Life Enhancing Devices

Ok, thought it was time I listed out my favourite LEDs (Life Enhancing Devices) and why I think they're so good. Some of them I've already specifically blogged about. Some of them I'll blog about in detail in coming entries.

As you read the list, think about the devices in your life that really add value to it and to you. What are they? How do they enhance and augment your life?

Read the list I've shared here and then please leave a comment about what's on your list. What are the most Life Enhancing Devices you own and wouldn't be without? What would you recommend?


Mind Machine - Brainwave Entrainment Device

Number one on my list. This is the most Life Enhancing Device I own. It's fantastic. At the touch of a button you get transported into the selected mind state, drifting off and returning at the programmed time. It's relaxing and revitalising. It feels wonderful. I LOVE it!!! (Read more about it here)

emWave Heartmath Biofeedback Device (and other similar biofeedback devices)

A great LED for controlling your autonomic nervous system and getting in touch with your heart-brain. This technology allows you to access deep meditative states and relax your whole mind/body. I highly highly recommend biofeedback devices such as the emWave.

Sound machine & Delightful Wakeup Device

Ahhhhh, the peaceful sound of the surf, a waterfall, or even the delightful tones of rain on the roof, all at the touch of a button. Such a great way to sleep and to overcome the inevitable ambient noises of living amongst other humans. Combine that with a clock that allows you to wake up to your own choice of CD or MP3 or Nature Sound and you have a wonderful way to start your day, peacefully refreshed and delightfully awoken. I mean, who the hell likes to be alarmed by the rauckus sound of an alarm clock or some radio announcer telling you the terrible news of the day...

Motorbikes

Yay! Petrol-sexual devices. I love them! Motorbikes, sportscars... LED's that allow you to move through space, go places and are optimised for fun, acceleration, control and connecting and enhancing yourself through velocity, movement and space.


Kayaks

Watercraft such as kayaks and canoes are such wonderful LEDs for gliding across the liquid medium, enjoying meditative experiences, while getting great exercise and seeing places that are not accessible otherwise. I can't recommend kayaking as a life enhancing sport too highly. Give it a go. You'll likely enjoy it immensely.


Computer/Internet

Yup, if computers and the web aren't life enhancing, then I don't know what is :-) They have opened out, expanded and automated our lives in ways that were almost unimaginable 50 years ago. We can now connect around the world, cheaply and interactively. The web is like a giant brain, filled with information and knowledge that you can google in a second. Whether its buying stuff you would never have been able to source previously, connecting with people of similar interests that you would never have been able to find previously or finding answers, advice or information that you would never have found before the web, the internetworked mesh of computers and minds is the most incredible Life Enhancing Device we have. My advice is to keep riding the wave of accelerating change and stay up to date with your web technology. Lead the change and reap the benefits.


TENS

Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation - a great technology that can be used to gate off and control pain and help relax and induce healing. These inexpensive devices are life saving if you ever get a pinched nerve or pulled/strained muscle. I would never be without one in my medicine cabinet. They really work!

MP3 Player

Wow! The ability to take my whole music collection anywhere I go - to listen to anything I want, whenever I want. Small, light, inexpensive and portable. I can listen to music, personal development talks, academic lectures and historical recordings of famous people. Do I need to say more? The MP3 player is truly a Life Enhancing Device.


Massage Chair

Gotta love a leather reclining swivel chair that has multiple levels and modes of massage. Sit back, set the program and for the next 20 minutes be massaged and relaxed. It's heaven! Combine this with the Mind Machine, and you are transported to another world!


Snowplay Equipment

Snow is the most magical material. It transforms the world into a fairyland. And the ability to ski or board on it... to glide down slopes, x-country through trees and forests. To camp in it. Play in it. It's one of the most wonderful and life enhancing experiences I can think of. If you've never learned to ski or snowboard, do yourself a life enhancing favour, and do it. Book in for a snowplay holiday, take lessons and enjoy the ride of your life!


Musical Instruments

The ability to make music is wonderful. To lose yourself in the sound and the auditory-kinesthetic experience. Combined with modern digital technology and given how inexpensive musical devices and instruments have become, you'd have to be crazy not to add some to your life and learn how to use them. Whether its a traditional acoustic guitar or an electronic drum machine, it's a wonderful life enhancing and expanding experience to be able to create music and melody in your life.


Wilderness Hiking Equipment

I love being out in nature, in the wild. Just me, the equipment I'm carrying on my back and wilderness. I love the immediacey of it. I love how you have to respect it and move intelligently through and with it. Nature can kill you if you don't pay attention. There's no abstractions here. No buffering. It makes me feel so alive and refreshed. And wilderness hiking equipment LED's allow me to control the risk of the experience and to move safely and comfortably through the environment.


Home Theatre

Amazing. A theatre in the comfort of your own home. The BIG screen and surround sound, with Active Sub-Woofer experience, anytime you feel like inserting a DVD and hitting the remote control buttons. Gotta love that! No hopping in the car and driving to a Cinema. No lines. No noisy, feet on the back of your seat, rustling of pop-corn distractions. No waiting for the movie to start. Get yourself a couple of Gold-class leather recliners, a home theatre system with a roll down screen and digital projector. Damn inexpensive these days. And you're in movie heaven. Now that is Life Enhancing! :-)


Breadmaker Machine and Coffee Machine

You wake up to the mouth-watering aroma of fresh baked bread and freshly brewed coffee. All automated and programmed the night before. I mean, can the day start any better than that? Yep, I think I have to add these to the list of totally Life Enhancing Devices.


Spa and Sauna

Lay back in the warm bubbly water. Relax. Let the jets and bubbles soothe those cares away. A home spa and sauna has got to go on the list of LEDs. These days they are quite affordable and definitely worth the investment in pampering yourself and delighting your senses.


Digital Cameras

How cool is it to be able to take photos and videos of pretty much any aspect of life you want! And so damn cheaply. Then to be able to display them immediately. To back them up. Print them out on your own printer. Display them on your home theatre. Or, (and here's another LED) display them on a LCD Picture Frame. I loooooove digital cameras. They've allowed me to capture images of so many of my adventures and life experiences that I would otherwise never have been able to afford to capture in the days of analogue/film cameras.

These days I've got underwater POV digital cameras, that strap on my helmets and can record full audio visual capture of my kayaking, snow boarding and motor bike riding adventures. I've got a watch that's a digital camera. A dental digital camera for looking at and recording my teeth with 40x zoom (go figure, it was so damn cheap I figured I may as well have one, so I can look at what's going on in there). And a myriad of other digital cameras. Combine all these with some good Video editing software and you can create wonderful movie and slide show experiences to capture and share your memories. My helmet cam even has a button that allows me to automatically upload the vids to Youtube. Gotta love that :-) Yup, I truly think digital cameras are life enhancing.


Mobile Phones

Yeah, I know. Everyone has one. But if you are old enough to remember BM (Before Mobiles), you'll know just how life enhancing they are. The ability to connect via phone, txt and email, anywhere, anytime, has to be up there as life enhancing. And with mobiles now becoming full-on entertainment devices and rolling in a lot of the functions of the LEDs described above, means they just get better and better.



Ok, there's my list. So what's on your list? What are the 3 top LED's in your life?

Please click on the comment icon below and share your list. I'd love to hear your thoughts and learn what you and other people think or feel are life enhancing devices.


smiles and cheers
Grant

Heart Coherence

Today I'm going to introduce you to an incredible Life Enhancing Device (LED) called the emWave. It's a biofeedback tool that you can use to powerfully control your heart coherence and therefore reduce stress and fill you heart, mind and life with positive, peaceful calm.

The effects of stress are largely due to the sympathetic nervous system’s response to perceived threat. Our autonomic nervous system is comprised of two sub-systems – the sympathetic system which is responsible for the fight and flight response; and the parasympathetic system whose role is to bring your brain and body back into homeostasis, into balance.

As you know, your gut and heart both have a brain. Each has a large independent chunk of neural tissue that acts like a little brain, taking in and processing information from your environment and responding to protect you. When the heart and enteric (gut) brains perceive a threat, they kick the sympathetic system into action and your heart starts beating faster, adrenalin and cortisol are released and all the physical stress responses fire up. It’s nature’s way of helping you get ready to fight or run.


If you looked at your beat to beat heart rate when you are in a stress response, when you have sympathetic nervous system dominance, you'd see a very unhealthy jagged graph as your heart speeds up and slows down and speeds up again, erratically racing to ready you for fighting or flighting. Conversely, when you are calm and in balance, when your sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are in balance, your heart beat traces a very smooth sine wave like curve. You can see this in the graph below, which is a screen shot from a HeartMath monitor, of my heart when I was meditating. Notice how smooth the graph is.



The measure of how smooth and evenly repetitive your heart beat is, is called Heart Coherence. It's a mathematical measure and indicates how balanced your autonomic nervous system is. It's also correlated with heart health and with a decreased stress response. So the higher the coherence score, the better it is, and the better you feel.

You can learn to bring your sympathetic and parasympathetic systems into balance and calm your head, heart and enteric brains down through a technique called the ‘heart-breath’. This is a way of focussing and breathing that sends powerful messages to your whole cybernetic loop and increases your heart coherence so that your heart, body and mind remain healthy and resilient. Given the usefulness and importance of this technique as a mechanism to control your mind/body in a very powerful way, I'm going to describe it in detail in this blog entry. Before I do though, I'm going to tell you about the emWave LED.

You can now buy a fantastic bio-feedback tool from the heartmath.com organisation that helps you learn and reinforce your skills in heart-breathing and easily allows you to see just how much heart rate coherence you are generating. I highly recommended owning and using this tool to enhance your life and happiness.The tool is called the emWave. It's a small portable device that allows you to see at a glance what your heart coherence is. It has a breathing pacer function that helps you to pace your heart breathing and a number of modes and functions to help you learn to increase your heart coherence. You can also buy a PC based version that shows you the second by second graph of your heart rate along with your coherence score and cumulative coherence score. It comes with a number of games to help you learn in a fun way to become more coherent, calm and balanced.

(And no, in case you are wondering, I have no shares or affiliation with the Heartmath organisation whatsoever, I simply think their tools and systems are Life Enhancing Devices and I’ve been using and recommending them for a number of years now. Their tools are powerful and in my experience really do work to help you quickly learn to control your autonomic nervous system responses.)

The thing I like about LED's like the emWave, is they allow you to use modern technology to learn quickly and amplify positive skills and states in your life - they are life enhancing! They cost relatively little, yet provide large positive returns in the quality of your life. They also provide objective measures of how well you are doing in controlling your mind/body. I really can't recommend highly enough that you invest in enhancing your life and gain the benefits of biofeedback technology. And now, let me share with you the details of the heart-breath technique, which you can use with or without the amplifying effects of biofeedback.

Heart-Breath

1. Imagine your breath coming in and going out through the area around your heart, in the center of your chest. Make each in-breath and out-breath last about 5 to 6 seconds.
2. As you continue to breath through your heart, recall a fun, loving or positive time in your life: A favourite friend, a special vacation a deeply loved person or something you adore. Fully re-experience and hold this positive feeling in your heart as you continue to breath through your heart.
3. Notice the emotional, mental and physical shift that occurs as your heart coherence increases and your autonomic system comes into balance.

That's it. Three easy steps that can be done free of charge, any time, any place, and no batteries required.


wishing you life enhancing balance,
smilings, Grant


And in case I've inspired you to buy yourself or someone you love the gift of an emWave:

emWave Personal Stress Reliever

http://tinyurl.com/heartmath-special

The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy

The HeartMath Solution: The Institute of HeartMath's Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart's Intelligence

From Chaos to Coherence (The Power to Change Performance)