Do Nothing

Have you ever thought about doing nothing? Literally nothing? You should consider the fact it's kind of weird. Us humans are probably one of the very few, if not the only creature with this strange conscious ability to nearly empty this busy, busy muscle up inside of our skulls. Sitting and doing nothing can be very refreshing. But that mind emptying muscle must be trained in the same way. You can train your mind to memorize or to read, or to write, or to read music or anything else. You can actually train it to be empty. You can train it to do nothing. Now, to do so, you have to systematically program certain periods of time during the day or during the week where you actually sit and do nothing. It doesn't have to be a long time. One minute will do. Most people can't even sit with an empty mind for one minute. Five minutes is more than enough. Now, when I do this exercise, you might like this. I like to imagine I'm a leopard in a tree, laying silently in wait for a prey, or perhaps a sniper. And camouflage laying underneath the camouflage for 48 hours to assassinate a villain. Or if you'd prefer a less violent analogy, a jellyfish hovering motionless in the midst of a rolling ocean. There are legends of mysterious yogis who can sit like this and somehow consciously lower their heart rate below 30 beats per minute, which would probably get you diagnosed with something called bradycardia at the average doctor's office or hospital. But yet all they're doing is using their mind to slow their body to do nothing. So I sit, I think of nothing, I ponder nothing, I do nothing. Eyes closed, I embrace pure darkness and nothingness. I don't observe my thoughts because I'm not even thinking about doing that. And when I finish, and again, this is only for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes maximum. It's as though when I finish, this flood of new thoughts rushes into my brain. It's a bit of an oil change. It's a refresher for the brain. It's a bit similar to blood flow restriction training. When you cut off the blood to a working muscle and then when you finish the workout and reintroduce the blood, the blood rushes in and the refreshed muscle then feels alive and unstoppable. The same can be done for your brain. And as you can imagine, stopping, sitting and doing nothing is a fantastic way to step away from the stress of the day, to give you a cortisol reboot, to infuse you with new creativity and mental energy. But just like hitting the gym, it's tough. Let's try it. Do nothing.