David Keefe - Coolmind. A Young Persons Guide to a Calmer Life

This book is a crash course in getting cool n calm no matter what is going on in your life. Youll find it will take anywhere from just a few minutes to fifteen minutes of practice a day to get a coolmind.

The title coolmind comes from an old saying: With a cool mind and a warm heart, which means to act with a clear mind and a passionate heart about the way you want your life to be.

Someone with a coolmind is no stranger to happiness. They are not at the mercy of their moods, not pushing hard against the flow of life and not letting fly with wild emotional displays.

We are all born with a coolmind but somewhere along the bumpy road of childhood we begin to cover it over with worries, fears and concerns. We call this conditioning. Conditioning is what we try to protect ourselves with, but these protective thought patterns stick and then as we climb out of the short pants of childhood into adulthood, they just get in the way. In fact, most of the time they just serve up anxiety and other miserable stuff that keeps us stuck in our drama.

Getting a consciously coolmind is, at least in theory, one of the simplest things in life to do because you dont have to think. In fact, its all about practising the art of not thinkingor at least no negative thinkingif only for a few minutes at a time.

Stress and anxiety mean that worry thoughts are going through your mind ... a coolmind will help you release these thoughts and let go of any worries.

If you are wondering how it will ever be possible to not think, have you ever noticed the momentary calm when you sneeze? Sneezing stops thought in its tracks, which gives you a glimpse of a quiet mind. Its a calming moment. Coughing and yawning can have a similar effect. So does the pre-sleep phase.

There are two main ways to reduce stress and worry in your life ... practise the habit of moving negative thinking to more logical, positive thoughts, which is not always easy, or practise the art of relaxing your mind with meditation techniques.

Relaxation techniques are basically all about helping you to find your neutral feeling place. This is the place where theres just you and your body, without stress, without the thinking. Your coolmind is a calm place and, importantly, you can find it any time you need to!

To put it simply, the art of relaxing and getting a coolmind lies in learning how to let go. By learning how to let go, you are dropping your resistance to the things causing you stress in life. The more you fight or dramatise the things in your life, the greater the stress you will feel.

Coolmind is about finding relief in any situation. Finding relief is the essential precondition of calm and happiness.

Stress can come in many forms. Here are a few ways we bring it on ourselves: thoughts of being inadequate, thoughts of being unworthy, thoughts of being ugly, thoughts of being stupid, thoughts of not being good enough, thoughts that the world will end if I dont get 95 per cent in this exam, thoughts that they hate me.

When you reduce your thoughts, you induce relaxation, and when you induce relaxation, you reduce your resistance.

When you let go of that sort of thinking, you momentarily drop your resistance to life. Thats what happens when you go to sleep; you let go, you drop resistance. And that is why sleep feels so good, particularly when you are stressed.

So stressful feelings in the body are really alarm bells telling you that you have resistant thoughts to what is happening in your life. Stress can manifest itself in the body in many different ways, such as in headaches, stomach and digestive problems, back pain, frequent colds, tiredness, difficulty thinking and the inability to make decisions (the dont know mind).

When you think a thought, either good or bad, your body responds with a chemical to let your body feel the thoughtit matches the thought to a bodily sensation. If the thought was This is a disaster! your chest might tighten or you might feel sick. If it is a happy thought, your body will feel light and loose. Think a panic thought and your body will create chemicals to make you feel panicky. This is known as the flight or fight response because your chemical system is making adrenaline to help you either stay and fight or take off. In the same way, calm and happy thoughts will make your body produce chemicals that enable you to feel calm and happy. Studies have shown that angry thoughts create a bodily feeling that creates even more anger.

Anger literally creates more anger. You see lots of live demonstrations of this on the roads.

Stress urgently diverts the energy required to keep your mind and body healthy into flight or fight chemicals, which, over the long term, run your system down.

If anger is the appropriate emotion to help you express something or to make you act when something is just plain wrong, well, go for it. But move through it quickly before you end up staying in an angry space and doing angry things. But if anger is just the usual way you respond to stuff because you feel threatened when no threat really exists, then learning to take a deep breath and letting the anger go might turn your life around.

If you are often a mess with nerves or panic, or feel useless and full of doubts, your thinking has in one way or another taken you to that state. If, in the middle of those feelings, you try to say positive things to yourself that you dont really believe, well, you just wont believe yourself. What will help you though, is to become aware of your unhelpful thoughts through meditation. By doing so, you will soften these resistant thoughts and reduce their power, so that you can gain clarity.