Being Still
Being Still is not
thinking or talking about it. It is not therapy, meditation or mindfulness.
Being Still is
an exercise in structured mental discipline. That discipline together with a correct understanding of how the mind and thought processes really work will bring mental, emotional and spiritual health and healing.
... "be still and know that I am"...Psalms 46:10
When you have come to realize that you cannot think, talk, meditate, medicate or therapy your way out of depression or PTSD and escape suicidal thoughts, then what?
Being Still is 180 degrees opposite of everything thought, taught and practiced in psychology today.
How can you think and talk about it all of the time and expect it to ever go away?
1. Learn how and why that when your depressed and you continually think and talk about it, even in therapy, you are just feeding the problem.
2. Learn how and why the thoughts will get worse as you continue to think and talk about them.
Have you ever wondered why you sometimes felt worse after therapy than you did before you went in?
3.Your thoughts are the most powerful and influential force in your life, they are the reason you are who you are and why you are experiencing depression.
"as he thinketh in his heart; so is he" Proverbs 23:7
4. Learn how and why depression is not a psychological problem so much as it's a thought problem!
If you have ever thought,
"if I could just stop thinking these thoughts, everything would be fine,"
you were right in thinking that, because thoughts are the root and cause of depression and all the conditions associated with it, including suicidal thoughts.
The most powerful and influential force in your life,
is your very own thoughts!
from The Art and Science of Being Still
In the book, The Art and Science of Being Still, you will learn how the mental processes really work. The reader will gain an understanding of the mental processes in a way that explains how and why depression and PTSD develop. you will learn how and why the affliction progresses in spite of everything being done to stop it. In fact it explains how thinking and talking about it and all of the therapies people are using to help them cope only intensifies and exacerbates the problem, sometimes to the point that many are needlessly driven to suicide.
Being Still, when practiced properly, has been proven that it heals depression and PTSD. It has proven effective for those battling substance abuse also. This book is a detailed record of what I have been teaching at the Battle Creek, Michigan Veterans Hospital.
Included in the book are stories of how people with depression and PTSD overcame their affliction using the Being Still discipline, including the milestones they endured along the way to healing.
Because depression is a thought problem,
stilling those thoughts is the key to healing.
To be still is healing in the Creators way.
He tells us to
..."be still and know".....
There are times and situations in life that we are not able to deal with through actions, words or thinking. Our creator knew this, because He designed and made us and knew that the way for us to get through these situations was beyond our capacity to understand. Perhaps that is a part of His design, or perhaps it is the limit of our design. When dealing with depression we need a way to get us through those times when we are overwhelmed and just can't do it by ourselves, because depression is too complicated. I have found that hose are the times we need to take refuge from our thoughts and our mind by Being Still. There is wisdom in choosing to let go and just be still and maybe let God do it. I have found that between the thoughts, somehow healing takes place.
In the end it is mostly our struggles that mold and shape our character, it is our afflictions that we endure that give us wisdom. We use that wisdom to define and shape ourselves into the kind of persons we want to be. Our Heavenly Father gave us struggles along with the words, "be still and know", to help us cope and overcome.
And that there is unsearchable wisdom in the words,
"be still and know that I am"
CAUTION!
There are a few important keys you should know when stilling the mind. The most important one is that you need to start treating the intrusive thoughts like white noise, both during your efforts to still your mind and then throughout the day. Because, we have found that many times on the path to healing, that as the intrusive thoughts start to lose their power over you they may become intense.
"The reality is that
we are continuously self-involved in self-creating
the life that we are living through
and because of the thoughts that we think"".
The Art and Science of Being Still
The Book is on Amazon
@
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Being-Still-Practical/dp/1648033423/ref=monarch_sidesheet_image
Here is a sample of my book
The Art and Science of Being Still
A practical and proven guide to
mental, emotional and spiritual health and healing
3rd Edition
For my teacher the Yogi Hans Olsen
and his teacher John Methuselah
and John’s teacher who taught John Raja Yoga
in his cave in the Himalayan Mountains so many years ago.
The principles and precepts in this book are based on the experiences and opinions of the author Douglas D. Zaccanelli and should not be taken as medical or psychological advice or counsel.
Table of Contents
It’s all about thoughts 5
A metaphor describing the experience
of depression 11
Resources & Teaching Experience 18
Lunch with a friend 23
How to Be Still 29
Your Attention & The Power to Change 41
Tracking Your Progress 45
Stories of those who Practice 53
Text Conversation with a student
during teaching 67
Truth and lies that exist in the mind 75
Teachings of the master’s 85
Because it is all thought 89
Letting Go 93
The Science of Mind and Thought 99
Knowledge is Power 115
Depression and PTSD
are not psychological issues they are thought issues.
It’s all about thoughts!
Depression and/or PTSD is a thought problem and not a psychological problem and for that reason you can never think, talk, meditate, medicate or therapy your way out of depression, PTSD and the thoughts of suicide.
Because it is a thought problem you should know that thinking and talking about it just feeds the problem. Every time you try to think and reason out in your mind what is wrong with you, you are just feeding those thoughts with the mental energy that sustains and strengthens them. That is how they become overwhelming and intrusive. After all, you didn’t wake up one morning and find out you were depressed, it developed over time as you kept thinking the thoughts it became a downward spiral that found you in your present condition. So how can you expect to heal or overcome an out-of-control mind and thoughts within it by using the same mind and thought processes that the problem is in?
Remember this phrase,
Where your attention goes, mental energy flows.
Your attention is the key to correcting the problem. And it doesn’t matter how serious your condition is, because you still have, and always will have, control of where you place your attention. Up until now every time a thought came into your mind you have given that thought your attention. By using a little mental discipline and learning how to deny those thoughts your attention, they will lose their power over you. By stilling your mind and the thoughts within it for a few minutes a day you will learn how to control your attention and become able to stop giving it to those thoughts. That alone withholds the mental energy those thoughts need to exist, and they cannot exist without the mental energy your attention has been feeding to them.
“With all thy getting,
get understanding.”
Proverbs
I am here to teach you a simple method in how to stop the thoughts that you can’t control. And to further teach you what is really going on in your head.
Being Still is an exercise in mental discipline and it is not meditation, I repeat, it is not meditation, meditation is thinking and conceptualizing which is counterproductive in overcoming depression and PTSD. While meditation has many benefits, using it to try to overcome depression will not work. There is a difference between Being Still and meditation, and that difference makes all the difference as you will see in your own experience.
I have been teaching this little mental exercise for over 50 years. In that time, I have taught this method to hundreds of people and without reservation I can promise you that if you follow my instruction, you will become able to heal yourself from depression and/or PTSD. You will be able to stop those thoughts and melt them away because they can only exist because you continue to think them. Once you learn how to withdraw your attention from them they will die.
Whether battling depression or seeking the realization of lofty goals, as in any pursuit we aim our thoughts and mind at, our condition is the realization of what we have spent so much of our time thinking about. As a person with depression spends so much time dwelling on the thoughts that accompany that condition and then is encouraged to talk about it and explore the so called “triggers” and all the other possible subconscious or unconscious causes of it, the condition will only worsen.
Therapy is a valuable tool in helping people with certain psychological conditions, such as personality disorders or behavior problems and it is effective in helping people to understand themselves better, mending or improving relationships and helping families to interact. But therapy, while it may be helpful in the beginning, quickly becomes counterproductive in trying to alleviate the problems with depression.
Thinking and talking about it has and will only make it worse.
Thinking about it constantly, as you are using reason to try to figure yourself out, talking about it with others and therapy only feeds the thoughts of depression and makes them stronger and more imbedded in your mind. Thinking and talking about them constantly also has an agitating effect on the mind.
Agitation in the mind is caused primarily by thinking and talking about the thoughts that are involved in or have caused the depression. Thinking about depressive thoughts stir emotions and talking about those thoughts intensifies those emotions. They all work together too, as those emotions intensify, the agitation increases and that drives the depressive thoughts to become even more overwhelming. That cycle continues and increases in intensity as you continue thinking or talking about it. All of it feeds the condition, the confusion becomes deeper, and the agitation becomes more severe. Ask yourself how many times you felt worse after therapy than you did before you went in.
These are some of the reasons, but not the only reasons, why continuously thinking and talking about the problem will only make the condition worse. There are other dynamics of the mind and thoughts that are involved, and they are also explained in this book.
Being Still and stopping the thoughts method of dealing with the issues relating to depression and PTSD is diametrically opposite to every method used, taught and thought in the science of psychology. And considering the explanations provided here, which make sense, especially to those dealing with the affliction, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that thinking and talking about your depression could and would only make it worse. If the problem is in your thoughts, how can you expect that more thinking and talking about it will ever make it go away?
To make yourself still and stop thinking the thoughts is not suppressing them, it is just making the conscious decision to let go of them and refuse to think them anymore.
Refusing to think and talk about the things you have gone over hundreds of times before in your mind and with your words is not suppressing them, it is just a conscious decision to let go of them and refuse to think them anymore.
This book is about learning what is really going on in your head. It is about how you came to be so depressed and what you are doing that continues to feed the overwhelming and intrusive thoughts that you can’t stop yourself from thinking.
This work explains it all in a comprehensive and reasonable way and in a way that anyone can understand.
Even more importantly it teaches you how to stop thinking the thoughts. How to enable yourself to be able to refuse the thoughts a place in your mind and your thought processes. When we are depressed, we instinctively know that if we could just stop the thoughts, everything would be fine. That instinct is true, and you will come to understand how and why it is true by reading and studying the principles explained in this book. With that knowledge you will come to understand how and why being still and stopping the thoughts is the process that heals depression and PTSD and even thoughts of suicide.
Being Still is a proactive, structured mental exercise that takes focused, conscious and aggressive mental effort.
My Pond
Our experiences vary but many of us, including myself, can relate to this simple metaphor in describing our affliction, it also reveals some of the dynamics of the mental processes.
I like to use my pond to help you to understand what is really going on within you. This will illustrate the difference between your consciousness or what I like to refer to as your conscious and intelligent spirit and your mind and how the relationship they have with each other works. It also demonstrates some other dynamics of the mental process that will help the reader get a little better understanding of what we who are depressed are going through.
My favorite place to walk takes me down a wooded path deep into the woods and to the banks of a beautiful and remote woodland pond. The pond is not very deep as I can see the bottom and there are plenty of reeds and cattails at its shores. There are a few large moss-covered rocks on its banks which provide a few good places to sit and think.
Upon the water I can see water bugs, there are dragonfly’s that dart and hover and there are some lily pads that flower in the summer. Turtles and frogs are in residence, large and small, swimming around in it.
On a clear day when the wind is calm and there isn’t a lot of disturbance in the pond I can see the bottom. As I walk toward the water, I can see the clouds of dust trailing behind the frogs skimming along the bottom as they dart away from the edge that I approach. As they skim along the bottom I see little trails of dust from the muck their passing stirs up, almost like the vapor trails of a supersonic jet. It is fun to watch.
On a cloudy, windy and rainy day the muck and water of the pond gets churned up and I cannot see the frogs, or their trails and I don’t know, but I assume that they can’t see me either.
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
Albert Einstein
Let me use my pond to illustrate the relationship between your conscious intelligent spirit and your mind. Now in this illustration, the part of your being that is you, your conscious intelligent spirit or consciousness is laying at the bottom of the pond looking up through the water into the day. The water in that pond represents your mind in this example and your spirit, your conscious intelligent spirit uses the water/mind as a lens to perceive life and the world through.
When the water/mind is calm and clear, you can see the day as it is. As you look up through the calm and clear water you can see the sun shining and the trees swaying, the blue sky and those big puffy clouds rolling by. You can see the birds as they fly over and even the dragonfly’s as they dart and hover over the surface. You can see all these things as they truly are in reality. All the things in the world around you, you perceive in the way they are, unclouded, uncolored, undistorted through the calm, clear waters of your mind.
Then as you lay there at the bottom looking up through the water into the day it starts to sprinkle, those little raindrops cause ripples on the surface of the pond and now what you see through the water/mind is a little distorted. You can still see the sun, though it shimmers a little, and you see the blue sky, but the clouds are not as defined. You can still see it all, but things are not as clear and defined as they were before.
Then, as the sprinkle turns to rain the distortion increases, doesn’t it? Soon you can only see the blue sky and some fuzzy patches of white where the clouds are, and you can no longer see the dragonflies or water bugs. Even the sun seems lost, though it still gives its light.
Then comes the storm and as the wind picks up the water becomes agitated, further distorting your perceptions.
In time your perceptions have changed from seeing a clear, defined reality in the light of a calm and clear sunny day to distortion and confusion, eventually even darkness if the storm is hard and continues long enough to kick up the muck at the bottom of the pond. Now you are cut off from seeing anything clearly, all of your perceptions have become distorted, and you cannot be sure of what is really going on in your life and in the world around you.
Not unlike the experiences of life from the minor disappointments, like a summer sprinkle to the storms that we all go through in life, things that happen can unsettle us and interrupt our peace. Our perception and our understanding are affected not only by the storm we are going through but also by the things already going on here within us. All the negative things we have held onto affect us and they are magnified most in times of stress and difficulty.
We will learn that that is why Being Still and letting go of those things and forgiveness of ourselves and others is so important in helping us recover from mental and emotional problems.
The water of the pond represents the substance of mind that acts as the lens that we experience life through. The sun represents light and understanding, clouds and wind and rain represent situations and adversities in life. The muck within the pond represents the negative and unhealthy thoughts, feelings and experiences that we hold onto. A good example of how Being Still affects and heals the mind is given by the example that as the storm passes and the wind dies, and the waters of the pond calm, they soon become clear. Being Still calms the mind in the same way. As we practice Being Still, we are forcing the mind to calm and as it calms, it clears the same way a pond does after a storm. Soon we can see things as they really are again.
Life is all about change, sun, rain, clouds, storms and seasons are all a part of nature, we are a part of nature and like everything else in nature, we and our situations are constantly changing. From the minor disappointments we all have, like when we are in a hurry to get to school or work and the car won’t start or we miss our bus, these are like the summer sprinkle, they unsettle us but usually have no lasting effect. Losing our job or our spouse leaving us represents the storms of life and living, all will pass but at the moment we find ourselves in turmoil, barely able to cope.
The life force within you is conscious and intelligent,
that conscious intelligence is light, and that light is infinite.
“That which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day.”
Verse 50:24 of the Book of Doctrine & Covenants
The pond metaphor helps to explain the relationship between your conscious intelligent spirit and your mind and the thoughts within your mind. Understanding this relationship is extremely important because it explains how you are designed and made.
Your mind, your thoughts and that conscious intelligent part of you are all separate, each with its own purpose and design. These three parts each take part in the mental process and each of them has their own separate purpose and function. Your conscious and intelligent spirit is the most significant and important of these three.
Your conscious intelligent spirit is the life force, that part of you that is living and breathing and occupying your body. Your conscious and intelligent spirit is the part of you that is affected by your living experience, including the things that are going on in your mind.
Your conscious intelligent spirit is that part of you that makes decisions and choices and feels the effects of those decisions and choices. It feels the experience you are having in life; it is the part of you that feels the benefits and suffers the wrongs of whatever happens to you in your life.
Your individual conscious intelligent spirit is the first principle of your existence. It is the life force, it is that infinite and immortal part, it is the witness to life, it is who you are, what you are, it is that part
of you that loves another and has the experience and the feelings that are associated with happiness or misery, fulfillment or emptiness, it is that quality within you that is learning and progressing and making right or wrong choices about life and the business of living.
Let us reason together for a moment.
If you are depressed, how many times have you said to yourself?
"If I could just stop these thoughts, everything would be fine."
You should instinctively know in your heart and mind that that thought is true, and reason tells you that it is!
And this book will confirm it!
Let’s set aside, for a moment, the common belief that the conventional and time-honored ways of working it out through thinking and talking about your depression and PTSD could really work.
Have you ever wondered what would have happened to you if you had spent as much time thinking and talking about some goals you had set for yourself, instead of spending all that time thinking and talking about your depressive thoughts?
Instead of being more depressed wouldn’t you be happy, rich, beautiful, smart, strong and have a romantic relationship with the most beautiful person imaginable?
Seriously, why should we expect that thinking and talking about either of the two, our goals or our depressive thoughts, would have any other effect than magnifying and manifesting them?
You really are what you think and you and the life you are living is becoming what you think about most, and it follows that you certainly are creating your own heaven or hell, happiness or misery in and through the thoughts that you spend most your day thinking.
The foundation and lowest common denominator of our human existence is our thoughts, they alone have almost absolute power and dominion over our lives
Since the early 1970’s I have been teaching this simple mental exercise to people that were suffering from depression and PTSD. Some of those that I helped were just a little stressed out or bummed out and some of them were in deep depression, some of them were even on the verge of taking their own life. I was able to help them by teaching them a simple little mental exercise that I call Being Still. That little exercise, though very simple, always worked for those who would do it. I never much considered how or why it worked, it just did.
In 2008 I started volunteering at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Battle Creek, Michigan (VAMC). I started volunteering because I was deeply concerned by the number of reported suicides happening among the active military and veterans of the military. I knew that if I could teach those people what I knew that I could save some lives.
With more than 35 years of study and teaching the discipline and then working regularly with those suffering with depression and PTSD at the VAMC, I came to a better understanding of how and why that simple little exercise that I have been teaching for so many years works.
This book brings to light a special knowledge that will enable the reader to better understand the mental processes. That special knowledge explains how and why depression and PTSD develop. It explains how and why the affliction progresses despite everything traditional therapies are doing to stop it. In fact, it explains how thinking and talking about it and all of the therapies people are using to help people cope with depression and PTSD only intensifies and exacerbates the problem. And how those therapies sometimes drive the depressed to the point that many are needlessly driven to suicide.
Being Still, when practiced properly, has been proven to be effective every time and often heals depression and those suffering with PTSD. It has proven effective in helping those battling substance abuse also. This book is a detailed record of what I have been teaching including some real-life examples of how effective it is.
Thoughts never stop; they are constant….
That is why they are the most influential and powerful force in your life!
I am a Vietnam Veteran; in 1969 I was drafted into the U.S. Army. After training I was sent to Vietnam as a combat infantryman. I was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. I spent my tour, as an infantryman, conducting long range search and destroy missions of the enemy in the Central Highlands and the Ashau Valley of South Vietnam. Because of my experiences there, I returned to civilian life suffering from severe depression and PTSD.
I overcame my depression and PTSD by my own efforts, by stilling my mind and letting go of, and stopping the thoughts of depression and PTSD. The experiences I have had, together with the knowledge and experiences I have gained by helping others with their affliction, make me uniquely qualified to teach this discipline. This discipline enables those who practice it to heal themselves through their own efforts.
My mission at the Veterans Administration Medical Center and here in this work is to convince the patient and the reader that, with the little bit of knowledge that is taught here in this book and doing the mental discipline I call Being Still they, through their own efforts, can overcome and heal themselves from depression and PTSD.
From page 45
Tracking your progress
Your thoughts may race, you may get frustrated, and you may feel that it isn’t working for you. But it has worked for everyone that does it and it will work for you. Those moments when you have actually stilled your mind and stopped the thoughts, even though the moments are brief and far between, they will have a profound effect upon your mind. Each of us has our own issues, each of us will progress at our own rate depending on a multitude of factors. But our minds are of the same basic design and because of that they all will have the same basic reaction to our forcing them to calm through the steady practice of Being Still.
Track your progress as you use Being Still to recover from depression and PTSD.
With very little variation, these are the most common milestones you will experience as you practice the Being Still exercise as it is taught here. Progress has been known to be accelerated by practicing more often and with sessions longer than 8 minutes in duration, but the sequence never varies.
Days 1-4 The practice is so simple that you will wonder if you’re doing the exercise correctly and you’ll have doubts about whether it is working. Just give it and yourself time.
Days 3-8 Thoughts may become intense and seem to attack for a while. Remember what I said to my suicidal friend at lunch, treat those thoughts like white noise. Like the rude neighbor that left his TV volume on ten, you can hear it but you’re not going to sit and listen to it.
Days 2-on You will be able to sleep better, deeper and sleep all night.
Days 10-14 After a couple of weeks you will reach a point where you start to feel that you have stopped progressing, you haven’t, keep on practicing. You will begin to have some personal revelations.
Your nightmares should have stopped within in about 20 days or even sooner, it depends on their intensity. Trust the process, they will stop.
Panic attacks usually take a while, even a few months for some but if you keep practicing Being Stil they will go away completely.
A text conversation with Michelle, a student demonstrating a typical rate of progress of someone who starts and stops practicing. page 67.
There are times when I have noticed a person struggling with an issue that was obviously depression. When I do it is sometimes hard to decide what to do because if I offer to help, many times they will deny that they are down and even be offended that I asked. That makes it awkward for us both, so I just usually let it go. But sometimes I can’t let it go, and I find a way to help.
This was the scene at a friend’s house one evening. He had a cousin of his living with him because his cousin had lost another job. He could not hold a job for very long because of his lifestyle, which was his addiction to getting high all the time. He was always depressed and on an emotional roller coaster since I knew him but lately, he was getting worse.
One evening, when he was in an especially bad way, I was sitting in the dining room playing a game on the computer. It was getting late and the light in the room was not on, so it was dark in the room. His cousin was sitting there in the dining room at the table also.
So, as we sat there together in the dark, I just began talking to him by saying softly, “It’s all about your thoughts. It’s the thoughts, and you can’t seem to stop them, isn’t it? They just keep coming and are out of control. It’s the thoughts that are bringing you down and it seems that you will never be rid of them, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you now, that the more you think about it and try to figure it out the worse it will get. I heard him start weeping in the dark, so I went on.
I have been through pretty much the same thing as you are going through, and I know how to overcome it. I have been teaching my method to others for many years now. If you listen to what I teach and then do a little mental exercise that I will teach you, you will be able to overcome the intrusive thoughts you are having, and your depression will go away rather quickly.
He said he would, and he listened as I taught him the principles and precepts that I have been teaching others. I then taught him the Being Still exercise and told him to do it at least twice a day for eight minutes each time, which he agreed to do.
I ran into him a few of weeks later and he introduced me to a friend and said, “this is the guy that saved my life”.
“it’s like a freaking miracle, even the nightmares have stopped.”
Student William
William had been in my class for about 2 or 3 weeks and one day, before class, I asked him if he was practicing the exercise regularly or at all. He said that he was using it to help him get to sleep. I asked him if he would try the exercise in the morning too. He said he was in a room with another guy and doing the exercise while the other guy was in the room would be awkward. I told him that he could just lay in his bunk and do the exercise lying flat on his back. He said he would try to do it.
The next week I asked him if he had been doing the exercise in the morning too and he said to me, “it’s like a freaking miracle, even the nightmares have stopped.” So, he went on practicing over the next several weeks and he kept improving during that time and then he finished the program and went home. This happened around Thanksgiving time in 2009.
At that time, I was also teaching in the PTSD unit in another building there at the Battle Creek VAMC. After the Christmas season, around late January of that next year, I was preparing for my class in the PTSD unit when William came into the room.
Surprised, because I never expected to see him again, I asked him why he was there. I knew he was progressing nicely when he left the other unit, and I had never had anyone who had learned and did the exercise come back to me and say that it didn’t work for them.
So, he began to tell me that his nightmares had started again, and he had checked into the unit to see if they could help him figure out what the triggers were. I remember thinking to myself, what the heck is going on? Then it came to me, and I said to him, “you’re not practicing every day, twice a day anymore, are you? He said no that he had gotten so busy over the Christmas Holidays that he was down to maybe two or three times a week.
I told him that there are no triggers, that he had just not been practicing long enough to purify his mind
I told him that there are no triggers, that he had just not been practicing long enough to purify his mind and that if he went back to the two a day, every day, the nightmares would soon go away. I also told him that he should continue to practice the two a day for long after he thought he wouldn’t need to anymore. And I also told him that he may have to practice Being Still at least once a day for the rest of his life. He said he would resume practicing twice a day.
The next week when I came into class, he was there waiting to tell me that the nightmares were gone within a couple of days after he started back to twice a day. After that he came to class every week while in that program and he commented to me once that he understood how his mind was being purified as he continued to practice.
the book is on Amazon!
@
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Being-Still-Practical/dp/1648033423/ref=monarch_sidesheet_image
