How to Stop Feeding Your Monkey Mind

In part 2 of the “Understanding the Mind” series, we are going to go much deeper down the rabbit hole and learn:

The mind’s connection to others (the collective)
What the “Monkey Mind” is and why it happens
Ways to calm the storms of our mind

In part 1 we learned the basics of how our minds work, what our awareness is and the basics of mental seeds and mental nourishment.

Parts of the Mind

As you recall from part 1, we learned that we have an active awareness called mind consciousness and a seed store called store consciousness. The seed store includes the “seeds” of our feelings and experiences but it also includes the soil to hold the seeds. Our mind consciousness (our active awareness) is our current focus and can include both welcomed thoughts but also unpleasant thoughts we don’t like or want.

Our mind consciousness (the upstairs) is the part of our mind that is actively aware and focusing. This is the part of us that is always analyzing, comparing, judging things. This part of our mind is sending data to our subconscious. Then the subconscious looks up our past experiences and patterns that it can relate to to make conscious choices.

Our store consciousness (the basement) is quite fascinating. In psychology terms it is called our subconscious or unconscious mind. It is capable of processing completely on its own, without our attention or awareness. In part 1, I gave the example of driving to work without thinking about it, yet we somehow still arrive safely. Interestingly though, we cant remember a single memory from the 45+ minute drive we took.

The mind is constantly flowing, evolving and changing. Experiences, feelings and thoughts are changing us even though we attach to familiar patterns.

Our brains prefer easy patterns that it has experienced before so that it doesn’t have to expend more energy and register a new pattern it hasn’t ever dealt with (the unknown).

Sense Consciousness

There is another part of our mind called sense consciousness that is connected to our 5 senses (sensors around our body):

Sight
Sound
Smell
Taste
Touch

Our perception of the world around us enters from the door of sense consciousness. There are 3 parts of this area:

The sense organ (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin)
The object we are sensing (or interacting with)
The experience of what we are sensing

There are many people around the world only believe in things that are experienced coming through the “senses” doorway. By doing so, they are severely limiting themselves, their connection with life and their innate and remarkable abilities to influence their outcomes.

I hope all people have the opportunity to learn about life’s purpose and its miracle. We are great beings of this life energy. We can learn to tap into it and not only improve our own life but those around us.

The Collective

The parts of your mind that you have learned about so far we call your individual mind. However, there is more to ourselves than our personal minds. We are connected to everything around us through a powerful, energy field. This energy field connects all life, including the planet we live on. Our mind connects us to this energy field. Each person’s mind connects to the energy around them and forms a vast network. This connected network is called The Collective.

The Collective is quite powerful and allows us to feel and sense life on a much deeper level. You have experienced sensations of the collective mind without likely even realizing it. It sometimes even becomes obvious to the nay-Sayers and non-spiritual people.

Lets use the example of a large gathering or event. When everyone is focusing on the same thing, there is a strange sensation and electrical energy that fills the air.

This is the point when everyone feels the same sensation and chills run down your spine. This is feeling comes from the collective. Connected energy that is way beyond our individual self. Everyone can feel it.

Here are some Large Event examples:

When singing the national anthem
Having a moment of silence
A meaningful speech
Music Concert

This collective energy can be felt even without a large gathering of people. A single individual can “tune in” to this energy field around them and feel powerful sensations.

Examples of the Collective

The collective exists even when we are not gathered together in large groups of people. Other examples you can feel sensations from collective energy:

Viewing the ocean
Watching a beautiful sunset
Observing clouds in the sky
Feeling the warmth of the sun
Looking at the moon (or experiencing an eclipse!)
Viewing mountains
Being around trees in a forest (nature)

The collective is an important part of our understanding. It allows us to connect to things larger than ourselves and beyond our learned capabilities. This connection can help us and provide us valuable support and healing energy.

Proper Mind Nourishment

Nourishment is a key aspect in understanding how our minds work. Nourishment is simply what we feed our mind on a daily basis. You may not realize it, but each day we consume mental food. It’s no different from the food we need to feed our physical bodies. We can feed ourselves healthy food and benefit or eat unhealthy food and suffer.

Since the mind and our thoughts influence and create the world around us, we need to be very careful of what we feed ourselves. We need to be constantly aware of “which mental seeds we water”. The seeds we nourish will grow and get stronger. These seeds become our habits, which manifest into our circumstances.

Examples of Mind Nourishment

Mindfulness can help us become aware of and observe our daily patterns. I practice mindfulness often to be sure I do not water the negative seeds in my mind. For my own life, I avoid:

Most News and Media (all forms)
Horror movies
Heavy, intense or emotional dramas
Spending my relaxing time with negative or angry people
Listening to harsh, intense or aggressive music
Seeing or watching things that evoke a sense of fear

The items listed above can cause anxiety, negative feelings and will increase our suffering. We should avoid the things that feed the stories that our minds are addicted to. We should avoid things that feed our fears, worry or our anger.

Negative nourishment is simply watering (focusing on) the wrong seeds. Ongoing exposure to negativity will effect your mental attitude. It is hard to feel happy or be in peace if you are constantly watering the seeds that cause you suffering.

Keep A Life Log or Life Diary

Keep a daily log of the nourishment you feed your mind for a week or two. Evaluate your list and determine whether you are feeding your mind mostly positive or mostly negative food. Then build a new plan to eliminate certain items.

Be sure to write it down. Its important to write things down and get them out of your head. Our minds will play tricks on us and sometimes will not allow us to see things that we really don’t want to deal with. This is especially true if those items cause us pain, change or point back to us.

Be strong! Have the strength to face your suffering. To see the things you don’t want to. Our mind makes it much worse than it really is. The reward is understanding, peace and happiness.

Keep a diary of important realizations from your journey of awakening. This is a valuable tool that you can review and reference. Its important that we keep things clear and organized. This is best done on paper vs. the conflicts of our jumbled mental patterns.

Its important to note, you may confuse some items that cause you suffering as negative nourishment. But in reality, the item (or person) is actually there to help you breakthrough or overcome a personal challenge. Be open and quiet your mind. Be patient. Insight will come as you practice mindfulness.

Try always to observe the challenges we have as an opportunity to learn and grow.

The Monkey Mind

Our minds can be compared to a wild animal. When untrained and untamed, our minds can be uncontrollable and dangerous (not house-broken). Thoughts pop in and out without reason or purpose, whether we want them there or not.

We may be sitting peacefully, enjoying a beautiful sunset and all of a sudden, a bunch of stressful thoughts pop into our mind about our work or about some unfinished business we need to deal with. This jumping around of thoughts is similar to how monkeys jump from branch to branch of a tree. This type of undisciplined, untrained thought is called the monkey mind.

Important: An untrained mind has a natural addiction to stories, drama and suffering.

As we learn about the mind and begin to work on the proper mental food, we use certain tools to help bring our minds back to our body. With a little practice we can begin to calm the random thoughts popping in and out of our heads. Mindfulness and meditation are excellent tools to help us quiet our mind and reduce the noise in our head.

Our minds respond very well to training but require ongoing practice. The more we practice mindful breathing and meditation, the more calm, peaceful and happy we become.

Stop Feeding Your Monkey Mind

Understanding how our mind works is very important. Our perception of our reality comes from our mind. Our thoughts create the circumstances of our life and our world. If our mind is untrained, our thoughts will be random or negative and cause us to receive undesirable or unpleasant results.

Its important to remember that our thoughts can not always be trusted. Our thoughts can be closely tied to our fears, our anxieties and cause us endless suffering. Our mind can play tricks on us and keep us stuck in a loop of unhealthy thoughts or patterns. These patterns keep us locked into our past or day dreaming about our future but NOT where we need to be. The remedy is to stay focused in the present moment.

Its very natural for us to resist change. Our resistance to change comes from our repetitive patterns. From our brain’s perspective these are called neural pathways. Neural pathways are the tracks that connect our neurons in one location to neurons in another location.

More simply explained, think of the pathways in your brain as connections that had to be carved in stone. Once the pattern has been established, our brains prefer that same path over and over versus having to re-build or carve a new pathway. Building a new pathway takes a lot more energy than using one that already exists. Our old pathways make it hard for us to accept change.

When we apply neural pathways to our thinking or our feelings, it begins to make sense why we hold onto to familiar patterns, even unhealthy ones. Its good for us to learn how things really work, so we understand why we react the way we do and we can try to transform our suffering into happiness.

What Can We do?

Understanding and calming the mind is similar to learning a new skill. It takes practice. Our minds need training and care. A trained mind becomes an important part of our:

Path to happiness
Comprehension of our reality
Understanding our perceptions
Understanding our suffering
Ability to accept change
Connection and compassion with others

We benefit so much from having an understanding of our mental habits. Unfortunately, as children we are not taught how our minds work. Learning this topic while we are young, could really help us avoid a lot of unnecessary suffering in life.

Its never too late. Hopefully with your new understanding you will stop feeding your monkey mind and begin healthy, daily mental food. Practice to strengthen your skill and enjoy deeper peace and happiness.

Practice Daily to Begin Happiness

Lets start by learning to calm our mind with mindful breathing and meditation. This will help reduce the untrained monkey mind and return us to state of peace and harmony. As we continue to practice, we can build new mental habits and provide ourselves healthy mental nourishment. Watering the correct seeds to begin to align your inner and outer worlds.

Wishing you peace and love,
Until next time…

—
Greg

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