EcoMeditation

About

Track Details

01  Guided Meditation [23:24]

02  Music and Brainwave Entrainment [22:40 minutes]

Full package includes:

• Two (2) tracks (for a total of 45:04 minutes)
• Tracks accessible on the free iAwake Technologies app for iOS and Android
• Downloadable audio files available in MP3, WAV, FLAC, and ALAC formats
• User Guide (downloadable PDF)
• Ongoing support (responsive email, active Facebook forum, FAQs, videos, audios)

About the Tracks from the Creator, Dawson Church

The Ten Thousand Hour Rule

The Ten Thousand Hour Rule is the concept that truly mastering an activity takes at least 10,000 hours of practice. Whether you’re a schoolteacher, accountant, brain surgeon, chef, concert pianist, or stock trader, experience counts. If you put in four hours a day, in 10 years you accumulate 10,000 hours.

This threshold has been used in the study of meditators, especially Tibetan monks. Researchers find that after 10,000 hours, they’re able to maintain stable attention. They are able to correct the wandering of their minds quickly, unlike novices whose minds go everywhere when they close their eyes. Their brains show high amounts of gamma waves.

Gamma is the signature wave of the “flow” state. It represents the synchronization of information from many different brain regions. It’s usually found in highly creative people as well as ordinary people having a moment of creative insight. It’s also observed in states of mystical union. This feeling of “oneness with everything” is reported by adepts of every religion.

Gamma is also associated with feelings of love and compassion, increased perceptual organization, associative learning, better memory, the efficiency of information flowing across synapses, healing, attention, and states of transcendent bliss. In my book Bliss Brain, I summarize the neuroimaging studies showing that gamma waves engender ecstatic states.

That’s a long list of benefits, all hallmarks of a high-performance brain. Researchers found that after 10,000 hours or more of meditation practice, the brains of the Tibetans produced 25 times the usual amount of gamma. By way of contrast, the brains of novice meditators show only small amounts of gamma.

In 2008, I had a revolutionary thought: We know that mindfulness is effective. So is biofeedback/neurofeedback. And hypnosis. And EFT tapping. What if we combined all of them into a simple set of instructions focused around the physiology of relaxation?

I tried the combination of these evidence-based methods on myself for a while and found I was able to enter much deeper meditative states. I tried it with groups of up to 200 people, and many said they were able to truly meditate effortlessly for the first time in their lives. I christened it EcoMeditation, put the 7 simple steps on the web, and forgot about it for a decade.

Ten years later, when my webmaster told me that the primitive EcoMeditation web page was getting over 15,000 visitors a month, I teamed up with researchers and began to study the method. We used EEGs to hook up novice meditators.

We were amazed at what we found. Even in first-timers, we often saw big gamma, just like the 10,000-hour Tibetan monks. They were able to enter “flow” in less than 5 minutes.

Neurofeedback expert Judith Pennington, studying eight subjects, wrote that “EcoMeditation produced extraordinarily high levels of Gamma Synchrony… During EcoMeditation, all participants generated high-amplitude 45–65 Hz gamma frequencies that resulted in high-value Gamma Synchrony patterns, some of which were at the top of the statistical range…”

EEG research shows that with simple training, you can attain “flow” states similar to those of experienced meditators. This makes meditation accessible to today’s busy people for whom 10,000 hours of practice is unrealistic.

The Story of the Development of EcoMeditation  from the Creator, Dawson Church

The reason EcoMeditation came into being is because it’s hard to meditate using the mind! It’s hard to still the mind using the mind. When I was fifteen, I went to live in a spiritual community, and the meditation teacher there said, “Meditation is simple. Here’s a cushion. Sit. Be still. Don’t squirm around. Still your mind.”

Now I can sit on the cushion really well. I got that part down, but I have never been able to still my mind in meditation. In fact, today I meditated for a couple of hours before starting my day and my mind still wandered! 

If you ever read ancient texts like the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, you’ll know that the mind just does its thing. Our minds evolved to be alert and focused on the opportunities and threats in our environment. That’s how our ancestors survived. That’s how animals survive today. The mind simply did not evolve to be still. So there I was, 15 years old, sitting on my cushion like a good meditator, trying to still my mind – and failing completely. I had a track record of failure at the age of 15, 25, 35, 45…And then I discovered that research showed certain techniques were effective at controlling stress.

 You know, a lot of that mind wandering that happens in meditation has to do with stress. Deep down, we’re worried that something’s going to get us, so we tend to focus on threats, or opportunities. There were several techniques I came across that controlled stress effectively, like focusing on the breath. That one practice alone is enough to bring you into the present moment. Breathwork is a powerful way of doing it. 

I also talked to the people at HeartMath Institute, and the research director there said, “We’ve been testing meditators, and finding that when they meditate, they sometimes drop out of heart coherence, but heart coherence is a really good thing. So we train meditators to stay in heart coherence.” I thought, okay, let’s layer in a simple method of staying in heart coherence! 

So I added that to the EcoMeditation practice, and I added EFT (tapping on acupressure points), some self-hypnosis, some neurofeedback techniques, very simple ones. These are all physiological things you can do with your body. They don’t require the mind to be still. You can breathe at a certain rhythm that puts you in heart coherence, even if your mind isn’t still. This worked much better than those old instructions the meditation master gave me at 15 years old! 

I began to try EcoMeditation with groups of people, and found that people doing EcoMeditation would get into altered states, often transcendent states, even if it was the very first time they tried. We had one veteran, who had served four tours of duty in Iraq and come back with severe PTSD, nightmares, flashbacks, hypervigilance – all the classic symptoms – who tried for years to meditate his way out of it. He even went to Japan, lived in a Zen monastery, meditated daily, and still couldn’t escape those PTSD symptoms. 

One day he was doing a web search, stumbled across EcoMeditation, read the instructions and did them one by one, and in five minutes, boom! He was there. 

When people told me they were having these sorts of experiences, I put the instructions on the web for free. We started to have thousands of people downloading them every month. We began to do research, and the research showed, to our amazement, that this practice rapidly ameliorates anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress. 

So that’s the story behind it. Now it’s well researched. We have EEG studies and MRI studies. The research shows that very rapidly, in about five minutes, EcoMeditation puts you in an altered state without the need to still the mind. From there, you can hit those transcendent states and start to feel really good and have that deep meditative experience. That’s a very brief history of EcoMeditation.