Mastering your Mind
Mastering Your Mind & How to Re-Evaluate Your Thoughts
The mind helps us solve problems, learn, analyze situations, recall information, and make decisions. It accumulates memory of past experiences and warns us of potential risks and dangers. In many ways, the human mind is sophisticated and smart; miraculous and mysterious in so many ways. However, there’s a reason the mind is compared to a reflex organ or a reactive mechanism similar to sneezing or breathing. It’s even given nickname’s like monkey mind and is often considered irrational, producing unrealistic, random, and negative thoughts.
Our minds are important for practical, everyday purposes. We need it to survive in the world. However, we must master the mind so that we can use it as a tool. An unmastered mind leaves us at the mercy of whatever thought the mind produces. This isn’t a particularly negative scenario when thoughts are positive and helpful, but what happens when thoughts turn negative, irrational, and unrealistic as they often do? It is critical to understand that the thoughts and information produced by your mind are not ultimate truths. In fact, the mind will “tell you” a lot of unnecessary and erroneous information, much of which should be ignored.
Mastering the mind simply means that you enter a state of awareness where you understand that although your mind helps you in many ways, every day of your life, this help is for practical purposes only. You need the functions of your mind to live, work, communicate, interact with others, and get things done. However, what you don’t need is the constant stream of commentary and judgment from your mind. You know, all those instances when your mind responds to and interprets every single thing in your environment, influencing your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This is where you—the observer, the awareness—must step in and take control.
As the observer of your mind—as the awareness—you can witness your own thoughts and notice all the negativity, all the dysfunction, and all the fear and jumping to random conclusions. This is how you begin the process of mastering the mind—when you create space between the observer and the thoughts. Try it out for a while and you will be amazed at what you will find. Observe your thoughts as if you were watching your own mind like a movie.
Doing this important exercise can help you to then begin re-evaluating your thoughts. As the observer, you can see the workings of your mind from an outsiders perspective. Think of this as being able to give really good advice to a friend even though you might struggle to apply that same advice to yourself and your own life. When you observe your own thoughts and you create that space between the mind and yourself (i.e., the awareness), you become the advisor and your mind becomes your friend.
Consider how you can re-evaluate and re-think the negative thoughts. If your friend told you that she often tells herself she’s not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough; that she’ll never achieve her goals; that she’s stuck in a dead end job forever; that she’ll never find love because she isn’t loveable—and so on—what would you say to your friend? How would you guide your friend in re-evaluating these thoughts and beliefs? Guide your own mind in the same way. Observe the negative thoughts and re-think each one. It will take time and practice, especially if you’ve held onto certain negative thoughts for a long time. But you will see that as you commit to re-evaluating your negative thoughts, that space between you and thoughts will expand. As you free yourself from identifying with negative thoughts, you will have fully mastered the mind.
