[Don Salmon]

Hi Andrei:

Glad to see you here.

I’ve been a member of this channel since the format was revised back in September. Lots of very interesting discussions (and remember, if you have a specific topic of interest you don’t find, you can start your own group)

My greatest interest is in practice. I just wrote a note saying that there are a number of highly qualified teachers, therapists, meditation specialists and others who have been, for decades, teaching methods of shifting attention that are completely in synch with what Iain writes.

I’ll just mention two for now:

Dr. Les Fehmi, a psychophysiologist. He is probably the most well known. He developed methods of shifting attention over more than 50 years, and taught thousands of people how, simply by changing how they attend to the world, can quite literally cure depression, anxiety, severe trauma and many kinds of physical pain. He also used these methods to help couples, and even to train Olympic athletes.

Dr. John Yates (aka “Culadasa”) has done work far more profound, in my view. He had been a neuroscience professor but devoted himself in the last decades of his life to teaching meditation.

I came across Yates’ extraordinary book, “The Mind Illuminated,” In 2016. At the time it was easy to contact him, and I wrote him about the startling parallels between his meditation techniques and Iain’s observations about how attention in the LH and RH is different. Synchronistically, he had just come across Iain’s work the week before I wrote him, and he agreed there were rather remarkable parallels (Even though he had minor neurological quibbles).

I’ll give you just one practice if you’d like to play with it. For thousands of years, the Tibetans have practiced “sky-gazing” – allowing the gaze to rest in pure, objectless open space.

The connection with the hemispheres is simple- when we look at something that has no objective “things” to hold on to, to grasp, the whole narrative structure of the left hemisphere starts to break down. Fehmi used to have people start just by noticing space more often in the midst of their lives – the space between objects, the space between people, and more profoundly, the “space” between thoughts (or better still – if this is not too confusing – the “space” underlying thoughts, a sense of deep stillness and silence that it’s possible to discover as being always present underlying all experiences.

Once again, welcome!