Mind Magic

in the flow state there is a diminishment of self-referential thinking, and therefore our stress levels go down because we are not self-consciously critiquing our every move.

only when we have shifted into the rest-and-digest response of the nervous system will our brains allow us to reclaim our attention, access the power of our imagination, and unlock our subconscious.

the negativity bias can keep us so blind to the positive that we may start to take it for granted or not catch it when it enters our lives.

In a sense, the flow state translates to the complete alignment of our conscious and subconscious minds in service of our intention. In flow, we have a special kind of access to the deeper resources of our subconscious and can draw upon them more directly. We can also seek this kind of VIP access to the subconscious via the techniques of hypnosis,

When we are in flow, we often experience a state of self-transcendence: the inner critic’s needling voice dies away, our habitual worries and self-consciousness fade, and we feel at one with the moment, with ourselves, and with our environment.

hypnosis allows us to be completely absorbed in the object of our attention, gain heightened control over our bodies and feelings, and get out of our own way so that we allow the power of our subconscious to work freely. When we deliberately embed an intention in our minds through repeated visualization, we are making use of the same physiological

The Buddha similarly commented on the powerful ability of thoughts to shape our experience of the world when he said, “Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.”

Crucially for our purposes, the DMN is negatively correlated with the attention network (AN), meaning that the more it is activated, the less access we have to the power of our attention.

Using functional magnetic imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, researchers at Stanford University monitored the brains of patients under hypnosis and observed several distinct phenomena. First, a decrease in activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain’s salience network, was evident. The reason