Brushing Teeth and Meditation

This weekend I went to a talk by Lisa Wimberger, founder of The NeuroScultping Institute. The NSI is an evolution of Lisa's work with neuroscience, trauma, and stress and helping people heal. From the NSI website, 'Her mission to share practical and powerful stress management techniques to those in need caused Lisa to develop her Neurosculpting™ programs combining neuroscience principles with mindfulness and energetic modalities."

Lisa's talk was an introduction to NeuroScuplting, or the idea of how we can as individual change our patterns of belief and therefore our patterns of response. Since this was the very beginnings of her talks, I will describe the technique she uses as a form of meditation. She also referred to these personal journeys as meditation.

Towards the end of the talk, Lisa compared brushing your teeth to meditation. On the surface this may seem like an extraordinary comparison of two seemingly very different experiences. Most of us think of brushing our teeth as a fairly, normal everyday occurrence. Meditation is more commonly thought of in terms of raising awareness and consciousness. It's often thought of as a ritualized experience, even the imagery commonly associated with meditation shows the same.

What Lisa did by comparing brushing your teeth to meditation is bringing them to the same level, with a similar purpose. She brings the ritualized form of meditation to brushing your teeth. For many it truly is a ritual, a common pattern and flow which makes us feel better. It is ordinary in many ways and yet it is important.

Likewise, this brings an ordinary, everyday experience to meditation. We can choose to make time for meditation every day like we do for brushing our teeth. It doesn't take long and it has long-term beneefits.

Lisa talked about brushing our teeth as a daily maintenance. After all brushing our teeth helps to keep a healthy mouth. It takes a daily commitment, even just a few minutes, of brushing our teeth to maintain our health. Meditation has a similar feel - by setting aside a few minutes every day to meditate we bring peace, we strength our mind, we keep our brain and attitude healthy. Meditation also helps maintain our health, albeit in a very different way.

I truly appreciate the reminders of how the ordinary is extraordinary, whether it's brushing your teeth, or being mindful while eating, or any daily experience. It's something I forget still. In this case, I really like bringing an ordinary quality to something even I consider somewhat ritualized and outside an everyday experience.

Thanks Lisa for such a profound comparison! I'm off for my daily brushing, flossing, and rinsing of my mind.