"Wordlessness shifts consciousness out of the verbal part of the brain and into the more creative, intuitive, and sensory brain regions. Which is more powerful? Well, the verbal region processes about forty bits of information per second. The nonverbal processes about eleven million bits per second."
Martha Beck writes about this in her new book, "Finding You Way in a Wild New World."
"Wounded into Wordlessness."
"Sometimes it takes a radical event to reawaken you into the inner voice that's always telling you what decisions to make, what to embrace and what to avoid, how to steer through various inner and outer situations. This happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist at Harvard Medical School, when, at the age of thirty-seven, she had a massive stroke that wiped out the speech center in the left hemisphere of her brain. An expert in neurology, she was able to observe her own horrific experience with clinical precision, but it took her eight long years of grueling effort to rebuild her verbal functions so that she could describe the event in words. Immediately after the stroke she didn't even recognize her own mother, or know what the word "mother" meant."
"This would have been tragic if it hadn't been so illuminating. You see, as Taylor lost her ability to think verbally, she gained the experience of a human mind freed from language. And that, it turned out, was worth having."
"I felt enormous and expansive," Taylor recounted later, in a TED talk you should watch (Google "Jill Bolte Taylor TED talk"). "My spirit soared free lie a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria." Before her stroke, Taylor "knew" herself to be "a single individual separated from the energy flow around (her) and separated from (others)." But when her verbal brain shut down, she found herself knowing, with equal if not greater conviction, that she lived in a universally interconnected universe in which "we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful."
"This is precisely the kind of thing we hear from menders of all cultures: Wordlessness allows us to see our true nature, and to heal from the violence of a thought system that cuts us apart, destroying compassion for ourselves and others...."
"Unlearning To Be Brilliant."
"To master Wordlessness, heal your true nature, and become a wayfinder, you must unlearn almost everything you were taught in school about what it means to be intelligent. The sharp focus you were told to sustain is actually a limiting, stressful, narrow, attention field - something animals only use in the moment of "fight or flight". Dropping into Wordlessness moves the brain into its "rest and relax" state. This affects the whole body, releasing a flood of hormones that helps repair and heal your body, relaxes your muscles, and puts you into a deep stillness, with expressionless face and soft eyes. Because you're paying attention to so much nonverbal sensory data, you may not respond verbally to comments or questions from other people when you're wordlessly "in the moment."
"In our culture, gazing into the middle distance, ignoring language, and reacting only to genuine social interactions, physical feelings, and emotions is interpreted as laziness or stupidity. This is one reason we're so plagued by unhappiness and illness. Yet when you drop into Wordlessness, you may find that not paying attention to words is a delicate, sophisticated, and at first difficult skill. You won't be good at it without a lot of practice. I don't mean mere repetition, but something psychologists call "deep practice."
"Deep-Practicing Wordlessness"
"Scientists have recently discovered that we physically restructure our brains when we learn new skills, especially when we use a learning process known as "deep practice." Deep practice is more than simply repeating something over and over. In deep practice, we aim for a precise experience, at first "getting it" only in brief flashes, then repeating the effort until we can perform the skill reliably. Wayfinders of all cultures deep-practice dropping into wordlessness whenever they need to orient themselves, to figure out what they should do next or which direction to go."
"You'll find sever methods of dropping into Wordlessness in this chapter. Remember you can't learn them by reading about them. Trying to understand Wordlessness by reading is like trying to understand skydiving by drawing parachutes. Please, actually try the exercises. In fact deep-practice them. You'll know they're working when you begin feeling flickers of peace, calm and safety. You'll become more aware of the subtle clues informing you about your surroundings, about other people's feelings and intentions. You'll want to make choices according to your own perceptions rather than whatever people are telling you. You don't have to start acting differently - not all at once - but you'll begin to figure you how you wish you could act. Persist long enough, and you'll be able to stretch the moments of total clarity into minutes and eventually hours. If you want to be at true wayfinder the will come when you remain in a Wordless state most of the time."
"Techniques for Dropping Into Wordlessness: The Paths to Stillness."
Le'ts start with the best-known ways of reaching wordlessness, which I call the paths of stillness. They involve - follow the logic closely here - sitting still. Meditation, which was regarded as bizarre by most Americans, during my childhood, is now something many of us feel we should be doing, the way we feel we should stop eating sugar and organize our shopping receipts. If you love to meditate, good for you! Keep it up! But if meditation holds the same appeal for you as water-soluble medical fiber, try one of the techniques below. They're very simple, which shouldn't be confused with easy. Persist at deep-practicing these techniques until you feel flickers of softness, expansion and peace. Then practice holding the sensation longer and longer."
I am only going to write one....here Martha lists 3 in her book.
"Path of stillness: Follow your bloodstream."
"This method, which one of my teachers learned from the tracker Tom Brown Jr. is supposedly an Apache technique for putting the mind in a state of Sacred Silence. It's my personal favorite way of dropping into wordlessness.
1. Take a few deep, full breaths.
2. Exhale completely, and pause before inhaling.
3. In the space before you need to breathe in again, focus your attention on your heart until you can feel it beating. This may take up to a minute.
4. Take another breath and exhale. Along with your heartbeat, find the sensation of your pulse moving through your hands, feet, scalp, entire body.
5. Stay focused on the feeling of your entire circulatory system as it channels your lifeblood to your head and extremities. See if you can feel it moving through your organs as well.
6. Perform some simple task - walking, washing the dishes, making your bed - while continuing to feel your heartbeat and over all pulse. You'll find the activity becomes strangely blissful.
"Wordlessness in Motion."
Feeling your bloodstream while you walk around is a level of Wordlessness that can challenge many meditators, who associate deep awareness with sitting peacefully on a cushion in their favorite yoga studio. Fully reclaiming your true nature means sustaining a Wordless connection to your environment and inner condition no matter what's going on. This means replacing thoughts about events with authentic sensations that track whatever's occurring in the present moment. Because thinking is the most familiar state of being for most of us, dropping thought and feeling our sensations and emotions may be frightening, even painful. But in the end, it's far less painful that typical human behavior, which is to become lost in thoughts and unavailable to anything real."
"Our universal teaching from wayfinders is that we suffer more from our thoughts about events than from the events themselves. Detaching from our verbal thoughts eliminates almost all of our psychological suffering. As wordlessness arises, fears about the future and regrets or anger about the past events slip away, because past and future don't exist except in stories in our minds. This, according to psychoneuroimmunolgist Robert Sapolsky, is why wild animals don't get stress-related illnesses. They react with fight or flight responses when circumstances call for it, but then return quickly to a baseline of relaxation." Marth Beck.
I love this book and how she is explaining what I have experienced. How my word mind failed me and I was then plugged into the wordlessness.
