Friday, February 21, 2014

Your Brain on Meditation: Gateway to an Incredible Life


Learn to activate your higher brain and fulfill your highest potential.

                                                               -  Jeff Skolnick, MD, PhD



Your brain can take you to heights you can’t now even imagine. Shrouded in spiritual language for millennia, the perspectives and practices of the 21st century give you a rare opportunity to make progress not possible before. Find out why the peak of brain development is life-changing. Learn a simple skill to launch yourself right now. 

Your human brain can take you to heights you can’t even imagine—right where you are. No travel required. Nothing external in your life need change. Develop your brain in the right way and you will have an abiding sense of peace and happiness with the exhilaration of feeling gratitude for each moment and everything in it.  People who have taken their brains to these heights say that they are so fulfilled by being alive they could face death in the next moment with no regrets at all!

Sign me up, right?

Your brain becomes the organ of spirituality at its highest stages of development. This is an indescribably valuable destination capable of changing your life in many ways. To boost your journey, here’s some background into your brain’s development, as well as some practical tips to get you going fast.

We’ll begin with the latest piece of information from the field of neuroscience. It is called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is simply the ability of your brain to change with changing circumstances.

We used to think that our brain mainly grew and shaped itself from infanthood to adulthood.  That radical process, we believed, then slowed almost to a halt at adulthood—permanently. Yet, neuroscientists have been increasingly shocked by how capable of development the adult human brain remains.  If, for instance, you have a stroke and lose your ability to write, it is possible to trick the brain into compensating for that ability in ways that can make that disability seem to disappear!

The same extraordinary process has been brought to bear in another area. Throughout the ages people have discovered the incredible state of being called Enlightenment, Awakening or Heaven Within. This tells us that your brain is capable of “developmental neuroplasticity”—of reconnecting and shaping itself to a level well beyond the average adult’s brain development.

What does reconnecting and reshaping your brain to its highest stage of development require? It requires selective activation of circuits of your higher brain—the parts that tell you that you are alive, that you exist and that guide and direct the programming in the rest of your brain. Develop these higher parts enough and you come to see that this moment right now is precious beyond measure! A life-changing realization that alters your priorities, changes your life and brings extraordinary happiness.

To activate your higher brain you must also learn how to selectively let go of, detach from, witness and direct your lower brain. The lower brain roughly consists of mind and body programming. Programming can take over your brain functioning entirely. It is a circumstance you may not always be aware of. Witnessing and directing your lower brain causes you to flow, as if you were easily surfing through life.    

The ability to radically stimulate neuroplastic brain development is great news for another essential reason. An undeveloped brain inevitably leads to stress, frustration with people, grief over aging, disappointment with life, anxieties, fear of the future—to name a few. This condition has been so pervasive in humanity it has been called “the human condition.” Look inside, look around you and you’ll see the human condition everywhere, informing everything.

Neuroplastic higher development tells us that our lives are not fixed. That we’re not stuck in our programmed selves. That we are capable of so much more than we ever realized. That dreams of a perfect life, with external measures of success, pale in comparison to a life of extraordinary inner success.

Right, so isn’t peak neuroplastic development just a goal for religious zealots or those with extraordinary abilities?

It might have been in the past. Previously cloaked in religious ideology or spiritual language, the 21st century, with its modern perspectives and practices, gives you a rare opportunity to develop your brain fully!

This happens through a series of brain development skills I call Inshifting. Inshifting comes with life and wellness strategies that make this process happen even more naturally and quickly. Together, they’re called the SatoriWest Method. This approach and these skills are centered around strengthening what has been known for thousands of years as an “inner eye:” the control mechanism for your higher brain.

Here’s where you get to participate. You already know your inner eye. It’s where you go, what you power up, to imagine a red apple appearing two feet in front of you. (Try that.) It’s where you talk to yourself or imagine hearing yourself saying the words “think,” “think,” inside your head. (Try that.) Notice a little strain that happens, particularly in your eye muscles. Some energy is required for concentration.

Your inner eye is where you go when you want to get out of your way to say type what you are reading or when you play an instrument, sport or video game—all without interference of your programmed mind. (Try noticing that.) It is where you physically balance your body. (Try observing that.) Your inner eye is also where you fully grasp you are alive and spontaneously flow through life.

So, try this inner eye strengthening exercise: For thirty seconds, close your eyes and say your name repeatedly inside your head, as if you can actually hear it. When your mind takes over and causes you to wander, come back to hearing your name as if the last moment never happened. No stress. Eventually, you’ll feel sharper, more grounded and present. Practice this every day or several times a day. Stretch the time to a minute, then five, then 15 minutes and you’ll begin reshaping your brain towards a life of fulfillment and extraordinary wellbeing.

To find out more about the SatoriWest Method, you can sign up for our free “Flex Your Brain” video series at ZenBrainDoc.com.

Dr. Skolnick offers a free introductory video series available on his website at SatoriWest.net.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Ways to Find Happiness in Life - Is Extreme Well being on Your “Must Have” List?



Play the Brain-Centered Integration Game


Well being is feeling really good. Where everything seems to be clicking — you feel physically well and good about yourself, your relationships and your life. Ratchet that up any amount and you enter the realm of extreme well being. If that isn’t on your list of “must haves,” put it there! The 21st century offers opportunities like never before. 

In the year 2000, having studied the issue exhaustively, the White Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine declared that a “biopsychosocial–spiritual” approach to healthcare was optimal.

When I read that, I could hear the collective ‘forehead smack’ as people thought, “Really? An exhaustive study to say something as obvious as that?”

It’s common sensical. If you want peak well being, you improve every area of your life. The thing is that although we may know that, we forget. We focus on one or two, maybe three areas at the expense of all the areas let alone the key strategies within each one.

Here’s a list. Just scan it. It’s got the six life wellness areas and some key examples of strategies within each one. Before you finish it and begin to freak out because it seems like so much, by the very end of this post you’ll learn that there is more to it than meets the eye:

1.      Physical
·         Exercise — both aerobic and strengthening
·         Nutrition — including optimal food, fluid and fasting
·         Sleep, rest and relaxation
·         Self-health, supplementation and partnering with professionals
2.       Mental
·         Learn about your personality and how you uniquely experience things
·         Understand the story of your family and childhood
·         Discover how to change your behavior and thinking
·         Laugh; have fun
3.      Social
·         Learn communication, assertiveness and negotiating skills
·         Nurture your relationships with love and attention
·         Create supportive and empowering social networks
4.      Cultural
·         Prepare for disasters
·         Learn to manage your time
·         Learn how to organize your finances, home, work and life
5.      Moral
·         Clarify and live in accord with your values and principles
·         Discover your life’s passion and go after it!
·         Do things to continually give back
6.      Traditionally Spiritual
·         Practice your religion if you have one
·         Regularly recount what you are grateful for
·         Give and ask for forgiveness — a lot
·         Find beauty everywhere

Ok, here’s the catch — actually catches.

First, to have extreme well being, you need in some way or another to practice everything on this list and whatever else you can think of that’s relevant to you.

I know, it’s hard to do everything. I get it. And remember what you saw was a partial list. We need a lot of help to practice all of these things. No problem. I have that covered in a new SatoriWest “LifeClub” that you can find out more about later.

Anyway, 100% perfect is not what we’re aiming for. Mostly because it doesn’t exist — which can make it tricky to achieve anyway. Try for about 70% to 80% of the strategies and we’re cookin’ with gas.

Two, now that I’ve said the above, not only do you need to practice all these strategies, you need to do them at about the same time. (Ouch. That probably sounds even harder than the first catch.)

The overall strategy is to practice at least one key strategy from each area of wellness to begin and work up from there. If you can do that, the synergy, the multiplication effect takes over. Not only will you get a higher return of investment, so to speak, but it will make adding more strategies that much easier! In other words, your life will evolve at a much faster pace.

Three, at the heart of the matter, not only do you need to practice one if not most strategies from all these areas, and at about the same time, you need to integrate them. By integrate what I mean is that you practice each strategy with this common end: developing your higher brain.

“Developing your higher brain? Huh?”

Ok, let me back up. There’s a little fact central to total wellness that I left out. Extreme wellbeing basically requires only one thing! It’s the one thing from which everything arises and the one thing you must aim for in return: A highly developed higher brain.

Before you injure your neck shaking your head back and forth, I’ll try to unravel this for you.

Really briefly, when you develop your higher brain you wake up to something that you had previously taken utterly for granted: that your existence is crazy unlikely. It’s rare beyond imagination…and because you can be aware of it, because you can experience it, makes each moment a true miracle. (Learn more about that here.)

If you were to grasp the miracle of your existence — even a tiny bit — you would be in a state of amazement. Grasp it a lot and you would be astounded by your very existence each moment of your life. You would appreciate everything — good or bad! Nothing could take away a deep and abiding happiness and inner peace. You would flow easily through each moment.

That’s also the core definition of peak wellness: Being so aware of, amazed and grateful for your own existence that…

·         your level of physical vitality and health shoots up.
·         happiness skyrockets while inner calm settles in.
·         your relationships become empowering, loving and effective.
·         you are more successful in almost everything you do.
·         you discover a passion to make a difference in the world.
·         there is a sense of connection with everything around you.

To name just a few ways your life improves.

So, you might be wondering, “Well if developing your higher brain inside your head is all it takes to have extreme levels of wellness, why bother talking about wellness? Why practice wellness in every area, at the same time, and directed to…oh, directed to developing your higher brain. I get it. One thing leads to the other. If I practice wellness in a way that stimulates my higher brain and strengthen my higher brain from the inside I’ll experience a quantum leap in wellness and wellbeing.”

That’s the SatoriWest Method: strengthen your brain from the inside while practicing wellness strategies at the same time to make it easier and easier…and you head straight to extreme wellbeing!

To find out more about the SatoriWest Method and SatoriWest Life Clubs, go to SatoriWest.net. 

Thursday, February 13, 2014

An open letter to Global Visionaries Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Page, Jeff Skoll, George Soros, Bill Lee and Warren Buffett.


Dear Gentlemen,

Because of you, the world is already going to be a much better place. Thank you.

Still, I’m sickened when I hear about violence, abuse and poverty—especially on a large scale. I’m saddened because I know the root of the human strife causing this is treatable. It stems from the fact that the human mind causes people to suffer. Everyone struggles emotionally with life—even if their lives are outwardly successful. This observation has been true since humankind began.

Yet, the 21st century offers a historic and rare opportunity for a radical, global transformation. You ought to investigate it. A detailed, scalable and workable plan exists which could, with your support, accomplish what would have been considered crazy, improbable or impossible decades ago…

Make the development to “spiritual” Enlightenment, as a brain and wellness science, so accessible it is commonplace in the world!

What does this boil down to? Teach people to see how miraculous—how incomprehensibly rare—each unique moment of their existence is. This is simple to understand yet challenging to do because it is requires a brain skill. Yet, when people learn to cherish the fact of their existence in each moment—“good” and “bad”—their sense of happiness and wellbeing skyrockets. They connect with each other on a deeper level without ego-defenses and fear.

This is a brain and wellness approach to “spiritual” attainment that gives people of different cultures and religions a common language and principles.

I realize that people have basic physical, safety, social and psychological needs. Yet, with modern advances in the science of neuroplastic brain development, contemporary life-wellness and social psychology it is often possible to bypass lower stages and go to the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to find the peace and contentment of Enlightenment. This ancient discovery can be a practical reality throughout our world today.

I bring unique qualifications to this undertaking—as a long-term, experienced Zen meditation practitioner, MD psychiatrist, former brain researcher, PhD Natural Health Science, author and previous medical administrator. To manifest this integrative approach (called the SatoriWest Method) making it is practical and scalable, I engineered the SatoriWest LifeClub. A community-centered LifeClub helps people get the help, training, guidance and support they need to make fundamental changes in how they experience the world.

An affordable LifeClub has been launched online. It will someday be followed by still affordable brick-and-mortar LifeClub centers located in regions throughout the US and world. Each LifeClub center in an area will be surrounded by LifeClub satellites (mini-LifeClubs) installed in other businesses, e.g. healthcare, fitness, schools/universities, churches, corporations, retirement communities, military, mental health. This is what makes this approach so scalable.

The skeleton of this plan is in place. However, the global change humanity is capable of will never be seen in our lifetimes. Not without you! There is a ton of research and development needed to make the approach even easier, the language clearer, the strategies more powerful, the marketing more global, the website more user-friendly, the operations team more effective, etc.

Please check out our crowdfunding launch at Indiegogo.com and help us now, or explore SatoriWest.net or better yet contact me directly through info@satoriwest.net. I will answer every question.

Be the defining catalyst for this movement and watch the unfolding of a massive global shift in consciousness and wellbeing.

In gratitude,

Jeff

Jeff Skolnick, MD, PhD
CEO, The SatoriWest LifeClub


Live in world you can only dream of. Leave a world you can be proud of.