Mindfulness is a group of philosophies and practices that help you gain better control of our minds. Think of your inner voice like a monkey. It’s active, it jumps around regularly, and it tires you out after some time.
Meditation is the practice of taming the mind to achievement mindfulness. One goal that mindfulness and meditation aim at is directing awareness to what’s happening in your mind and body.
“Is that monkey jumping around and causing trouble?”.
Start asking yourself that question, and you will gain a better insight into what your mind is doing.
Why do we accumulate stress?
In our life, there are things we pick up and take on that cause stress along the way — a new project at work, a life change, marriage, family, etc. In general, stuff happens to us and adds stress to our life.
In anticipation of what’s happening and what may happen, you accumulated worry, fear, disappointment, or anxiety.
So what caused these feelings?
It’s the dialog inside your head that brought you these feelings. You can call it “thoughts.” Michael Singer called it “the inner roommate” in his book “The Untethered Soul.”
Did you ever notice, you have a voice in your head that tells you things like:
“My body is not lean, and I’m too fat. I need to sign up for the gym next month.”
“Oh, gosh. I forgot to call Sammy today. I need to call him right when I get home.”
“That colleague of mine, Mike, is annoying the heck out of me with his arrogant attitude in the office.”
These dialogues are the representation of the thoughts created by your mind. And there is a linkage between these thoughts and your feelings afterward.
The relationship between thoughts and feelings
For example, when you think that you need to lose weight, you might be feeling guilt or shame about your body.
Your feelings and emotions are a kind of energy created inside yourself. One thing to notice is since it’s a kind of power, it can emit the vibration to the environment around you. So when you are angry, not only that you feel tense, other people around can also pick up the energy and feel anxious as well.
The other thing about feelings is they can, in return, create more thoughts in the future. Ideas come because your body needs to release the built-up energy within itself. For example, when you feel angry at your children for not caring about you, another thought may arise as “They ungrateful of all the support I’ve given this family in all these years.” These thoughts again reaffirm your anger with your children and can add some other feelings, such as being irritated or annoyed.
The continuation of thought after a feeling leading to another idea is called the “thoughts – feelings – thoughts” loose “thoughts – feelings – thoughts” loop.
The “thoughts – feelings – thoughts” loop is an infinite circle. You don’t know which one comes first, because it’s like wondering which comes first, the chicken or the egg. The simple answer is there is not a start point or an endpoint in this circle.
This infinite loop causes spirals in your mind, suck your energy and bring you sufferings in the forms of stress, anxiety, and other negativity.
When you ask how to get out of this infinite circle, the answer is you need to break or change one of its two components:
- Change your thoughts
- Change your energy (feelings)
The mindfulness solution to stress
Change the thoughts
Dreams are how your mind lets out its presence. And your inner voice is a part of you that likes to think of itself as someone that has the total control of your life.
It’s like a giant person who lives inside you and is keen on telling you stories about the outside world in its own words, judging everything you did, and projecting what’s going to happen to you in the future.
Let’s evaluate the essence of the thoughts.
Your thoughts are misleading
Throughout the day, you can notice some of the conversations that the mind tells you:
“My friend doesn’t care about me anymore. She didn’t pick up the phone this afternoon”.
“You didn’t do well in the presentation at work yesterday. You are a failure.”
While in reality, your boss thinks high of you and considers you a valuable member of the team.
“My family will look down on me when I tell them I didn’t pass the test.”
When actually, your family tried to cheer you up when they knew you were disappointed about the test result.
How many times in your life, your mind has given you the wrong conclusion, a mistaken judgment like these? However, it seems that every time it talks to you and gives you its opinion, you listen to it entirely and believe what it tells you is correct.
It’s because the mind is very assertive and authoritative. It likes to be the boss, and I bet you’ve given it that title for all the years of your life.
Now you see, when you give the mind too much power, it can lead you to believe in its false judgment and brought negative feelings.
Separate the thoughts from yourself
The way to get out of the negative feelings like stress and anxiety is first just observed the mind when it talks to you and not act on it.
Just observe your thoughts, don’t give them any more weights than only an event, or an activity currently happening in your body.
The mind is doing all the talking because it has some pent up energy somewhere that needs to be released. Talking, either done internally through the voice in your head or outwardly in the form of external conversations, is a mechanism for your mind to let off its steam.
When you listen to the mind and believe what it tells you is accurate, feelings end up arising in you, such as jealousy, guilt, stress, fear, anxiety.
The mind keeps talking, whether you invited it or not. For a good chunk of your life, these conversations set an invisible boundary and keep you away from reaching your maximum creativity or potentials.
By observing the mind, you separate it from yourself. It is indeed separate from you. Just think for a minute, when you are thinking, you know that you are considering. So “you” are the subject, and the “thinking” is the object. And the question is different and separate from the purpose.
Observing the thoughts is a disarm technique because you train your awareness only to acknowledge the feelings when they are there. Ideas are just something that is happening in your mind; that’s all. Don’t give them any more power.
The ball of energy
When the mind frequently talks about a topic, day after day, it creates a ball of energy, similar to a snowball effect. The longer it runs, the more significant impact it builds up in your life.
You will eventually build up a giant ball of energy filled with resentment, stress, and disappointment about him. This ball of energy can create issues to you like anger, guilt, shame,…, which can cause damage to your relationship and doom your life.
It’s also worth noting that those dialogues you have come from the energy that built up earlier. The mind keeps talking because it has some pent up energy that needs to be released, in the form of talks. It keeps looking for evidence to bolster its previous belief and deepens averse feelings. That’s why what it does causes the “snowball effect.” The impact it has just get bigger and deeper over time as the mind does the talking.
When things get messy, it’s time to clean up.
Dropping the ball of energy
A two-minute meditation is possible at any time of the day. To start, stop what you are doing at the moment for a minute.
Take 2 minutes to breathe, speak a mantra, and let the racing ball of energy go.