The Golden Mantra

or, how I learned to live more intuitively

I recently put on a free public workshop, shared to my generally engaged and supportive LinkedIn network, about the power of mantras for living the life you want. And I got 2 signups.

But it turned out that one of those two was flying in to Copenhagen the following weekend, so Craig and I agreed to meet that Friday at his hotel in central Cph, as he arrived directly from the airport. Alongside the welcome celebration, getting to know each other and city tour advising for him and his wife, Rebekah, we managed to fit in pretty much the entire mantra workshop. Within about 20 mins we landed with something for both of them to continue reflecting on and using in practice, should they wish. I couldn’t share what impact has come for them from it even if I knew, but the point of the story was that mantras are so simple to grasp fully and so Damn powerful, man.

The 20 min workshop with Craig and Rebekah was at least proof that the concept is easy to get to grips with.

My own life is evidence of the power of a simple mantra, repeated at the right moments.

Mantras were introduced to me by the person who comes up more often in my writing than almost anyone else, Katie Warriner. My sport psych in 2012, we worked on training my subconcious in a way that I am still reaping the rewards of today. Part of that process was creating my best performance description and then formulating it into a series of mantras that I would draw to mind at specific times (e.g. at sudden death, 14-14). The mantra that I used for every reset, every time I got into my en garde position – was ‘Now Fight’. It represented bringing my focus to the present - not the previous hit, or what might happen next. And it represented the warrior spirit that I wanted to bring to the match, the aggressive body position, the fierce mindset.

By adopting this mantra alone, my performance shot to a new level of consistency and increasingly produced 4 or 5 out of 5 performances on my own scale. I was able to play to my game plan and not get distracted, far more consistently. That led to some of the best results of my career, and far more enjoyment of the whole process. I was in flow more. And the wild thing about flow is that you are performing far better than your normal best, and it feels totally effortless. By far the best you can perform and feel, is when you are running in complete flow - no trying, no thinking. 

There is a mantra that has been with me since before my professional sport days, and accompanies me still. I have been a huge admirer of the American author, Hunter S. Thompson, who invented Gonzo journalism. A distilled description of the Gonzo philosophy could be ‘The weirder and more intense, the better’. It sounds a bit extreme, but I have found it to be a remarkably effective way to reframe experiences in terms of the exciting challenge they present rather than the anxiety inducing threat they could just as easily be.

This approach to reframing is well known and respected among ancient Greek and Roman Stoics and modern day psychologists. And I’m telling you, I can get quickly comfortable and find enjoyment in highly weird situations 😆.

Mantras, they just work.

So, what’s the Golden Mantra, and how is that even a thing?

Well, the golden mantra is something that is out in the open, and central to almost every spiritual tradition. I have noticed it being promoted by a myriad sources as the single most important guiding principle to support a good, healthful life. It is ALSO applicable in an incredibly wide array of scenarios. From arguing with your partner, to performing at the highest level of sport, to being in fear-inducing pain, to having a challenging Ayahuasca trip, to pulling yourself back from rumination and into the present moment multiple times per day.

My version of this Golden Mantra is:

Breathe and Let Go

Try it now. One breath in, then a long slow out breath as you allow yourself to physically and mentally just… let go. For one - however brief - moment. The out breath can be more of a sigh – that often helps to really feel the letting go.

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This is what I have understood to be the one principle that will be able to guide you to ever better outcomes in your life, and is the practice that I use throughout my day – just like ‘Now Fight’ at every break in my fight –  to bring me out of my thinking and into the present.

That’s it, my secret.

The simplicity of it masks a profound process going on. When we are trapped in thinking, we are necessarily narrowed in our perceptions and worldview. Our mind is closed to truly new information, because the brain does not so much create new ideas as it is a receiver/filter for them.

It goes like this…

I am sitting at the traffic lights on my bike, waiting for green, and my mind starts to wander – to thinking about the man next to me, to planning dinner, to plotting ideas for my next blog – or to a host of other less important, less desirable thoughts. An internal alarm clock rings and I activate my mantra, take one breathe, feel a sense of release through my body and mind for a brief moment, then see what is still there.

9 times out of 10 the next thought in my mind is of a higher quality of consciousness than the last thought pattern. Sometimes I still do just want to keep planning my dinner because I’m about to get to the supermarket. 😆

The point is not that I necessarily need to change my thinking, it is that I get a moment to choose whether to continue it or take another ‘breathe and let go’. And THAT, is the source of an incredible amount of power.

Viktor Frankl spoke of the space between stimulus and response as holding the keys to all human freedom and power. This underscored the importance of becoming more skilful in operating within the moments before we react to some event.

Breathe and Let Go is all about creating space in your daily thinking to decide whether your thinking itself is desirable – and changing it if not (or allowing it to change itself would be more accurate).

Because, the thing about thoughts is that they are by nature… transient. They are always on the move, unless you grab onto them and turn them round and round in your mental paws. As soon as you let go for a moment, they’re off! It’s amazing really. Even the most sticky thoughts can dissipate in a moment, given the right impetus.

There’s a wonderful physical metaphor for this to help it stay with you, taught to me by my endlessly surprising friend, Darragh. You can try this at home now.

First clench your fist tight.  Hold it closed and just consider it for a minute. What can you do with this hand? …. Hit something, sure. What else? … erm knock knock. But not much more of any real use huh?

Now unclench and loosen your fingers, playing with them a bit in the free air. What can you do with your hand now? Pick up a pen, type on your phone, tickle a kitten, solve 3 Rubiks cubes while juggling them in under 5 seconds, and a hundred thousand other useful things in your life.

This is your mind on constant thinking. As soon as you are lost in thought, it’s a fist –  only able to engage with a tiny subset of potential mind moments. When you give your mind a moment thinking-free, your mind becomes the open hand, able to operate fully unhindered in all those good and helpful ways.

You may be keen to ask, how come your mind could actually operate better without the benefit of thinking? That’s because there are forms of knowing and relating to the world that do not go through our thinking mind. Your emotions, energy and intuition are three such alternative methods.

When you are engaged in the present moment for however briefly, your brain opens up like a satellite to receive messages from all the other sources. And they can be effective when they get their chance!

Here’s an example.

I am launching myself in a completely new direction, and there has been plenty of thought-mulch around how I can share what I am doing with people in a way that I am comfortable with, without selling. I started out for a run, across a sunny agricultural landscape in western Denmark, and my mind went straight to the same old concerns about getting enough people interested to make ends meet… I took one ‘breathe and let go’, then another for good measure, then into my mind plonked the thought that I should write more about why this is the clear next step on my journey, and what I have been experiencing in my own life – to give people a sense of what they can expect if they come along with me.

My blog writing had dipped off for over a year. I hadn’t had much zeal for writing in that whole time, so I have just been writing the odd post when something particular felt worth sharing. The thought that I should begin writing again was followed by the first 4 chapter topics in quick succession. You are reading one of them.

There was immediate excitement to begin writing on these themes, and I felt a spike in my energy for the whole project, and I could immediately sense that I would feel so much better about sharing my story and ideas rather than just a new offering. I have since shared my introduction story with people near and far, and I can swear that this has been an incredible opportunity to meaningfully connecting with my whole network of friends and beyond. So, suffice to say, the insights have not stopped there, but I will, for now.

This was a simple example of how a moment of respite from our mundane thinking can lead to meaningful change in life state.

This is the power of the mantra. It’s the simplest thing in the world, and it’s all about knowing the right moments to employ it, and then doing so with discipline.

This is what I mean when I say I learned to live more intuitively.

The more I have played with this mantra, and this approach to living, the better things have gone for me, and the easier life feels to navigate.

A few weeks ago I had a major decision to make that included an expense that was bigger than I was expecting to pay at this stage in the venture. The decision was weighing on me more than anything had in quite some time. After a couple of days of mulling it over and getting nowhere, I implored myself to leave it be, and I would return to the subject on the morning of the key meeting to check with my feelings on it all. Then, the day before that meeting, my best friend Jake and I both happened to have unexpectedly free afternoons, and we spent them on a wicked-full 2hr phone conversation. I told him my conundrum and he coached me immaculately to consider the thing from all angles. For each question the answer came through me fully formed and clear, and always in the positive for it being a worthwhile investment. I had put the subject out of my mind for 4 days and when I revisited out of the blue with Jake, my feelings on the subject were super clear. I had no doubt any more.

I’m still extremely happy about that decision. And how much easier was that route than stressing over it for an extra 4 days? Better outcomes, less effort. This is the payoff from living more intuitively.

And guess what? The route to living more like this is just the same.

Breathe and Let Go.

Talking about living more intuitively, you will hear the same message repeated time and again from different sources, and maybe not have put them together.

·       Be like water, said Bruce Lee. The guy had extraterrestrial levels of wisdom and conviction.

·       Wu Wei, the art of effortless action.

·       The beautiful physical poetry of Aikido, that teaches the maximum effect with minimum exertion of force - the true path of least resistance practice.

This is really the same lesson being imparted, presented in various forms. Let go. Let go. Luckily there are so many people pointing to this exact thing, that you will get inspiration everywhere you turn. Like this brilliant piece on Unclenching, by Jonny Miller. He says:  “I’ve spent the better part of a decade teaching nervous system regulation to thousands of people, and I’ve realized that most of what I teach distills down to one word: unclench.”

And he produced this lovely interactive graphic, to highlight what happens when you unclench, like our fist.. 

The same way that Now Fight brought me to awareness about my fighting readiness, and brought more consistency and higher peaks to my fencing performances – so my mantra practice today helps me remain aware of my behaviour, attitude and general energy, in any given moment. They help me to choose the contents of my experience, much more consciously, and to ground myself in the present moment experience, however briefly … but often. And that has translated into a remarkably consistent and rare levels of wellbeing and enjoyment of my life.

The mantra process is so simple and yet has led me to sense and follow my intuition far more consistently. And the results keep coming back as exceeding all my expectations.

I can see that this Mantra of Your Life idea is going to be central to my approach going forward.

I will leave you on a creative twist. This guy, he’s another one of my mantras 😃

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If you would like to explore mantras more deeply, just get in touch, I will be creating more opportunities for people to experience my approach without a big commitment of time or money.