Going On A Vacation Of The Mind Through Meditation with Briana Bragg

 

Taking a vacation of the mind from the pressures of business and whatnots is a necessity for corporate athletes. The best destination is through meditation. CEO of Vacation of the Mind Briana Bragg created a unique meditation program that is an excellent tool for stress reduction, improved focus, and concentration. Author of the upcoming Journey into Tranquility: A Three-Step Process to Guided Meditation, Briana breaks down the different techniques on how to reduce the noise and clutter from our minds and produce from a calmer state. Learn how to do breathing properly and find out what happens if there’s prolonged exposure to cortisol. On top of that, determine how meditation coexists with high performance and the one key to creating a visualization.

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Going On A Vacation Of The Mind Through Meditation with Briana Bragg

I have a special guest, Briana Bragg. She’s going to be joining us. I’m excited about interviewing her. Briana has created a unique meditation program that relieves stress, refocuses the mind and takes every practitioner on a peaceful journey to inner peace. She believes that meditation is a great tool for stress reduction, improved focus and concentration. We all need more of that and it also increases immune health. Who wants to be healthy? Everyone wants to be healthy. We’re going to be talking about meditation and how we can utilize that to become better, to improve our lives, to improve our businesses and to be better corporate athletes.

We’re going to be talking about how meditation helps the corporate athlete. It’s all about performance. A lot of times, when we are talking about being an athlete or performing, it’s all about taking action, getting in the practice, having the mental capacity and the mental mindset to perform. A lot of people don’t think about meditation. It is the last thing you think about it. It’s too soft, we don’t want to do that, but we’re going to talk about how meditation can be helpful, how it can reduce the noise and clutter from our minds and allow us to produce from a more calm state. That’s what we’re going to be talking about. Briana Bragg, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure. I’m super excited about the topics that we’re going to be discussing as it’s near and dear to my heart. Having been an entrepreneur for several years, a CEO, and growing in a fast-paced business, we could all use a little slow down in our lives.

We’re going to be talking about how we can implement slowing down, because our life goes fast and if you’re trying to go to the top, then it’s nonstop. It’s always chaos. It’s always going to the next task and getting the next task completed. It seems like we can never get to a place where we can calm our mind. Let’s talk about why it’s important to calm the mind. Why do you think that’s important?

It is absolutely important. The beautiful thing about where we are now is that research is finally backing this thing that we’ve called meditation for thousands of years. It’s able to take a look at what’s going on in the brain and what’s going on in the body. I’d like to make a small comparison. When you think about your computer, you think about you’re using it every single day and you don’t turn it off. You don’t give it that time to reset and unplug. You’re constantly using it. Before you know it, a few days go by and everything is running slowly. Everything has slowed down. The programs aren’t loading correctly. You can’t get your programs to work. You’re ready to throw the thing out the door.

Back before we all had laptops, the thing was to unplug the computer, give it a few seconds then plug it back in. Now it’s called the restart button. You restart or you shut it down. You give it a few seconds and you turn it back on. Our bodies are similar to this. If we constantly go, before you know it our programs are going to start running slowly. Our programs are going to start slowing down. They’re not going to be functioning properly. Meditation is that reset button like the computer. It is that ability to unplug preferably a few minutes a day and to hit that reset button so that it gives your body and all the programs running inside time to recharge, gear back up and start functioning properly again.

I know a lot of people don’t feel that meditation can do that. When we think about hitting the restart button, it’s a vacation. Let’s step away from work altogether. A lot of times, we don’t think about hitting the reset button. In the corporate world, maybe a couple of times a year, you get away, you do a whole vacation thing. How do we get into that habit of hitting the reset button every single day?

What I love about meditation is it can be like taking a vacation every single day in your mind, hence the name of my company, Vacation of the Mind. We believe that you can go to a beautiful place anytime that you want to even if only in your mind. When you come back, you can feel that same rejuvenation and that same recharge if you had taken a two-week vacation. I’m a huge proponent of vacations. They’re super important. I’m an even bigger proponent of taking that in your mind. A lot of people think meditation is this scary subject. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t know if they’re doing it right. There are a lot of false beliefs around the fact that you need to be highly trained, enlightened or even a monk sitting on top of a hill somewhere.

What we need are practical techniques to start your day off. Focused breathing is one of the best things you can do for your body. There are techniques to help you get to refocus your mind or go to a beautiful place in your mind. Give your body that time to reset. The beautiful thing about where we are with science now is it is finally coming around and showing that meditation does have an impact on the stress receptors of the brain. It can go in and change the neural pathways of the brain. What’s interesting about our brain is that our neural pathways, over years and years of programming, they become triggered or become designed to respond in certain ways. Meditation has the ability to go in there and retrain those neural pathways.

This is the study of neuroplasticity, which is a fascinating study in this field, but it can go in and retrain those neural pathways to respond and react in different ways. Science is also showing that meditation is going in and changing at the DNA level and at the cellular level. People who have a disease in their body are able to utilize meditation as one of the many tools to help at that DNA and cellular level. It’s changing our DNA. If you have a morning routine or an evening routine, when you’re able to implement it into your daily practice, you can see the change by seeing the response that you have in the way that you react to situations. You can come from a place of being calmer. Our decision-making skills are improved when we implement and practice meditation on a daily basis. We’re operating from a calmer state instead of our neural pathways firing off, so we react with whatever craziness, anger, out of emotion. We can slow some of that down.

I’m a big proponent of emotional intelligence. I believe that in the corporate arena, there’s a lot of stress, a lot of chaos, and it takes a lot of emotional intelligence and emotional maturity to handle all of that. When you have to make decisions under high-pressure situations, being able to think clearly and quickly cause even more stress because you have to be able to perform that. How does one calm that down? How can we utilize meditation? I understand the science behind it and how it works, but if I’m a high performer at work and I have all of these decisions that I have to make on a consistent basis that is high pressure, high visual situations. Where do I implement meditation? How does that come into play?

One of the simplest techniques of meditation that we all do on a daily basis, but sometimes we forget how important it is, is focused breathing. Believe it or not, there’s a right and a wrong way to breathe. A lot of us breathe the wrong way, especially when our body is in that stressed-out state. That’s referred to as the fight or flight response. What we find in our atmosphere is that we live in a fight or flight response a lot of the percentage of the time. Back in the caveman days, this was known for when a bear comes, you can stand and fight or you need to turn around and run. What it does is it pumps cortisol all through our body to give us that adrenaline rush that we need to either fight the bear or to turn around and run. Because of all of the stress that we stay under, especially in the corporate world and having to make these decisions that aren’t easy on a consistent basis, we stay in that fight or flight response. We stay with cortisol pumping through our systems, which is not healthy all of the time. What’s one of the best and fastest ways to reduce that cortisol, to reduce that adrenaline rush, to calm yourself down in a state of panic or in a state of, “I need to make a decision quickly,” what do I do? That would be focused breathing.

A lot of us breathe into our chests. We inhale and exhale through the mouth or maybe we inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth, which can keep our bodies a little more hyped up. One of the best forms of breathing for calming the central nervous system is to inhale and exhale through the nose. You want to breathe into your diaphragm. We like to do a technique here at Vacation of the Mind where we use a balloon. Imagine you have a balloon sitting inside of your abdomen and as you inhale that balloon expands, and as you exhale that balloon contracts. That brings your focus and attention into breathing into your diaphragm versus breathing into your chest. It’s one of the best ways as you’re inhaling and exhaling through your nose to get the central nervous system to react and respond quickly. Three to five of those deep inhales, if you can do ten even better. It’s amazing how quickly you can get your body to respond. I practice this on a consistent basis myself. Right before I’m about to walk into a big meeting or if I’m in a big meeting and things get a little crazy as they sometimes can in the corporate world. The beautiful thing about breathing is nobody has to know you’re doing it. You can literally sit there and breathe. You can sometimes even control the response of the room by getting yourself into a calmer state.

Not to toot my own horn in the corporate world, it’s one of the things that I have been known for. I’ve had people mention that to me, “You have this calmness about yourself. When there are chaotic situations, things that went wrong, you stay calm,” and I do. I’ve practiced that because I realized that being overly excited or too pumped up about certain things, getting too emotionally involved with things doesn’t lead to anything good. The best thing you can do is be overly excited about it and you start making irrational decisions and things that you probably wouldn’t do if you were under a calmer state of mind. I believe that being calm gives you that ability to think. Sometimes we think too quickly, we react to the first thing that comes to our minds and that may not be the best response. We’re getting a little bit more technical here. That’s what we’re looking for. We’re not looking for a reaction when we’re in those situations. We’re looking for the response because the reaction is just reaction, but when you can respond, you see a benefit from meditation. It is to get to that response and maybe it’s the right response or a better response than a reaction would be.

Focused breathing is one of the best things you can do for your body. Click To Tweet

When you’re in a panic state, when a big decision comes across your desk or some bad news come your way or whatever it might be, we panic first. That’s how our bodies are designed and our brains, unfortunately, are designed to think negatively first. In every situation, we tend to go to the negative solution or the negative answer. Think about when you’re in a panic state, your body is hot, your heart is racing, and you can feel that heat throughout your system. Maybe your palms are sweaty. Your mind is going crazy with all these what-ifs or crazy situations that might not be real. Sometimes it’s interesting when you think about how our intuition isn’t the right thing. Sometimes our mind does throw us off and it gives us the wrong scenario or the wrong situation. At that moment, when you feel your heart’s racing, you’re sweating. You feel that heat all over your body and your mind’s racing. If you can become aware of how your body is reacting to that situation and utilize a breathing technique where you get yourself to calm down, typically the situation isn’t as bad as you thought it was. Instead of reacting to that situation, that’s when you can get into that response mode and go, “Let me think through a few of these solutions instead of doing that initial thing that probably isn’t the right answer.”

You talked about the cortisol release whenever you are in fight or flight state of mind. What are some of the negative benefits? You said it was unhealthy for you. Why is it unhealthy? What happens if there’s prolonged exposure to cortisol?

Cortisol is a hormone that’s important for our bodies, which is part of the reason why we produce it. It has some amazing benefits to it but the unhealthy part comes in when cortisol is constantly being pumped through our bodies. The problem with us not identifying stress and not allowing ourselves that time to reset and recharge is that many of us live in that panic state consistently. Think about jumping out of an airplane, you go skydiving, you walk up to that plane door and you’re freaking out. You’ve got butterflies in your stomach. I know you’ve done this. Think about some of those things that you felt when you went skydiving, and maybe you could even share a couple of them. Were you panicked? Were you scared? Were you excited? What did you feel?

I was all of those things. I can’t believe that I was doing that, but it was on the bucket list. I was like, “I’ve got to go through with this and I’m going to face my fear.” The adrenaline was pumping and I was frightened. I was excited. I had a lot of emotions going on.

That adrenaline gave you the courage to step that foot out of the plane. Maybe they had to push you, maybe you were one of those, but that adrenaline ran through your body. That’s that constant excitement. Your hands were probably shaking a little bit. Your legs were probably jittery. It’s almost like having a dash of caffeine that’s running through your bloodstream. The problem with the cortisol and the adrenaline rush is if it’s constantly doing that, you’ve got to think about your central nervous system. It is constantly on guard and constantly having those nerves on high alert going, “Mayday, we’re about to jump out of a plane.” That’s not healthy on our system. That wears down our internal organs. That puts a lot of pressure on our heart. That puts a lot of pressure on our brain to constantly be making all of these decisions and all of these emotions are coming up.

If you were to look at cortisol as you’re constantly in a state of about to step out from the door of that plane, if you live in that state constantly, it’s not healthy on our internal organs or on our central nervous system. Adrenaline is needed for that moment to take that stuff, fight that bear, turn around and run as fast you can, or lift a car off of somebody if it’s on them. It’s needed. It also has some other health benefits to us throughout the day, but we don’t want to live in that constant state. Whereas meditation when you can give your body that time to go, “We don’t have to operate here,” it does that reset to the central nervous system and quite frankly to your internal organs. It’s great for your heart, great for your immune health, and great for a lot of other health factors that come in place. Giving your body that reset instead of constantly living in that mode of, “I’m going to step out of this plane. What am I doing?”

You think about before you step out of a plane, there’s a lot of stress that’s going on in your body. Unfortunately, a lot of people live their lives like that even though they’re not stepping out of a plane, but because of all of the things that are going on in life. It’s a high-stress situation. I agree with you relative to the impact that it has on our internal organs, but I’ve also read some things and heard some things about how this can lead to weight gain and other health problems like heart disease and other things like that. Can you speak on that as well?

 

It does. When our cells hold cortisol or have cortisol in them, it can lead to weight gain, one of the largest contributing factors. It’s not healthy for our heart. Think about that moment when your heart is pumping so much blood into the system, it’s on overdrive and we live in these stressed-out states. Might I add, a lot of the stress comes from the perception of our situations too or all of the things that we have on our plates, that to-do list, not only at work but at home. We’ve got this thing that we have to accomplish, that thing that we have to accomplish. A lot of times we put that stress on ourselves and it overworks the heart. It can lead to high blood pressure.

It can absolutely lead to a more active central nervous system. All of these things lead to disease. They’re finding that being stressed or staying in a stressed-out state is the number one leading cause of a lot of diseases that we have. When you’re able to remove or reduce, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to remove the stress from our lives fully. When we are able to reduce some of that stress and change your perception on the stress, that’s something that you like to talk about as reframing. It’s reframing your situation, reducing some of that perception of the stress and reducing the stress or giving your body a break from it. That’s when meditation is being shown to help with lowering blood pressure, helping those that are at risk for heart disease, helping some of those risk factors to lower them. It’s got some good benefits to our heart and our immune health.

There’s something that you mentioned and I want to raise an even higher awareness about that. Life is stressful. We can’t escape stress. One thing I want to emphasize is that stress has never killed anyone, just like overwhelm has never killed anyone. It’s the inability to recover from the stress. To live through life and think, “I’m going to have a stress-free life,” that’s a little far-reaching. The idea here is resistance. You’re going to have resistance, but it’s how you manage it. What I love about meditation is it can be used as a recovery technique. You had stress upon you. That’s what makes meditation important because we know that going in. When you wake up, you know that you’re going to experience some level of stress. It’s important to have a plan in place to recover from that. It is not sleep alone. Although sleep is a recovery mechanism, we all have to sleep. Meditation is a tool that we can use to recover from stress, recover from overwhelm. What are some of your recommendations for an individual to practice meditation?

Definitely, it’s the breathing techniques. I encourage anybody who doesn’t have experience in meditation to start there, spend five minutes in the morning, five minutes before you go to bed at night focusing on your inhale and your exhale. I gave you the balloon technique. That’s an easy way because quite honestly, lying in bed or sitting down in a room and focusing on your breath isn’t all that exciting. It’s boring, to be honest especially to those people who are starting out but it’s super important for our health. Focused breathing is what I like to refer to it as conscious breathing. It can be a good place to start. There are a lot of different meditative styles and meditation practices. Some of them include observing your thoughts as if you’re sitting up in a blimp above a football field and you’re looking down at the football game. Similar to that, observing your thoughts and not having judgment to your thoughts, that’s a mindful meditation practice. Other meditation techniques work to help you clear your mind and empty your mind.

We at Vacation of the Mind always start with breathwork, getting that central nervous system to calm down and we use a variety of refocusing techniques for the mind. Some of them could be prayers, mantras and chants that you repeat over and over again until your mind has refocused. Some of them might be to pull all of your thoughts into your mind, observe them, and don’t have any judgment with them, but then let them go. We do that with something that’s called the broom technique, where we’ll pull all of them in, we’ll take a look at them as if we’re observing them from up high, we’ll take a broom and we sweep them out of our minds. We’ll take our focus back to our breath.

Part of my favorite is where we do journey into a beautiful, tranquil, serene atmosphere. One of the things that we do from our guided meditation styles is we take people on a beautiful vacation of the mind into a beautiful, serene atmosphere, whether that’s a waterfall, on the beach, the top of a mountain or a beautiful park that we’ve been to. We allow their mind to refocus from the noise, the clutter, the chaos, the responsibilities, and see themselves in this calm, peaceful atmosphere. It’s my personal belief that when you’re in that calm, peaceful atmosphere, it’s a lot easier to walk into stillness from there than to sit down, try to close your eyes and go to stillness because quite honestly those thoughts are still going to come up. We’re probably not going to be able to achieve meditation in the way that we want to in terms of being able to be calmer and stiller.

You talked about quieting the mind. A lot of people may find that quite difficult. I practice meditation myself and when I first got started that’s one of the hardest things that I had to do. I had to overcome that in order to meditate because every time I start, I want to clear my mind and I can think of ten things that I’m thinking about. It’s preventing me.

A lot of the stress comes from the perception of our situations. Click To Tweet

That’s what happens when you get to calm down and get still, and they flood into your head. It’s like everything you have going on in your life wants to come into your mind at that time.

I was in a situation when I’m going to meditate. I’m going to quiet my mind, I start thinking and I’m like, “I need to go do something.” I stop meditating. I ended up going to work on something else because it’s like, “I forgot to do that.” It came up there. What is your recommendation about quieting the mind? How can we do that? What are some of the techniques for that?

You first have to start with breathing because if your central nervous system is still in that crazy state, it’s hard to get your mind to start calming down. First, you need to start with that breathing. You need to get your central nervous system to relax. A few of the refocusing techniques that we use, one of them is the letting go technique. It was a technique that I was taught in my certification class and I absolutely love it. It’s where you put your thought into a balloon, you see yourself holding onto the string of the balloon, and you let that balloon go with the thought inside of it. You watch it high into the sky.

From there, I typically like to bring people to focusing. If you’re sitting there or lying there with your eyes closed, I like to bring people to focusing on the darkness behind their closed eyelids. This is the closest technique to the state of nothingness. It’s not easy at first because you’re going to get those thoughts to continue to come up. In fact, when you first start practicing meditation, those thoughts are going to flood your mind quite often. If you can really get your central nervous system to calm down, try to let those thoughts go and focus or refocus the mind on the darkness behind your closed eyelids.

That’s a great way to come into stillness or nothingness, but you really do have to practice it and you almost have to tell yourself, “No, thank you. I appreciate you for being there, thoughts. I’m going to let you go right now,” and bring your attention and focus back to that dark space. The beautiful thing about this technique that I love is it gets easier with practice. When I first started out with this, it took me a long time before I could sit down, close my eyes, bring my attention right here and let everything else go. I’m now to the point where in the middle of a crazy situation, stressed out state, my mind is going crazy before bed, I have gotten a lot better at being able to practice this technique and allow my thoughts to go quicker and faster than before. With practice, you get better at these techniques.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but if you think about this deeply, anytime you are in those high-pressure situations, right before it, it seems like the body automatically wants to take a deep breath. Have you ever been in a place where like jumping out of a plane, in those moments, one of the things that you automatically naturally do is, “Let me get myself together?” You start breathing. What meditation is it’s an extension of that and it seems like it’s a natural thing that the body wants to do. Is there any scientific evidence about the body’s natural or automatic response to those things?

I know that we have an automatic response to the correct breathing itself. As far as scientific research in what our body first goes to, I haven’t specifically read any of that myself. I’m sure there’s something that exists out there, but you’re right. It does. It is a natural thing that we want to do is take a deep breath. Are we taking a deep breath in the right way that’s going to get us to calm down? That’s the real question there.

 

Let’s talk about high performance. Most high performers that I know do meditate, but before it wasn’t so. When we think about high performance, meditation isn’t the first thing that comes to your mind. It’s killing it or being on beast mode. Is there a link between meditation and high performance?

Absolutely. Meditation, I love the science behind the productivity, the focus and the concentration that’s coming out around all of this. That’s how I got into meditation. I’ve been an entrepreneur in the digital marketing space for several years, and I started it in college. I was a kid that was good at doing this thing called social media. It’s now one of the biggest trends we have in marketing these days. I built a successful company within the first few years of my business. The problem was I didn’t have the right tools and techniques to treat my body right. I wasn’t performing at my highest level, even though I had all this success and all of these clients. I was in meetings constantly and to the outside world it was like, “This girl has her life together.”

What happened to me was my body ended up shutting down completely because it couldn’t handle the stress. It couldn’t handle all of that high performance without the ability also to shut down and relax. That’s where a lot of health problems for entrepreneurs and high-level people in the corporate fields, that’s what happens to them. They do begin to develop health problems. They begin to develop diseases because they don’t get their body that time to shut it down and relax. To managers who lead teams, I highly recommend having your team be introduced to meditation because what happens is it slows down the brain, which then improves focus and improves concentration. It’s showing to improve decision-making ability, reducing team conflict and improves creativity in the brain. It’s allowing your brain to function at its highest level instead of making a decision out of that reactionary state.

For me, as an entrepreneur, it has been a lifesaver because I was always that A-type personality that was go and can’t stop. I lay down in bed. I’m making lists of things I needed to do the next day. I’m up two or three times throughout the night writing down my ideas. It was a crazy chaotic lifestyle, but it has allowed me and research is showing that it’s allowing a lot of other high performers to function. We call it A game. You function better at your A game because you’re giving your body the time to unplug. You’re giving that computer the time to reset, rejuvenate, and come back in it with better decision-making skills and higher productivity.

Does this provide the same benefit to an athlete? One who’s maybe working out on a consistent basis and that goes for the body, training and sports activity?

Yes, I was an athlete all throughout middle school, high school and it was cool. In high school, I learned the art of creative visualization and how to utilize creative visualization to improve my game. I played volleyball. I was a great all-around player, but I was the worst server on the team when I first started out. I could not get the ball over the net. It was bad. When I coupled being able to breathe with techniques that creatively would visualize the ball going over the net and landing in a certain place, I went from being the worst server on the team to being the best server that scored our state championship points. Go figure for that. Meditation is being utilized by the athletes to be able to help place the ball and improve their game.

We’ve got to have a step-by-step process to sit down and start creatively visualizing what you want yourself to see. If your body is still in that reactive state or that stressed out state, it’s not going to be as effective as if you can start with breathing. Get your body to calm down, refocus your mind, and start creatively visualizing what it is that you want that game to be like and how you want to play. You can do this in the corporate world, too. If you’re trying to get your team to the next goal, if you’re trying to accomplish that next stage of your life, start utilizing these visualization techniques in meditation to see yourself where you want to be. What that does is that helps to program the subconscious. It can go to work and start making the action plan happen for the picture that you keep telling it you want it to work towards, that you want it to be.

The brain is the hardware of a computer and the mind is the software. Click To Tweet

I work with teams and a lot of situations where they want to go from where they are right now to where they need to be. One of the biggest problems in the corporate world is that it’s hard to get everybody on the same page. A lot of times, the departments don’t communicate with each other. When you go into work with a team, have a meditation and you can creatively visualize all together what that next goal looks like, feel yourself having done that goal, and seeing your self-accomplishment. It’s powerful for getting to that next phase.

Being an athlete and suffering an injury, how I recovered from that injury was with a lot of visualization techniques. I would visualize myself walking again. I would visualize working again. I’d visualize myself being productive. I find myself in certain situations, I can handle those situations because it felt I had been there before. It was a result of the visualizations that I was completing. I felt even in the corporate arena, if you’re a leader or an athlete, this is a powerful tool because we are in such demanding situations when we can feel familiar with them as a result of the visualizations. It’s an opportunity for us to put ourselves in those demanding situations. The fictitious type of environment because it’s in our minds, but then when it’s time for that to play out, it’s running a play. You visualize this play over and over. You visualize what defensive players are going to be and how you are going to offensively maneuver through that. You can be familiar with that situation and make moves unconsciously. You’ve been there before because of the visualizations that you’ve been completing. This is powerful and useful even in the corporate world.

A term I like to utilize here is the brain is the hardware of a computer and the mind is the software. Your brain will function based on the software that you’re putting into it. What are you plugging your brain with? How creative visualization works is that you’re plugging your brain with the solution of what you want it to do, see, feel and be, and it goes to work to make that situation happen. That hardware goes to work to say, “We’ve got this software that’s feeding us the thoughts, the ideas of what we want to be, where we want to be, how we want to be functioning, or responding.” The subconscious goes to work to find the action plan to make that happen.

One key to creative visualization is you have to put the action steps yourself behind the creative visualization. You can’t just lay in bed and say, “I want to be this successful,” and not put the action behind it. Another thing with creative visualization, what makes it even more powerful is if you can also couple that with the action steps, see yourself doing whatever you need to do, whatever it takes for you to get there and coupling it with the feeling and emotion that you have of having accomplished that. That’s when that trifecta makes it even more powerful. I encourage people to do that over and over again because it’s that repetition of plugging your brain in with what you want it to do, see, feel and be. That helps the creative visualization come to fruition.

A lot of people take meditation lightly, but as we continue to talk, this is a game changer because what’s coming up for me is that you can’t get out of what you don’t put in. Here’s an opportunity with visualization and meditation is to put in the result that you want. If you’re not getting the results that you want, perhaps you’re looking around. You’re trying to figure out what it is that you’re doing wrong. Why are you not performing? Why is your body not doing what you want it to do? Why are you not getting your team to do what you want them to do? This is an opportunity for you to put in what it is that you want to get out and by practicing that meditation, you begin to change the game. You’re changing your environment, you’ve been changing your thought process and you’re putting into the hardware. You’re putting that in such things can start working for you in your favor to produce the result that you want in your outer environment.

Reprogram your mind, reprogram what your current habits are and retrain yourself to start fully functioning at that optimal level that you want.

As you put in, the brain is always at work trying to get to the result that you’re looking for. This is an opportunity even for thoughts to come into your mind. I was taking a sport psychology class not long ago. The instructor was talking about how we go about our days where you’re trying to reach those milestones, produce those outcomes. All of that is energy out. The thoughts, the actions, everything that we’re doing to produce that result is energy out. When we take a moment to meditate and visualize, that’s the energy that’s going back in. When we don’t do that, we disrupt the flow. We’re not as creative as we want to be and we’re not producing what we want to produce. It’s like a water hose. Remember when you were young and you played with the water hose, we put a bend in the water hose and it shut the flow off. It allows things to stop flowing. Take that analogy a little bit further, when there is a bend in the water hose and you’re not getting the results that you want, when you finally release it, there’s an overflow of the water going through. It’s like a rush. Think about implementing meditation. It’s like opening up the water hose and allowing that flow to come through.

 

It’s a beautiful process. It’s a beautiful thing. We overcomplicate it. We may get this thing that’s inaccessible to people who unless they’re trained. I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be something that’s simple and something that’s fun, something that’s encouraging to you. When you change your mindset around it being something you can’t touch versus something you can participate in, it’s an absolutely beautiful process. It is to open that flow, allowing you to live in that flow.

I agree with you. It is overly complicated and underestimated. This is something that’s powerful. It’s free. A lot of people spend thousands of dollars on coaches and on all this other stuff to help us perform at a higher level when all we have to do is breathe, take a step back and meditate. It doesn’t cost you anything but time. This has been wonderful, Briana. I want to thank you for coming on the show and spending your time talking about meditation. This is probably the most hyped up discussion about meditation I’ve ever had.

It’s been my pleasure, Rodney. I enjoyed every minute of it. You’ve got some great questions and analogies.

How can people connect with you if they wanted to learn more about meditation and get some techniques from you, maybe even work with you as a facilitator on meditation?

We have a website called VacationOfTheMind.com. You can also reach out to me with my email at Briana@VacationOfTheMind.com. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, all Vacation Of The Mind. We provide a lot of tips on our social media. We have a blog where we give effective breathing strategies, ways to become aware of the moment. We offer several different programs and services. We have a weekly call that’s probably one of my favorite services of all time because it’s from the comfort of your own home. It’s super affordable, $20 a month and every week we get on a call in the comfort of your own home, go through a 30-minute guided session to relax and calm yourself down. If you can’t make the call that week, it’s sent out to you on a recording. I’m coming out with a book. It’s called Journey into Tranquility: A Three-Step Process to Guided Meditation. We also have all kinds of individual and group sessions. We do events nationwide. Definitely connect with us on our social media so that you can stay connected and see where we’re going to be, maybe it’s in an area where you are and we’d love to have you join our community.

As things are changing, we’re going through cultural demographic shifts and artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent. Do you find that meditation is becoming more of a trend and people are becoming more aware of its benefits and taking the practice of meditating?

Yeah, I do. The other thing that’s helping to that is that research is finally able to have the tools to show us the benefits of it and back it up. For thousands of years, meditation has been around and it’s been told that we need to do it, but finally, we have the tools to say, “No, your brain does respond to it. The reactors for stress do calm down when you do this. I do think it’s becoming a trend. The beautiful thing about meditations is there are many different styles and techniques out there that you can find something that fits with your lifestyle and with what you want. We’re going to see that it is going to become even more of a trend and we’re going to see the real need for this modality.

Meditation can be like taking a vacation every single day in your mind. Click To Tweet

In some countries, they’re practicing this in the corporate arena and that’s what we’re going to see here in the US eventually. This is a part of the culture and corporations. It’s a total game changer. Here’s an opportunity for us to get a jump on this. Learn as much as you can about meditation. Begin to practice it because I know that you are living in a high stress, high performance and high demand environment. That’s okay. I’m not knocking it. I’m not telling you to remove yourself from that. However, here are some tools that we can use to be an even greater and better game changer. Thank you, Briana, for being on the show. Do you have any final words?

Breathe. Focus on conscious breathing.

It’s easy to remember, breathe. This has been wonderful and a lot of fun.

Thank you, Rodney, same here.

This has been another beautiful game-changing episode. I want to thank you for reading. I realize that there are other shows out there that you can read. For those that are reading this continuously, I want to say thank you and I love you. Until next time, please remember that greatness is your birthright.

Important Links: 

• Briana Bragg
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• Facebook – Vacation of the Mind page
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• Blog – Vacation of the Mind
• Programs and services – Vacation of the Mind
• www.Facebook.com/VacationOfTheMind
• www.Instagram.com/VacationOfTheMind
• VacationOfTheMind.com
• Is Life Knocking You Down? Read Rodney’s inspiring story – Get Up! I Can’t. I Will. I Did… Here’s How! https://rodneyflowers.com/get-up-book/
• Recognize Your Positive Potential – Essential Assertions by Rodney Flowers https://rodneyflowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• Get Access to Rodney’s Daily Inspiration in your Inbox Today https://rodneyflowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734

About Briana Bragg

As a successful, energetic, and highly-driven visionary and entrepreneur, Briana Bragg loves life and lives it on-the-go! Her immersive presentations offer perspectives from both personal and professional experiences.

Briana became a CEO at an early age learning quickly that operating from chaos only leads to more chaos. Presently operating two companies, she understands the challenges leaders face when running an organization. Operating from a calm, more relaxed state improves productivity, focus and helps us accomplish more than when we live in a reactive state.

Based in solid scientific research on the brain-body connection as well as feedback from her clients, Briana created a unique meditation program that relieves stress, refocuses the mind, and takes every practitioner on a peaceful journey to inner peace.

Allowing all walks of life to escape the chaos of daily activity and engage comfortably and effectively with mindfulness and meditation. When you lead from a peaceful state everyone wins. Briana coaches her clients and corporate wellness teams how to quiet the mind to improve productivity, enhance team connection and find work/life balance.

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