The Mystery Of The Mind

The Mysterious Mind

The mind is a mysterious place. Sometimes our mind is wide open and thoughts flow like a waterfall and other times it is stagnant like a pond that has nowhere else to go. I don't get it. How does the mind decide when it is going to be open and when it is going to be closed? Let's find out.

  Is It Open Or Is It Closed?

I want to imagine two different situations; one will be a time when ideas were flowing to you like a waterfall and the other situation will be the stagnant pond. I will you a minute. Ok, do you have your two situations in mind? I want you to think of the situation you chose for the waterfall. How did it make you feel?  Maybe happy, excited, rushed to write down all your thoughts as fast as they are were coming to you, or maybe a combination of all three. I know that I have had many situations where all three occurred at the same time. Now I want you to think of the situation you chose for the stagnant water.  How did that make you feel? Upset, angry, annoyed, maybe even furious at the situation. See how these two different situations make you feel a number of different emotions.   If we feel happy and excited when our thoughts are flowing, then what can we do to not get furious when they aren't flowing?

Ways To Calm The Mind

A few days ago I had a situation that would have fallen under the category of the stagnant water. I was actually writing The Greatest Thing You Will Ever Learn post when for some weird reason what I wrote wouldn't show up in the preview area where I see it how you guys would. Anyways, I tried just about everything I could think of at the time. Rewriting it,  putting it in a different window and putting back into my blogger post, and checking the settings. None of it worked.  I tried for a good half an hour, but my mind was stagnant. I started getting upset with technology for not doing what I wanted. Let's just say that technology wasn't my friend that day, but instead of getting caught up in the situation which was starting to make me upset, I decided to do one of my pattern interrupts. I put my phone down and leaned back in my chair to do a meditation. This helped me disconnect from the situation and calm my mind. As I was doing this, my mom came outside and I told her that I wanted technology to go away and told her what happened. For the next 20 minutes, we sat there trying to figure out what was going on. We tried a bunch of different things and then figured out it was a formatting problem; which allowed the words to show up after we fixed it. Thanks, mom for the help. From this situation, I realized how important having different pattern interrupt activities are to calm your mind. Some other things you can do is go for a walk, go for a drive, take three deep breathes, count backwards

from 10, or anything that disconnects you from the situation that is stressing you out.

Three deep breaths

                                 

Reading

Walking

Driving

Action Item

Situations come up whether they are good or bad. I challenge you to think of some activities you can use as a pattern interrupt. Next time a situation comes up that stresses you out, I want you to do one of your pattern interrupt activities instead of getting caught up in the situation.