A Deep Dive into ”Applying the Silva Method: For Improved Intuition, Creativity and Focus” BOOK REVIEW PART 1

“Once we learn to use our mind to train it, it will do some astounding things for us, as you will soon see.” Jose Silva (August 11, 1914-February 7, 1999) author of The Silva Mind Control Method. Welcome back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast I’m Andrea Samadi and like many of you listening,  have been fascinated with learning and understanding the science behind high performance strategies to increase our results in our schools, sports, and modern workplaces. As we are in the midst of holiday season here with Thanksgiving this past week in the US, and Christmas fast approaching, we will be narrowing our focus here on the podcast and resuming interviews in the New Year.  Until then, this episode will launch a series where I’ll be taking us on a deep dive into the benefits of developing a meditation practice. While I’m sure those who tune into this podcast already have a practice in place, I wanted to cover a meditation method that I came across years ago, that our last interview, with Dr. Hasan Ibne Akram reminded me about. The goal of this series is to help all of us to reduce stress with this practice, but also to see if we can learn something new, and refine our practice for those who work in our schools to improve learning, in our sports environments for improved focus and concentration towards a specific goal, and in the corporate workplace for ideas to improve creativity and focus. We will begin this series reviewing Jose Silva and Philip Miele’s The Silva Mind Control Method[i] that’s based on the Revolutionary Program by the Founder of the World’s Most Famous Mind Control Course. Ch 1: Using Our Mind in Special Ways This course is something I came across while working in the seminar industry, and while interviewing Dr. Hasan Ibne Akram, on our last EPISODE #260[ii], he reminded me of Jose Silva’s program, that helped him with his self-esteem as a teenager, in addition to his studies, and a few other areas of his life, and this reminded me that I had come across Jose Silva’s work years ago. I’d actually forgotten about this book, and many of the techniques we learned that were adaptations of Silva’s work, and I thought that since meditation is helping so many people around the world, and it’s now mainstream in our schools, with athletes, and in the corporate world, it would be fascinating to look closer at Jose Silva’s Method, to see if it could help all of us to enhance our current meditation practice, myself included. Then I dove into The Silva Method, and realized his work is going to need to be broken up over a few episodes, like we did with The Think and Grow Rich[iii] book review, just to make it applicable for all of us, and give each chapter careful consideration as we look to see what parts of The Silva Method, could help us to improve our own lives.  I wanted to release this episode last Friday, but in order to cover this topic properly, I knew I had to review the Silva Method thoroughly myself, do exactly what he instructs us to do, and not cut any corners. So this weekend, instead of recording, I reviewed and practiced the strategies in the first three chapters of this book, making more connections to past episodes, and increasing my learning and understanding before sharing these ideas with you. If you listened to our episode #258 with Friederike Fabritius, on her new book, The Brain-Friendly Workplace, I asked her what science has to say about those flashes of insight that we ALL have access to for improved creativity and performance, and she explained that “when you are relaxed, your brain waves slow down to the alpha state.” Friederike further explained that we can measure these brain waves with EEG scans and that at moments of insight, or those AHA Moments, the brain has “gamma oscillations” that can be trained and measured that she called “The Gamma Insight Effect.” After speaking with Friederike, I wondered HOW we could ALL train our brain to reach these levels to gain those flashes of insight on demand, or at least more often, to help us with our lives and work? Whenever I’ve had a flash of insight about something, it’s often during times where I’m relaxed (during a massage, in the shower, or during meditation) but they happen when I’m not expecting them, so I’ve learned to write them down, to see I can learn the meaning behind them, and determine if the insight is useful. Have you had flashes of insight? When do they happen for you? How do you make use of what you are seeing? Next, I remembered our interview #148[iv] with Dr. James Hardt and his Biocybernaut Alpha One Training that helped people (like Tony Robbins)  to access the zone, or peak performance, on demand, and increase those heightened levels of awareness for reduced stress and increased productivity. I wondered if there was a way we could do this ourselves, without having to pay the money to attend a training somewhere. Dr. Hasan spoke about attending Dave Asprey’s 5 Day 40 Years of Zen Training[v], that was life-changing, but he also mentioned The Silva Method on EPISODE #260, that’s designed specifically to help us to tap into the Alpha (deeply relaxed brain state) with other parts of the program that could train us to reach the Theta State (relaxed consciousness, deep meditation, light sleep, REM state) and the Delta State where we are in a deep sleep. Dr. Hasan Ibne Akram, who has successfully built 7 companies, believes that the Silva Method launched his mind to a whole new way of thinking and spoke about how Einstein and Edison would gain flashes of insight from relaxing their minds in a certain way, something that we ALL have access to do. Dr. Hasan is a huge believer in The Silva Method, that shows us how to access these creative brain states, and then give us some ideas of what to do with them once we are there. Jose Silva himself believed that once we learn how to use the tools in his program, that we all have the ability to become geniuses. Napoleon Hill even wrote about this in his best-selling book, Think and Grow Rich, when he said that a better definition of genius “is a man who had discovered how to increase the intensity of thought to a point where he can communicate with sources of knowledge not available through the ordinary rate of thought.” Read that quote a few times and keep thinking. How could YOU benefit from diving a bit deeper into your meditation practice? We have covered meditation on this podcast, beginning with Dr. Dan Siegel all the way back to EPISODE #28[vi] where we spoke with Dr. Siegel about something he calls Mindsight, or seeing the mind in another person, and he says this is the “basis for social and emotional intelligence.” Then on EPISODE #60[vii], we dove deeper into his Wheel of Awareness Meditation, and the science behind a meditation practice, which is evident to anyone who goes to www.pubmed.gov and types in the word “meditation” as they will see over 9,000 results showing that mindfulness and meditation clearly improves our health and wellness. Dr. Dan Siegel has mentioned the research often with his Wheel of Awareness Meditation, that “integrates the structure and function of the brain.” By integration, he meant moving towards well-being. But with ALL of these episodes, we’ve focused on WHAT meditation does (improves mental and physical health and well-being) but I’ve never covered exactly HOW to access these altered states of consciousness, or what to do when we get there, mostly because until I read Jose Silva’s book, I had no idea what I was doing when I was meditating. I’d been doing many of the exercises in Silva’s Program, that I had learned from different seminars and sources over the years, without fully understanding exactly what I was doing, and noticed I could use some improvement with my own practice. When Friederike Fabritius said that accessing these different brain states could be trained, and then suddenly Dr. Hasan mentioned HOW he trained his brain all those years ago, I thought it was time to take a closer look at our brain states. My goal with this episode is to help me to be more intentional with my meditation practice, and then share what I learn with you here. Just keep an open mind. As I share my insights with you from each chapter, see how the ideas could help you to improve YOUR practice, and perhaps give you some new insights along the way. On PART 1 of this book review we will cover: ✔ CH 1- Using More of Our Mind in Special Ways: An Introduction to the Silva Mind Control Method ✔ What this program has done for others. ✔ Ch 2- Meet Jose ✔ Ch 3- How to Meditate: A review of the brain states (BETA,ALPHA,THETA,DELTA). ✔ How to quickly access the ALPHA STATE to improve creativity, and intuition. ✔ Using A Mental Screen in Your Mind for Heightened Visualization ✔ How to Help Yourself and Others With this Practice   What This Program Has Done for Others: For this episode, #261, we will begin our DEEP DIVE into Jose Silva’s Mind Control Method, used by over 10 million students around the world, to see if we can all use his work, that’s based on accessing altered states of consciousness, to train our brain in ways where school just never taught us. The only reason I had heard about Jose Silva’s Method, was that when I sold seminars for Bob Proctor, back in the late 1990s, many of the seminar attendees asked me if I had heard of Silva’s Training. Over the years, I learned that parts of Silva’s Methods were used in many of the seminars I had attended in the personal development industry, but I had never looked at the entire program as Jose Silva had written it. Much like I had only read parts of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich book, until I decided to review it myself on this podcast earlier this year. We will be going through the chapters together, and see what res