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Make the Mind
Your Ally
by Joan Borysenko,
Ph.D.
 You
can change your habits and learn to manage your time,
but without learning to manage your mind, inner peace
is impossible. Even when you’re sitting in a
comfortable living room, surrounded by loved ones and
trying to relax, your mind is capable of producing
outrageously stressful mental movies. You probably
create them several times a day, perhaps without even
noticing what you’re doing. The key to making your
mind your ally, rather than your enemy, is to become
aware of how you produce and direct your very own
cinema of the absurd. Then you can choose to run a
different feature. Awareness and choice are the keys
to mental peace.
Here
is how the average stressful mental movie gets
produced. I was on my way to facilitate a weekend
workshop at a cozy conference center in upstate New
York. It had just snowed, and the trees were bowed to
the earth, shaking off their frosty offerings in a
light breeze. The sunlight sparkled off the flakes,
and the world was enchanting in its beauty. I was in
the moment, feeling spacious and present. My body was
relaxed and comfortable. Then I had some constricting,
afflicting kinds of thoughts:
What perfect skiing
weather. I moved to Colorado to spend more time
outdoors. Everyone at home is probably out enjoying
the snow. I’m on my way to spend the weekend teaching
indoors. Poor, poor pitiful me. I’m so busy.
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One
moment I had been peaceful, expansive and present,
thoroughly enjoying life; the next moment I was
feeling deprived, crabby, and stressed. Nothing had
changed except my thoughts, but that’s where we live
the majority of our lives. Much of the time, the
suffering and busyness we feel has very little to do
with the reality of the situation. It’s a direct
result of our thinking.
The
Buddha had a great analogy. He said that each of us
has some suffering, like a cup of salt. If you choose
to dissolve your salt in a small bowl, the water will
be undrinkable. But if you dissolve it in a lake, the
water will still taste sweet. The mind — and how you
deal with your thoughts — is the equivalent of the
bowl or the lake.
Life
is filled with very real suffering. God forbid that
you or a loved one gets seriously ill, a child dies,
your business fails, divorce rips your family apart,
or you’re betrayed by a person you trusted. These
things happen because they’re a part of life. As you
get older, you realize that there’s no magic amulet or
formula that prevents suffering. Bad things routinely
happen to good people. Suffering is part of the human
condition. You may wish that this were not so. There
are plenty of books that trade on that hope,
dispensing advice on how to think, eat, pray, and
behave in order to avoid suffering, but suffering will
come just the same, in spite of your best efforts. The
only thing you can really control is how you respond
to life’s inherent challenges.
However, there are two types of suffering — mandatory
and optional. On my drive through the snowy
countryside, there was no external cause for
suffering. It was all in my mind. This made me recall
that the original definition of yoga had nothing to do
with stretching exercises. It was defined as learning
how to control the mind and banish the afflicting
thoughts that create needless suffering. Learning how
to do that, said the ancient sages, is the most
difficult of all disciplines. Learning to walk on
water was said to be much easier.
Getting control of your thinking may not be easy, but
if you want lasting peace, it’s a worthwhile practice.
As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is
us." It takes consistent effort to overcome that
internal enemy, but you can do it as part of your
daily life. It takes no more time to use your thoughts
well than it does to let them drive you crazy. The
basic skills of awareness and choice are available to
every person, in every situation, during every hour of
the day and night.
For
example, in order to stop my mind from creating
suffering over its preference to go skiing, I had to
notice what I was doing. That is awareness. "Uh-oh.
I’ve lost it. I’ve made myself miserable." The thought
of skiing started the process of woolgathering, or
bringing up other thoughts about how busy I was. The
next move in the practice of mental martial arts was
to change my thinking.
Modern
cognitive psychologists suggest that you internally
yell, "Stop it," then start in on a more productive
train of thought. In the skiing example, I might have
nudged my mind onto a better road by thinking, Next
weekend I’ll definitely go skiing with my family. I’m
glad I remembered how much we love to do that. Today
I’m going to enjoy my work. These thought
corrections are called affirmations. I like to
think of them as station breaks for the opposing point
of view. This might all seem very simple, but it’s not
easy. If it were, we would all be yogis.
This
week, notice your thinking and develop the habit of
awareness. Witness your thoughts with the recognition
that you are not your thoughts. They are just a
mental movie, and you can make the choice to run
another film. Try saying an emphatic mental "Stop it"
when you feel tense and constricted by unproductive
obsessing. Then substitute a train of thought that can
be your ally in experiencing inner peace.
Exaggerate the Negative
Remember the song "Accentuate the
Positive, Eliminate the Negative"? Easy for them to
say! Although being aware of your thoughts, and
exercising your authority to choose new ones, is
helpful, sometimes the strategy of accentuating the
negative creates such a hilarious parody of the
situation that it can help you change your mind even
faster.
Woody Allen films are funny because
he understands the movies of the mind. Listening in on
the soliloquies of his characters and witnessing their
mental concoctions is amusing because it’s so human.
We all do it. One of his characters may have a simple
headache and suddenly he fantasizes about being in the
hospital with a terminal brain tumor. Psychologist
Albert Ellis calls this awfulizing. That’s a
great word. It’s powerful because it’s such a perfect
description of obsessive worrying. Whenever we work up
a situation mentally to the point where it has the
most dire conclusion imaginable, we’re awfulizing.
When I got the contract for this
book, I only had two months to write it between
business trips. How could I do it? I was already busy,
and the daily office work would still be there.
Furthermore, the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New
Year’s holidays were coming up. Most of our blended
family of six adult children were planning visits. I
began to awfulize. How could I possibly find time to
write? I would miss being with the kids, and they
would think they didn’t matter. I began to dwell on
the fantasy that I was a hypocrite, one of those
people who loves everyone in general, but no one in
particular. How could I write about inner peace for
busy people if I was a mess?
I sat down at the computer to write
in that elevated state of mind. Wonder of wonders,
after a whole day, nothing but drivel had appeared.
That scared me even more. Apparently my fantasies
about not being able to write the book were true. So I
decided to try exaggerating the negative. "I will
never write this book. I’ll have to give back the
advance and then the bank will repossess the house.
We’ll end up in the street — and all because those
kids are coming!" I can do a pretty good comedy
routine, and soon I was laughing so hard that I
relaxed. At that point, I was able to acknowledge what
my good friend Janet told me. She pointed out that
I’ve always written best under pressure, being the
type of person who lives for deadlines.
"If you had a whole year to write
this book," she reminded me, "you’d start the month
before it was due." I was awfulizing over nothing. I
did love to work like that. I could spend the mornings
writing and have the rest of the day free once the
kids arrived. I relaxed, sat down, and immediately
began to enjoy the creative process.
The key to exaggerating the
negative is that humor counteracts the physical
effects of the stress and panic that accompany
obsessive worry. The body can’t tell the difference
between what you imagine and what is real. Awfulizing
is just like watching a scary movie. Your heart
pounds, your breathing becomes shallow and ragged,
your muscles tense, and you become hyper-alert. You’re
ready to fight for your life. Once you’re in that
state, it can be hard to get hold of yourself without
a good dose of laughter to calm you down.
You don’t have to be facing a book
deadline or any other unusual circumstance to get
trapped by awfulizing. You probably do it every day.
Perhaps you’re drinking your morning coffee when you
think, I’m so incredibly busy. I still have
yesterday’s phone calls to return. I bet there will be
10 new voice-mails and 20 new e-mails today. Then
there are the two reports that are due. What a
beautiful day it is. I’d love to go out for a walk,
but there’s too much to do. How did things get so out
of control? I’d rather pack it all in and move to a
cabin in the woods. Now that your thinking has
created stress, physical tension, and neurotransmitter
disaster, you still have to get through your to-do’s,
but with a body that has just been beaten up by
chemical two-by-fours.
This week, when you notice
obsessive worry, label it: "I’m awfulizing!" Try
exaggerating your movie as if you were Woody Allen,
until you see how entertaining you are. "I’m so busy.
No one in the entire history of this world has ever
been so busy. I have more phone calls to return than
the president. I could run three countries, and I
haven’t even had breakfast yet." This will help stop
the stress response and return you to a relative state
of peace.
 This
article is excerpted from the book
Inner Peace for Busy People: Simple Strategies for
Transforming Your Life, by Joan Borysenko,
Ph.D. Reprinted with permission of the
publisher, Hay House Inc.
www.hayhouse.com
Info/Order this book.
About The
Author
Joan
Borysenko, Ph.D., is one of the leading experts on stress, spirituality,
and the mind/body connection. She has a doctorate in medical sciences
from Harvard Medical School, and is a licensed clinical psychologist.
She is the author of
ten books, including the New York Times bestseller
Minding the Body, Mending the Mind and
Inner Peace for Busy People. Joan's Website is:
www.JoanBorysenko.com
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