Hello again! This week, I want to help you understand your mind a little better. I meet many people who like to get their houses done up or set up by a Feng Shui or Vastu expert. Feng Shui is a complex body of knowledge that teaches how to balance the energies in any given space to assure good fortune for people inhabiting it. I believe it works since everything is just energy, frequency and vibrations that brings me to the thought about our minds. I have researched the human mind over the last 20 years and I find it absolutely fascinating and complex at the same time. Understanding quantum physics to Studying NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), I have attended over three hundred workshops involving the knowledge of the mechanics of the human brain and mind.
Let me try to make this simple for you to understand. We carry in our minds enough thoughts and beliefs that keep us in a state of confusion and turmoil. So let us compare our minds to a room, which is completely disorganised. The furniture is all over the place, the couch is over here, the lamps exist, and there are wires over here and showpieces over there. To move around the room you have to climb over all the stuff and around all these things. Imagine having to live in a room like that and now think that this room was the only living space you had. How difficult it would be for you to live comfortably here. Therefore, what I am going to do is help you understand the mechanics of your mind and then give you some tools that can help you organise your mind. Some exercises that I share with you will help you clean up that messy room. They will help you organise that furniture so that you can move around the room easily without having to live in that mess. Let us start with self-talk. What is it? The voice that keeps talking to you inside your head or the voice you are hearing as you read this.
It has been observed that an average person has over fifty thousand thoughts or conversations in his mind every single day. Out of these fifty thousand self -talks we interact with around ten thousand of these and for every positive thought we simultaneously have four negative thoughts that are limiting in some way. This ratio is 1:4. This is the state of the world right now. In psychology, it is also equivalent to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). So we have all these negative thoughts going on and all those cause us to resign ourselves to something called learned helplessness. Research was conducted to find out about learned helplessness. Researchers took a little dog, put it in a maze, and laid down electric wires that let out little electric shocks. Each time the shock was applied the dog would run and find a way out of the maze. Next, they put the same dog in a Straitjacket restricting its movements. Then they applied the same shocks, now the dog tried to run but it could not and after repeated shocks, finally it gave up. No amount of shocks compelled the dog to move. Then they took away the straight jacket and once again applied the shocks. What happened now was that the dog still did not move and it just stood there. It was completely free to move but it has gone to a point where it had learned helplessness.
Here let me give you another unrelated research that was done but which ties us to the thought of this article. A research was conducted on dreams and it was revealed that there is no difference to what happens in our minds when we dream at night and what happens in our minds when we day dream. In other words, when you are sitting there day dreaming about, “I want to better my life”, or “I want a better world” or “I want to change my job”. The same chemicals are released in your brain during dreams at night and during day dreams. Another research that they were doing involving dreams was that they were studying the dreamless mind and the way they were doing that was by having subjects lay in the lab and overtime the subject had REM (Rapid eye movements) i.e. they entered into their dream phase of their sleep, they were woken up or disturbed so that they would stop dreaming. After three days they cancelled the research and considered it unethical and announced to the world that it should never be done again because all the subjects who were not allowed to dream became very irritable, suicidal, angry and violent people. So we talked about this mind of ours which has an average of four negative thoughts to a positive thought.
We discussed about learned helplessness research and we talked about the research that when we are not allowed to dream, we go insane. If you put these three researches together in a particular sequence, you will realise that this is exactly what is happening to a majority of the people in the world. Each one dreams of a better life a better world, a better job, a better lifestyle, yet they are continuously being woken up by negative thoughts saying that’s not real, you cannot do that, you cannot achieve that or you don’t have the resources to do that. Later they resign themselves to a state of learned helplessness where eventually they give up trying. These exercises or tools that I am sharing with you are to help you lower the ratio of the negative thoughts to positive ones. One of the ways to achieve that is to still your mind. Here is the exercise that will help you do that. I call it the soft gaze exercise to start off sit in a comfortable position, place your feet on the ground. To generate and emanate that peaceful state where the mind is not dragging you around, can be achieved through the soft gaze exercise. By holding your eyes still and not allowing them to move around you actually slow the brain down. There is a very specific way that you do this. This exercise is to teach you to see what your eyes are actually seeing and not what you are looking at. As a result of doing this particular exercise you can reduce the fifty thousand thoughts or self-talks that are happening down to virtually nothing.
You can slow down your mind to a degree where you can observe yourself in a new way. This is very scientific and simple, so relax yourself. Start by gazing forward, don’t look at anything in particular, just gaze forward. Now without moving your eyeballs see everything that’s above you. You are still looking forward but you can see everything that is above you, you can blink if you have to, and that’s okay. Now see everything that is below you, so you are gazing forward looking at everything that is above you and everything that is below you, you will notice that your mind has started to quieten. The chatter is reducing. At the same time now see everything left and right. So that you see everything that’s above you, below you, side of you all at the same time, you see it all. You will start experiencing your mind silencing and the chatterbox in your mind quietening. As you sit there longer and longer you see that it gets calmer and calmer. Next week, I shall share with you some more of these tools and exercises to help you understand your mind better and to help you gain control over it.
Umesh Pherwani
