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Text
Version of Article from the Irish Times. February
1998. Original available on
request.
The
fifteen-minute holiday
Jonathan
Philbin Bowman
Discovered a simple technique to
Give his mind a well-earned rest
If
you had told me a few weeks ago that I’d be sitting in a house in Castleknock
bathed in imaginary coloured light, I'd have
told you where to get off. Sure, a
little meditation never did anyone any harm, and the worst that can happen when
you try a relaxation exercise is that you get confused by the instructions,
distracted by the discovery that you don’t do this often enough, and then you
start to panic and your blood pressure goes up……
But
‘MindLink’ - the course did -
goes beyond all that.
Rod
Briggs is a big South African. From
his silhouette you might assume that he heaves, hauls himself in and out of
armchairs and wheezes a bit. He
doesn’t. Instead he bounces
around with energy that makes mere mortals envious.
He enthuses about nearly everything.
And in between talking about ways of changing your thinking and
quietening your mind, he quotes Laurens Van Der Post.
Briggs
was in Dublin to introduce a seminar to a new audience. I did a sort of MindLink introduction course with a
hand-picked selection of Gaelic guinea pigs (guinea pigs in the sense that
he’d never given the course in Ireland before).
There was one PR man, one accountant, a GP and a couple of women who, I
think it would be fair to say, had more than a passing acquaintance with the
world of spirit guides, crystals and chakras.
I
was the token journalist, with a foot in both camps.
Half of me sticks with the hard news hemisphere, while my other half has
been known to burn the essential oils (beyond midnight) and disappear down to
Cork to dabble in the Dharma. The
amazing thing is it worked for all of us.
Essentially,
what Rod provides over the two and a half days of MindLink (it started on Friday
night and ended on Sunday evening) is a simple framework and a set of techniques
which allow you to ‘manage’ your state of mind at any given moment.
It
was amazing how quickly and how easily a room of six strangers learned almost
effortlessly to change their brain chemistry at will. By the end of the weekend, we’d learned to take a 15-minute
‘holiday’ - or even a five-second timeout
- from the frequent foul-ups
that fly at us from all four corners of everyday life.
It was effortless and almost automatic, and since the weekend
course, it’s already served to keep me sane more times than I care to
remember.
Rod
Briggs will be returning from South Africa to run a MindLink course in April.
The course is particularly suited to students. Rod says it would cut
study time and exam stress by two-thirds. MindLink
also proved extremely effective in helping those with disturbed sleep patterns
and in achieving a spontaneous reduction in reduction in consumption of
cigarettes and alcohol. And even if
you get none of that out of it, he is worth spending a weekend with anyway.
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