Your Relationship With Your Mind

Discover the different types of relationships that you can have with your mind. And how you can change your mindset. This will be very helpful with problems like anxiety, stress and depression, and other issues.

Transcript

Today,

I'm going to discuss a very important topic,

And that is the different types of relationships that you can have with your mind.

So there are four different types of relationships that you can have with your mind.

The first is mind as enemy,

The second is neutral mind,

The third is mind as friend,

And the fourth is mind as creator.

As well as discussing these four types of relationships that you can have with your mind,

I'm going to explain how you can move between those relationships.

So let's take a look at the first relationship.

First relationship is mind as enemy.

So when your mind is your enemy,

It basically means that your thoughts and your feelings,

Your imaginings,

Things like this,

Are generally negative and painful.

When your mind is your enemy,

It can cause all sorts of mental health problems ranging from stress to anxiety to depression.

You will probably already know if your mind is your enemy because you will feel like you can't really control your mind.

You will feel as though you keep having painful thoughts,

Painful imaginings,

You can't control them,

You can't change them,

And you basically feel like you lack self-control.

So if you are at this stage of relationship with your mind,

What you will want to do is move from mind as enemy to neutral mind.

Again,

Neutral mind is basically where you have thoughts and feelings,

Some positive,

Some negative,

Your mind doesn't really affect you too much and you are able to go about your days.

So how do you get from mind as enemy to neutral mind?

Well thankfully our good friend Buddha provided the answer to that many thousands of years ago.

The best way to move from mind as enemy to neutral mind is simply by becoming less reactive to your thoughts and feelings.

And science as well as the Dharma and other philosophies show that the best way to do that is by practicing Vipassana meditation.

So Vipassana meditation is one of the core forms of meditation in Buddhism.

You've probably heard of it.

Basically what it involves is meditating on your breath and then when thoughts or feelings come to mind you are simply going to label them for what they are.

So for instance let's say that you are meditating and you see a painful image in your mind.

You're simply going to label this mental image.

Or maybe you hear a voice in your head in which case you are just going to say sound in mind or something to that effect.

So what you are doing is you are observing what is happening in your mind and then you are simply describing it for what it truly is.

So instead of seeing a thought as something that is real you are saying no this is just a thought and nothing more.

When you do that you are going to become less reactive to your mind.

So even though you may still experience negative thoughts and feelings you are not going to react to them.

They are not going to influence you as much as they would and that is going to give you much more mental balance.

At the same time you can also do some basic cognitive behavioral therapy exercises or CBT.

The basic idea is to listen to your thoughts and then change them to something that is more realistic.

For instance let's say you have a thought I am a failure.

You would then challenge that.

So you would say ok well in what ways am I a failure and in what ways am I a success.

And then you would realistically say well ok on the level of failure to success where am I.

And that would give you a much more balanced perspective instead of thinking well I am a total failure.

You would say well ok I have some areas of my life that I am not happy with but I have also been successful in this and that and so I am like everybody else I am somewhere in the middle.

So to get from mind as enemy to neutral mind you want to practice vipassana and then also do some basic CBT exercises.

So now we will be at neutral mind.

So neutral mind is when you experience a combination of positive and negative thoughts.

Sometimes they bother you.

You know we are all human sometimes our thoughts bother us but overall you are able to get about your day to day life without too much mental health problems you know without stress or anxiety you are just able to go about your day.

This is where most people generally are.

They are not massively positive massively negative they are just somewhere in the middle.

So that is not a bad place to be because it means that you can go about your day to day life without being too disturbed by your mind.

However if you are in neutral mind you might like to move to the next step which is mind as friend.

Now when you are at mind as friend you will feel like you get along with yourself you have a good understanding of yourself you know like you have a good understanding of a close friend.

You accept your weaknesses and your strengths.

Overall your thoughts are generally positive sure you might occasionally have a negative thought but you are able to correct those thoughts and you are able to get on with your life while enjoying happiness and good mental well being.

That is what I would describe as mind as friend.

So if you are at neutral mind how do you go to mind as friend?

In other words if right now your mind is kind of somewhat neutral you get negative and positive thoughts negative and positive feelings but you would quite like to be more positive over all and have a better relationship with yourself.

So how do you get there?

So the key to getting from neutral mind to mind as friend is basically to practice all sorts of positivity techniques.

Probably the number one exercise that I would recommend for this would be gratitude.

Simply every day just spend 5 minutes making a list of things that make you grateful.

That is going to massively boost your positivity.

You can also do things like compassion exercises for instance there are traditional compassion meditations such as loving kindness meditation or metta as well as karuna and tonglen.

Now karuna and tonglen are traditional meditations in which we recognize the suffering in ourselves and in others and then we imagine ourselves visualize ourselves acting positively to stop that suffering.

So simple exercises like this like compassion and gratitude loving kindness these things will overall improve your positivity of your mind so your mind will be a much more nicer mind to live in you'll be much more positive and you'll feel like your mind is your friend because overall your thoughts are positive objective helpful and your mood overall is going to be a happy one full with gratitude and love and most importantly compassion.

Now so far we've gone from mind as enemy to neutral mind to mind as friend the fourth and the highest the best relationship that you can have with your mind is when your mind is creator when you see the power in your mind to create your reality.

Now this is based on scientific fact neuroscience indeed shows that that our perception of reality is based on a combination of our memories our thoughts and our beliefs as well as sensory input so when you put all that together it basically means the reality that you live in is created by your mind through a combination of sensory experience in the moment plus memories plus beliefs plus your thoughts and you have control over all of that and because you have control over all of that so because you have control over all of those factors you have control over how your mind conceives of reality and you can edit it by editing your thoughts your memories the things that you focus on in the present moment and your beliefs you can ultimately change the way that your mind perceives of reality.

Now there's tons of different spiritual texts on this it's discussed in a load of different spiritualities and religions to such an extent that it would be ridiculous to say that any one method is better than others there's not one exercise which we can say well this is the way in which you alter your perception of reality.

So instead the best thing to do is really just to experiment with things to observe your mind and say okay I seem to be remembering this that and that how about I changed my memories or I remember other parts of my life or I seem to be thinking about this this and this and how about if I change those thoughts.

The best way to begin to gain some control over how your mind conceives of reality is really to just experiment with different meditation techniques and other psychological exercises and just say well okay so I changed this belief or I changed this thought or I remembered different things and then to observe how has this altered the way in which I'm perceiving my life.

When you experiment in that way you kind of gain insights into how your different beliefs thoughts memories and sensory experiences how they all come together to shape what we call reality and from there you can find what works for you try different meditation techniques try different psychological exercises all with the understanding that the way your mind processes your life is how you conceive your world and when you do that you will finally get to the highest relationship with your mind which is mind as creator.

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