Dr. Fleet Maull | Neuro-Somatic Mindfulness (NSM): How To Activate The Task Positive Network

When we focus our attention on anything, the body for me is the most efficacious thing to focus our attention with. That activates the task positive network. And these two networks are mutually inhibitory to a degree. So when we bring on the task positive network, the default mode network starts to go offline quite naturally. We find the mind quieting down naturally. This is really important for meditation because often people get the idea I'm trying to get rid of my thoughts. That doesn't work. It's counterproductive. We really want to just let the mind be as it is and let the thoughts handle themselves. But by yoking our attention with the body, the mind will naturally quiet down and we'll find our attention stabilizing. And then we can drop deeper and deeper into awareness, being and flow. And as we do, anytime we're in these states of flow, coherence, resonance, deep beingness, we healing our nervous system is getting untangled, we're healing the traumas, we're releasing the traumas. That's all happening organically and we're developing the architecture for awakening. Now it could be that what we think of in various spiritual traditions as full blown awakening, enlightenment, Buddhahood probably requires some nonlinear tipping point. But the way we get to the place where that tipping point could happen is by strengthening these five neural networks. And we become a very self actualized person, able to live in a very awake, balanced way, in a very relational way. And then who knows what tips us into some kind of ultimate liberation which I do believe is our destiny for all of us. But we can certainly work on becoming highly functioning, resilient, joyful adults, able to create really positive relationships with each other by targeting these five neural networks. And you know, because of what we know from the ancient yogic sciences east and west and current neuroscience, we now can target these networks with greater and greater efficiency and use different practices like breath work, approaches to meditation, like neurosomatic mindfulness, various physical and body work. All the work you're doing in this festival is all related to this eft, tapping, things like that, affirmations, visualizations, and we can develop our own practice stack of these various things and experiment like If I do five minutes of this and then 10 minutes of that, and then 10 minutes of this, you know, we can learn to build ourselves into a state of complete openness, gratitude, forgiveness, even bliss and ecstasy. And when we're in these states, the brain is learning how to return to those states and developing a neural architecture that supports living that way more and more. And we can do this in very targeted ways. And unlike any other time in history. We have access to all of these practices coming from all the ancient contemplative and yogic traditions. And then we have all the modern insights from positive psychology, neuroscience, quantum theory and so forth. So it's a really amazing time to be alive.