Changing minds.
I’VE GOT MIND ON MY MIND.
Since my two posts Breaking Habits and The Monkey Mind, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about the mind and how it works when the monkey takes over. I’m going to continue this conversation and while some of what I say is a repeat of things I’ve already talked about, it’s a hugely important topic that I think deserves more attention.
Until recently, I have spent a lifetime living in a scarcity / fear mode. My conditioning is to not feel good enough, or worthy enough and sadly I’m in the majority because most of us feel this way. Forget breaking into the publishing industry, getting an agent etc I’ve realised over the last month, that the biggest battle is often with our minds. Once the mind takes control and feeds you the same old narrative of you not being lucky enough, good enough, worthy enough, or whatever negative conditioning you’ve experienced in the past, those thoughts becomes a feeling and then a fact which we don’t question.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING.
I understand this on a intuitive level, but it was hard to get distance from my thoughts when there was only chaos in my mind and everything felt pointless and hopeless. It was a dark few weeks, until I asked the universe for some help, went on to my Spotify to find a podcast to listen to and there as if by divine intervention, was an episode waiting for me on Jay Shetty’s ‘On Purpose’ with Joe Dizpenza, a scientist, author, teacher and lecturer, called Why Stress And Overthinking Impacts Your Brain And Heart And How To Change Your Habits On Autopilot .
I first came across Joe Dizpenza at the start of lockdown when again my thoughts were spiralling out of control and in so many ways his work saved me, so when I saw this podcast I got very excited and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
LIFE IS AN EXPERIMENT.
In his work, he talks about how the job of the monkey mind is to protect you, to keep you safe by predicting the future based on what has happened in the past. So when your mind tells you things, you believe it to be truth. But its not the truth based on current circumstances and those negative thoughts will only keep you locked in fear or anguish. So if you really want to change the conditioning of your mind, he suggests that you look at life as an experiment.
What this means is that if you want to change your present and therefore your future so that you feel abundant, excited, motivated, instead of coming from a place of scarcity and fear, you need to change how your mind works now. Not when you have reached nirvana because unless you change your insides, the outside isn’t going to change as you want it too. He says you can do this by becoming aware when the conditioned thoughts come up and consciously and repeatedly training your mind to think the way you want it to. But and this is the key, we aren’t training ourselves to never think like that again because that’s not going to happen. What you are training yourself for, is to not stay in it for as long and to understand that this part is the hard part because it’s not going to be easy to retrain your mind. It’s going to be really bloody uncomfortable because the mind will just want to take you where you’ve been been before, because that’s all it knows! To quote directly from Joe Dispenza ‘When it’s the hardest, it matters the most.’
If you want to change your mind by using scientifically proven strategies on how to do so, then I highly recommend listening to this podcast and reading Dr Joe Dispenza’s brilliant book (my lockdown saviour) ‘How To Break The Habit Of Being Yourself.’ Do let me know how this experiment goes for you, I’d love to hear from you.
X
