Our happiness in life is dependent on our understanding of our mind. When we were growing up, we simply were not taught what we needed to understand how life really works. We go through years of education and yet we still did not learn the things that matter most. In fact, much of what we learn from our traditional education, locks us into a life full of suffering.
By learning about our mind, we begin to understand why we think and feel the way we do. When we work on ourselves and gain an understanding of life, we learn:
- How things truly work inside of our heads
- Where our thoughts and feelings come from
- How to be more happy
- How our thoughts directly influence our circumstances
- Why we experience suffering and pain
- How we can connect and flow with life’s energy and power
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is simply our awareness and focus on the present moment without judgement.
In recent years, there is much evidence that mindfulness is a valuable “life” tool that brings us great benefits. Even modern, western medicine accepts and recommends the health benefits of mindful practices.
Mindfulness has been scientifically proven to reduce stress, calm the mind and benefit the health of our body. Through yoga and meditation, mindfulness has been practiced for thousands of years.
Mindfulness is a powerful tool to help us:
- Bring us great joy and peace
- Be present in the moment
- Calm the mind and reduce our over-thinking
- Return our mind to our body
- Heal and transform our suffering
- Find deeper beauty in our experiences
- Provide us valuable insight
Understanding Our Mind
To understand how our mind works, lets first define what consciousness is. It is important to understand the different pieces of ourselves to understand how things work together.
Consciousness is our awareness of our thoughts, feelings, sensations and the world around us.
Awareness is essential to understanding our mind. Our awareness helps us awaken ourselves to new realizations. An awakening helps us see what we could not see before. Our awakened state helps us return to living in the present moment without judgement. Which in turn, reduces our suffering.
Our mind is broken into 2 parts:
- The “active mind”
- The “seed store”
The Active Mind is our active awareness, where we are currently focusing. When we are paying attention to something, this is our active mind.
The Seed Store is where all of our past experiences and sensations are stored (in the form of seeds). In Psychology terms, the seed store is called our “unconscious mind”. Both areas of our mind have the capacity to learn and process information automatically.
Unfortunately, in modern day culture, our mind is often not connected with our body at all. From a young age, we begin to separate our minds from our body through distraction, thinking and focus on the past or future. This is not a healthy state. We need to work, to return our mind to our bodies anchoring ourselves in the awareness of the present moment.
The Unconscious Mind
It is important to recognize that we do many activities with our unconscious mind. A great example is when we drive a car to work each day and our mind is off thinking about a million other things. Yet we safely arrive to our destination without getting lost or getting into an accident.
This is an example where our subconscious and unconscious mind did all of the processing for us while our active mind wandered off. Our mind is capable of processing things on its own without our awareness. This can get very tricky when it comes to our perceptions. Which is another reason why our perceptions are often wrong.
Scientists used to believe that most of our daily actions were done with our awareness. They assumed that only a small percentage of actions were done automatically. Through scientific studies, scientists have learned that very little of our daily actions are actually performed with our awareness. In fact as much as 90% of our daily activity is handled by our unconscious mind automatically – without our awareness or participation.
This automatic processing is important to understand. If our brains are making decisions and processing data without our knowledge, how can we be sure that it is accurately evaluating our situations?
Our brains are simply a pattern matching engine, making judgement calls in fractions of a second. We need to return our active awareness to these decisions and be sure our brains are not making assumptions based on past patterns to support our ego (our fears). Otherwise we will continue to make wrong perceptions.
The Upstairs and Downstairs of Our Mind
To understand how the two areas of the mind are connected, think of your mind as being like a house. Your house has an upstairs and a downstairs. The upstairs is the living room, where you live and your current awareness and focus operates. The downstairs is the basement, this is the “seed store” operates. In the basement we store the seeds for all of our different feelings, memories and experiences. The seed store includes both positive and negative “seeds”:
- Joy
- Excitement
- Compassion
- Anger
- Fear
- Sadness
- Events
- Memories
The seed store also contains the soil that preserves and holds the seeds. The seeds stay there until we see, hear or think something that touches one of those seeds and makes us a feel or remember the related emotion. The seed then comes up from the basement and comes into our current focus. Think of the seed as a guest in our living room (in our mind). When this happens, it becomes a mental formation.
Mental Nourishment
However, sometimes seeds come into our current focus that we do not want. They come our upstairs living room as uninvited guests. We can then choose whether to focus on the seed or to attach mindfulness to it, so we can care for it and calm it down. When we do this, it will return back to the seed store (in the basement).
When we focus on a seed it is called nourishment. Think of nourishment as watering a seed in a garden. When we give seeds nourishment, they will grow and strengthen. It doesn’t matter if the seed is positive or negative, when we focus on it, it grows. If we do not want certain feelings, thoughts or circumstances in our life, we must stop nourishing those seeds with the focus of our mind.
Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind.
The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water. If you plant tomato seeds in your gardens, tomatoes will grow. Just so, if you water a seed of peace in your mind, peace will grow. When the seeds of happiness in you are watered, you will become happy. When the seed of anger in you is watered, you will become angry. The seeds that are watered frequently are those that will grow strong.
– Thich Nhat Hanh in Anh-Huong & Hanh, 2006, 22
Learning to Calm the Mind
By understanding how our mind works, we can understand why our thoughts and feelings arise. By using mindfulness as a daily practice we can begin to heal and transform our suffering into peace, joy and happiness. When we learn to calm our mind, our feelings and emotions no longer run wild and cause us pain.
When we nourish unwanted thoughts and feelings (the negative seeds in our mind), we bring those unwanted circumstances and results into our life. If we begin to practice, we can nourish more of the thoughts and feelings we want in our lives. By learning about the mirror of life, we can connect with life and receive what we really want.
Observing in the Present Moment
Begin to simply observe the thoughts you have each day without judgement or reaction. Are these the thoughts you desire? If not, remain mindful of the present moment and commit to start nourishing the seeds of the here and now.
Begin to practice mindful breathing daily to gain valuable insights to the root cause of your suffering. Be thankful and appreciate each day you you have to live and explore the world. Your life is a journey of discovery. Remember there are ways to calm the storms of your mind. We must practice and build new habits to transform ourselves.
When we combine this practice with a clear vision of what we desire, we begin to connect with our authentic self and purpose.
Wishing you peace and love,
Until next time…
– Greg
