I try to keep my eye on the TED talks. They are ad-free, cost-free and cover an extremely broad range of topics. Just put "TED" in capitals into Google and take a look at the web site. They have so many very interesting yet short talks that they have created playlists of similar topics for ease of selection. However, while I still understand too little of the financing and inner working of their creation, I guess not all of them can be found through the TED web site. Watkins cannot be found using the TED site search but he can be through Google. His talks are part of YouTube.
I signed up for emails about good TED talks and one of them mentioned Dr. Alan Watkins and his talk on being brilliant every day. The man is British and young and obviously trying to do a good job with his Complete Coherence training company. He focuses on performance, as in executive, athletic or marital performance. I am not in a stage of life where I am trying to perform well, certainly not every day. In fact, I have a suspicion that trying to be brilliant every day may be a recipe for less brilliance on many days than if I take on more modest goals.
For some reason, I decided to give his talk, in two parts, a try. I was quite impressed by what I learned and went on to watch the second talk. My interest in self knowledge, self acceptance and meditation clicked with Part 1 of his talk. Part 2 was not as dramatic as the demo in part 1 but far more informative.
Pranayama is the name given to the branch of yoga related to breathing techniques. My feeling about much of yoga is that it would be improved with testing, verification and scientific analysis. Science is not always helpful but millennia of theorizing and disorganized practice interspersed with conflicting claims needs some culling and checking. Dr. Watkins is set on doing some of that.
Links to his talks appear on this page I mentioned yesterday. Breathing was noted by the ancients as well as people today to be something of an oddity since most of the things our bodies must do are taken care of automatically. However, breathing is something we can take over consciously if we wish to do so. Watkins makes clear that this connection can be used to good effect to train ourselves and to move ourselves out of stress or anxiety very quickly and effectively.
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
