Batman's meditation training is as tough to handle as it is deadly, with him going so far as to lock himself away in a closed-off Pitch Black k for 49 days straight just to get good at it. Hello everyone, welcome to trick theory. If you wanted to know how meditation or mindfulness can improve your life, you're not alone, as it has been shown to literally grow the thickness and activity of your prefrontal cortex, which controls higher decision-making, your ability to stay focused, control your emotions, or your ready to face whatever lies ahead rather than having any negative emotions drill you down. Besides that, meditation has also been thoroughly shown to increase the density of your hippocampus, the part of your brain that allows you to remember anything a whole lot better, while decreasing the fear and stress response from your amygdala, and it can sharply reduce your mind ruminating about anything. To master meditation before his years of crime fighting in Gotham, a young Bruce Wayne traveled all the way to Nanda Parbat, otherwise a

mystical City in the Himalayas of great spiritual significance and training. Here, Bruce began to practice a form of Buddhist Meditation called togle, which is aimed at achieving profound spiritual insights and realization of one's true nature, and in Batman's case, accepting and overcoming his fear of death. In togal meditation, practitioners like Bruce primarily focus on visualizations and inner experiences, where they reportedly experience the beauty of the present moment. If you practice this, think of sitting in the grass and gazing at the Open sky or a source of light like a candle. Batman used this to basically confront his own inner demons and fears, and in the end, this meditation lets people push past their ordinary mental limits or otherwise quiet their minds so much that they can perceive things as they truly are, rather than seeing everything through their own biases. Ordinarily, the practice can also involve you closing your eyes and visualizing light and colors while maintaining a state of deep concentration and awareness. However, Bruce decided to take things a whole lot

further and underwent the full-blown ritual, a ritual where during the 49-day retreat practitioners like Batman go into a place of extreme isolation, in his case a cave that he had sealed off with a freaking Boulder, where the practitioner is then to engage in intense meditation sessions, delving deep into their subconscious to overcome their greatest fears and attachments in life, all without any food, sunlight, and in Batman's case practically no water. To put this in perspective, the longest someone has gone with zero water is recorded at 18 days when an Austrian bricklayer was left locked in a prison cell after the officers on duty forgot about him. The other type of meditation that Batman uses to control his mind is known as Tumo meditation of inner fire, which is exactly as it sounds. In the story Court of Owls, Batman flashes back to a time in its travels where during a 9-month trip to our favorite Himalayas, Bruce ended up training under a monk who trained him in the art of Tumo, a sacred practice that is thousands of years old.

and as researchers discovered, monks walking outside in the mountains at night, where they then proceed to use Tumo to dry soaking wet sheets placed on top of them in the blistering cold. Tumo begins with the practitioner adopting a comfortable seated posture and focusing their attention on the breath through controlled breathing exercises, sometimes being rather rapid. Practitioners gradually increase their internal heart rate while maintaining a state of mental clarity and focus. And as you go through this art of deep breathing, visualization also plays a crucial role, with practitioners often visualizing flames or intense heat at the base of their spines. This mental imagery helps to amplify the sensation of warmth within the body and is thought to direct the flow of energy or Prana to specific energy centers or chakras in the body. As practitioners advance in their Tumo practice through their breathing, they are shown to be able to generate enough inner heat to raise their body temperature significantly, sometimes by 8.3 de C or 47° F. Beyond this, there is

then the regular meditation techniques that Batman uses on a daily basis. This is other when he decided to meditate like a bat when he gained Superman's powers, and we don't talk about that meditation that allows him to simulate sleep to check his memory so he can recall someone's face and literally speed up his healing processes quite a bit with this meditation being more so a combination of the two most basic forms of meditation that he had to master before melting a glacier, being the two common forms of vipasana and somata meditation. Vipassana, also known as Insight Meditation, is the one that Bruce may tend to favor as it's a practice on observing the mind and body with clear awareness that evolves nicely into the total meditation that he went on to use. Samatha meditation, on the other hand, is known as Tranquility meditation, where practitioners typically focus their attention on a single object such as their breath or a visualized image like a flame, entering a deep state of relaxation that can evolve into Bruce's

Tumo meditation, while being too distinctly different practices, vipassana and samatha, are often complementary, with practitioners sometimes combining elements of both in their meditation practice. And it's this meditation practice of observing his own body and breath that Batman could do for even 5 to 10 minutes a day for some serious benefits. You see, meditation like this changes the structure of your brain, specifically your gray matter, being the matter in your brain that is composed of the nerve cells. The bodies themselves are responsible for processing and transmitting information within the brain. It's what allows your higher brain functions like decision-making, memory, and learning to happen at all. Gray matter is basically your brain minus the white matter that connects the different brain regions together. The power Batman is after through his meditation practices is he's knowingly increasing the density, the power of his gray matter, which improves his cognitive function. It makes him smarter, more calm, able to easily control his emotions, and quickly think things through, let alone allow him to sit down and practice something for

hours on end. Batman is so good that he is said to be one of the only men on the planet who can control himself so well as to withstand poison ivy pheromones that hijack a male or female's hormone system beyond the point that their brain can no longer control themselves and allows him to outright ignore distractions, relax his body at a moment's notice, and be way more tolerant to pain. Strangely, it also alters his brain waves, or more so to say that Batman's brain doesn't really think like most others all the time. Most of the time, people's brains are in a state characterized by Beta waves, beta waves being a high-frequency wave that the brain gives off when someone is in an active awake state. However, we see that Batman at a moment's notice is able to quickly change his brain waves to producing not only the more medium-frequency Theta and Alpha wave patterns that are associated with relaxation and heightened awareness, but Batman has also demonstrated that he can instantly go

into delta waves, being by far the lowest and slowest waveform that is often found in infants and young children, and is primarily seen in adults only when in the deepest levels of sleep. It literally takes a full night's rest for someone to briefly enter. But despite all of these benefits, Batman uses meditation for something else as well, for something I'm sure we all would love to have whenever we're in an unfriendly or unfamiliar place. Because Bruce has trained his mind to be so quiet, he himself has become hyper-aware of not only how he's feeling but also his surroundings, making him practically impossible to sneak up on. So much so that he can sense the presence of people and villains like Cheetah long before anyone else in the Justice League. He can sense another person's Chi or is simply really good at telling their mood. And all around, Batman has built in a sense when things are off and someone is looking to do him or someone else harm. And beyond this, Batman has gotten so

good at controlling his own brain state that he has straight up hypnotized himself at one point, making himself forget that he was Batman. And just to make sure that Manhunter never reads his mind to learn about his contingency plans for the League, Batman repeatedly hypnotized himself to forget all about his plans, placing an externally activated phrase in the Batcave that will recall his memories whenever he needed to work on the plans again, only for himself to hypnotize himself into forgetting all over again. But if none of this was very interesting, then I save my most interesting fact for last. Batman has perfected meditation, or calming down his nervous system, allowing him to quickly cause himself to fall asleep as he practices one of the most bizarre sleep schedules in the world to maximize his time, which we go over in these videos right here. Remember, it's all just a trick. See you in the next one.

The Science Of: Batman's Extreme Meditation Practice

The Science Of: Batman's Extreme Meditation Practice