needs, so programmed to run after what the ego wants, that we have to relearn the basic mechanics of how attention and intention actually work.
There are many ways to get fulfillment besides the outward-oriented ones our culture teaches us. The most valuable lesson in this regard is that intentions automatically seek their fulfillment if left alone. Every cell in your body is seeking fulfillment through joy, beauty, love, and appreciation. This is hard to realize when the mind sets up its own separate agenda for fulfilling other kinds of desires, ones that are loveless, without joy or satisfaction. Yet millions of people have programmed themselves to reach only such goals.
In the three related procedures given here, you will experience the effortless way that intentions can get fulfilled, bypassing the ego and the rational mind (for best results, do exercise 1 as a warm-up, in order to bring your body into a receptive state). Even though the intentions being carried out are simple, they give you confidence in your ability to direct your awareness, which is critical if you want to change the deep-rooted patterns of aging, for aging itself is an intention that your cells are obeying without your control.
1. Take a piece of string about twelve inches long and tie a small weight at the end to form a pendulum (a lead fishing weight, household washer, or one-inch bolt will work well). Hold the string in your right hand and brace your elbow on a table or the arm of your chair so that you can hold the pendulum steady. Sit comfortably and make sure that the pendulum is not moving.
Now look at the weight and project the intention that the pendulum move from side to side. The simplest form of intention is to visualize how you want the weight to move, but you can verbalize the words side to side if you wish. Keep your attention on the pendulum and keep the intention firmly in mind, but make sure you hold your arm steady. In a few seconds you will be surprised to see the pendulum start to move of its own accord. If it moves erratically at first, don’t try to correct its swing—just wait until the desired motion is found automatically.
Now change your intention to direct the pendulum back and forth instead of side to side. Again see this motion in your mind’s eye and easily hold it there. Typically, your pendulum will hesitate for a few seconds, move erratically, then take up the desired direction.
After watching it for a few seconds, intend for the pendulum to swing in a circle. Again it will pause, move erratically for a second or two, then move exactly as you visualized. The harder you try to hold your arm rigidly still, the faster the pendulum will move. Curiously, doing this exercise in a group produces the greatest effect; I have observed several hundred people sitting mesmerized while their pendulums instantly changed direction at the touch of an intention, often moving in wide, fast arcs. Although this exercise is very simple, the effect can be quite uncanny.
2. Sitting comfortably, hold your right hand open, palm upward. Have the intention that your palm should get warmer. To aid in this, imagine that your hand is touching a red-hot stove or burning coal. Hold the image in your mind. Within a few seconds the sensation of warmth will start to appear. Now hold up your left hand and aim the fingers of your right hand at it, fingers out stiff and close together. Intend for the warmth to shoot out of your right hand into the palm of the left. To aid in this, sweep your right hand back and forth, as if painting your other hand with warmth (but don’t let the two hands touch). Most people will feel warmth broadcast from one hand to the other; others will feel a mild tingling or ticklish sensation in the left palm.
This exercise is most effective if you guide someone else through it. If you are doing it alone, familiarize yourself with the instructions first so that you can try the experiment without interruption.
3. Sit comfortably and hold an ordinary thermometer between the thumb and forefinger of your right hand. Close your eyes and pay attention to your breathing for a moment. As your body relaxes, continue to easily follow your breath, then note the temperature on the thermometer. You are going to change it through intention alone.
The intention of cold. Breathing through your mouth, feel the cool air in your throat as it moves in and out. Think the word cool as you do this. Now imagine that the thermometer is a piece of ice that you can barely hold between your fingers. After a minute or so, look at the temperature on the thermometer—it will likely have dropped from two to five degrees. If you notice no change, resume the exercise for another minute or two before checking again.
The intention of warmth. Breathing through your nose, feel the warmth in the center of your chest for a moment. Now think the word hot and imagine that the thermometer is a glowing red ember you can barely hold. After a minute or so, look at the thermometer—it will likely have risen from two to five degrees. If you notice no change, resume the exercise for another minute or two before checking again.
The last two exercises are based on classic experiments performed over fifty years ago by the pioneer Russian neurologist A. R. Luria. Luria’s most famous subject was a journalist he simply called S., a man who was gifted with an almost flawless photographic memory. S. could attend a press conference without taking notes and afterward recount every word spoken by any number of speakers; he could memorize long strings of random numbers and recall the details of any scene in which he had been present down to the most minute detail.
In addition, S. could use simple visualizations to change all kinds of involuntary functions. If he imagined himself staring at the sun, his pupils would contract; if he imagined himself sitting in the dark, his pupils would dilate. He could raise and lower the temperature of his hands using the procedure described above. Once you have mastered that, you can try his method for changing his heartbeat. If he wanted his heart to beat faster, S. saw himself running after a train as it pulled out of a station; if he wanted to slow down his heart, S. saw himself lying in bed taking a nap.
Luria considered these achievements remarkable, just as future researchers did a generation later when they observed Swami Rama performing the same feats. However, in both cases what was being demonstrated was biofeedback without machines. Instead of needing an oscilloscope or a beep to indicate that an intention was being carried out, S. and Swami Rama relied on their bodies’ own feedback loops.
Although we are not ordinarily aware of it, the body is constantly regulating temperature, heart rate, and other autonomic functions by listening in to its own internal messages. The slightest change in any function registers, however faintly, in the awareness of the nervous system. As these exercises demonstrate, such silent signals can be consciously tapped. Awareness is a field, and by sending an intention into that field, you shift the flow of biological information. This registers in the conscious mind as a faint sensation, intuition, or just a silent knowing. The response varies from person to person, but with practice one’s sensitivity to one’s own awareness becomes stronger.
As applied to aging, this sensitivity is necessary, because the new paradigm tells us that aging begins as a distortion in the field of awareness. The smooth flow of information in the body becomes blocked by stresses, memories, past trauma, and random mistakes. Although such breakdowns are subtle, they are not lost to awareness; the heart, liver, kidneys, and every other organ know when they are malfunctioning. Disturbances in cellular intelligence eventually register in the mind as discomfort or pain or just being out of sorts. What we are learning to do here is to refine such perceptions so that they register at an earlier stage. The earlier it is detected, the more easily a distorted function can be corrected using awareness alone. Full-blown aging is a very gross sign that the body has suffered a loss of energy and information at some vital point, usually in the brain, immune system, or endocrine glands.
Cancer, diabetes, and senility are typical late-stage manifestations of dysfunction. There are rare cases in which patients have used the power of awareness to cure themselves of even the most serious disorders, yet it is far simpler to correct the underlying problem at an earlier stage. The very first stage of any physiological disruption takes place in awareness itself; quite naturally, the best way to move these disruptions back into balance is also by using attention.
Every intention is a trigger for transformation. As soon as you decide that you want something, your nervous system responds to reach your desired goal. This holds true for simple intentions, such as the intention to get up and get a glass of water, as well as for complex intentions, such as winning a game of tennis or playing a Mozart sonata. In either case, the conscious mind doesn’t have to direct every neuronal signal and muscle movement to achieve its goal. The intention is inserted into the field of awareness, triggering the appropriate response.
When I go to sleep, my intention to sleep triggers a complex series of biochemical and neurological processes. Medical science cannot duplicate this connection; it is controlled at the level of intelligence. The connection can be crudely manipulated only from the molecular level (for example, I can go to sleep by taking a sleeping pill, but the kind of sleep that results will not be natural; there will be disruptions in the normal sequence of sleep stages, particularly REM or dream sleep).
When you have an intention, your brain can supply only the reactions it has learned; if you are a good tennis player or pianist, your trained response will produce very different results from those achieved by someone less skilled than you. Yet the deepest skill resides in managing intention itself. The people who succeed best at any endeavor are generally following a pattern of handling their desires without undue struggle with their environment—they are in the flow. If you review the section on adaptability (this page) you will find a good description of how the most successful people solve problems—they allow the solution to present itself, trusting their own abilities to cope with difficult challenges. By creating a minimum of anxiety, conflict, worry, and false expectation, they promote highly efficient use of their mental and physical energies. The resulting ease of mind-body functioning is directly correlated to aging well—the more naturally you exist in the flow of your awareness, the less wear and tear on your body.
As is true of all abilities, people vary enormously in their use of intention. When Professor Ellen Langer and her colleagues provided a group of elderly men with the challenge of acting twenty years younger (this page), the researchers gave their subjects a common focus of intention. The key to reversing the age of these men was that their bodies responded to external cues from the past.
In the following exercise, you are asked to participate in a kind of internal time travel using a visual image from your past; the purpose is to experience how quickly your body adapts to this intention with feelings of renewed youthfulness.
Sit comfortably or lie down with your eyes closed. Pay attention for a moment to your breathing, easily following the rise and fall of your chest, feeling the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils. Feel your arms getting heavy at your sides. When you are relaxed, conjure up in your mind’s eye one of the most wonderful moments from your childhood. It should be a vivid scene of joy, and preferably you should be the center of some activity.
For example, one such scene for me took place while playing cricket when I was a child. In summer my father took us to the hill stations in northern India, and I vividly remember one of these, named Shillong, nestled in the cool green mountains. I can see the flat meadow ringed by hills where we played our games. There was one instance where I made a winning run, and this is the moment I choose to relive in memory. I feel the weight of the bat in my hands and the hard smack when I hit the ball. I see it soaring high, against the green and red roofs of distant cottages. I feel the cool air and the excitement in my body as I start to run. My heart is pounding, my legs straining with all their might. In my mind’s eye I swing my arms open wide, embracing this victorious moment. With every fiber I am participating in it, not just recalling it, and the intensity of desiring to be back there in my youth makes me feel light, expanded, happy, absorbed in an experience so fulfilling that it stops time.
Find your own moment and see how powerful it is for you. Details are important; for that reason, intensely physical experiences are the easiest to use. Feel the air and sunlight on your skin; sense whether you were hot or cold. Observe colors, textures, faces. Name the locale and the people in your scene. Notice how everyone was dressed and acted. But most important, recapture the feeling in your body as you rose up to blend into and become that moment. By rejoining the flow of one magical instant, you trigger a transformation in your body. Signals being sent from your brain are activated just as easily by memories and visual images as by actual sights and sounds. The more vivid your participation, the closer you will come to duplicating the body chemistry of that youthful moment. The old channels are never closed, they are only unused. Therefore, by changing the context of your inner experience, you can go back in time using the biochemistry of memory as your vehicle.
The new paradigm tells us that our underlying reality, the field, is continuous and therefore equally present at all points in space-time. Your awareness and every intention that springs from your awareness are enmeshed in this continuity. This means that when you have a desire, you are actually sending a message into the entire field—your slightest intention is rippling across the universe at the quantum level. We have already seen that when you have an intention related to your body, it gets carried out automatically. The same thing should occur, then, with intentions you send outside your body—the field has the organizing power to automatically bring fulfillment to any intention.
Everyone notices occasional instances when a desire unexpectedly comes true, when something you wished for appears out of nowhere—a call from an old friend, unexpected money or job offer, a new relationship. These are the times when your connection to the field is clear. When your desires don’t come true, your awareness has suffered some block or disconnection from its source in the field. It is normal to have all desires be fulfilled if your awareness is open and clear. It takes no special act of providence to fulfill desires; the universal field of existence has been designed to operate for that purpose; if it were not so designed, you couldn’t wiggle your toes, blink your eyes, or carry out any mind-body command. Every voluntary action depends on the invisible transformation of an abstract intention into a material result.
Your body is the material result of all the intentions you have ever had. In the last exercise, we called back a moment from the past, using intention to create a certain mind-body response. If you imagined your experience vividly enough, all kinds of involuntary reactions—blood pressure, heartbeat, respiration, body temperature, and so forth—started to conform exactly to how you felt in the past. You were reliving not just a visual image but the entire physiological response that went with the image. Millions of such holistic responses went into creating the physiology you now experience. But since you did not possess the skill consciously to use these intentions for your benefit, your body contains stored impressions of traumas and stresses that contribute to the aging process.
In the next section I will describe how to remove these old impressions, but here it is important to learn the mechanics of intention that prevent aging in the first place. An intention is a signal sent from you to the field, and the result you get back from the field is the highest fulfillment that can be delivered to your particular nervous system. When two people want the same thing, they don’t always get the same result; this is because the quality of intention changes as it is sent into the field and then reflected back as a result. For example, if you have a strong desire to be loved, the love you want and will receive is highly conditioned by your experience: The love of Saint Paul is totally different from the love known to an abused child. Nevertheless, whenever a desire comes true, the mechanics have certain similarities for every person:
1. A certain outcome is intended.
2. The intention is specific and definite; the person is certain about what he or she wants.
3. Little or no attention is paid to the details of the physiological processes involved. Indeed, paying attention to the details inhibits the flow of the impulses of intelligence that produce the outcome, slowing down or preventing success. In other words, the person takes an attitude of noninterference.
4. The person expects a result and has confidence in the outcome. There is no anxious attachment to a result, however (if you are anxious about falling asleep, for example, that prevents the very outcome you desire). Worry, uncertainty, and doubt are the three primary obstacles that prevent us from making efficient use of the power contained in every intention. The power is still there, but we turn it against itself. In other words, when you doubt that a desire will come true, essentially you are sending out a self-defeating intention, which the field computes as canceling your first desire.
5. There is a self-referring feedback involved. In other words, every fulfilled intention teaches you how to fulfill the next intention even better. When the result occurs, it confirms the power of intention at a conscious level, increases confidence, and makes success stronger—the effect is self-reinforcing. This changes doubt to certainty. (People whose desires don’t come true also experience feedback, but it reinforces failure.)
6. At the end of the process, there is no doubt that the outcome was obtained by a definite, conscious process that extends beyond the individual to a larger reality—for some this is God or Providence, for others it is the Self or the Absolute. I have been using a more scientific term, the field, but without excluding any of these more traditional spiritual names. In all cases, the material world is an expression of an unmanifest, overriding intelligence that responds to human desire.
These six steps display the most important characteristic of inner intelligence—it has organizing power built in to it. This organizing power is the link that connects intention and result. Without it, there could be no cause and effect. The “quantum soup” would remain chaotic, since without organizing power there can be no patterns, orderliness, natural laws, physical structures, or biochemical processes.
To take advantage of this knowledge, you can use the following exercise with any desire. Do not worry if you have not had much success in fulfilling your intentions in the past. Gaining clarity about the mechanics of intention is the most important step in achieving anything. By going through this exercise, you will be clearing a path for greater success; just have confidence that the field automatically fulfills all impulses sent into it. In some form or other, every desire reaches its goal; it is only your limited perspective in space-time that clouds your perception of the outcome being produced.
1. Sit quietly and use any of the methods already given for relaxing your body and feeling calm inside.
2. Intend the outcome you want. Be specific. You can visualize the outcome or express it to yourself verbally.
3. Don’t get bogged down in details. Don’t force or concentrate. Your intention should be as natural as intending to lift your arm or get a drink of water.
4. Expect and believe in the outcome. Know that it is certain.
5. Realize that doubt, worry, and attachment will only interfere with success.
6. Let go of the desire. You don’t have to mail a letter twice; just know that the message was delivered and your result is on the way.
7. Be open to the feedback that comes to you either inside yourself or from the environment. Realize that any and all feedback was elicited by you.
This last step is extremely important. Being so conditioned by the materialist worldview, all of us tend to look for material results. However, someone who wishes for wealth may actually be desiring the security that he imagines wealth brings, and if that intention is dominant in his awareness, the field might favor an outcome that brought a sense of security rather than material wealth. The feedback produced from an intention is capable of manifesting in unexpected ways, but some result is always produced, however faint.
In regard to aging, most of us want to avoid mental and physical deterioration; we might have a specific intention, such as not to contract Alzheimer’s or cancer, but these intentions might not be effective, since they are disguised forms of deeper wishes, such as not wanting to suffer and die. My suggestion is to intend to remain at the most youthful level of functioning possible. You can also intend, in both mental and physical function, to improve every day, and to reinforce the results of that intention, you can resolve to take notice of anything you are able to do better every day. Do not set any restrictive expectations—perhaps one day all you will notice is that you did the laundry more cheerfully or appreciated a sunset. Awareness branches in a thousand directions, and keeping every channel open is valuable.
Here is one form your intention might take:
Today I intend to experience
1. More energy
2. More alertness
3. More youthful enthusiasm
4. More creativity
5. Continued improvement in physical and mental capacity on all levels
The following intention can be added as an all-encompassing wish:
I intend that my inner creative intelligence will spontaneously orchestrate and guide my behavior, my feelings, and my response to every situation in such a way that all five of the above intentions will automatically be carried out.
Finally, it is helpful to remind yourself that you can rely on this approach because you are tapping into the fundamental nature of your physiology as it operates all the time: “My internal cues are my best feedback, and the more I respond to them, the more I will amplify the force of my intention to get the outcome I want.”