Beware Of Your Monkey Mind!
Great teachers have told us that you become what you think about most. You believe what you tell yourself, so it’s important to be very thoughtful about what it is that you are saying with your self-talk. That voice in your head is powerful.
As a musician I’ve been instructed that mental practice can be as effective as actual physical practice in learning a piece of music, so at roughly 2500 thoughts per hour, that’s a lot of practice time you can use to your advantage. But you need to be mindful and disciplined about it to do so. You need to be paying close attention to the messages you are sending yourself and assure they are constructive, n’est pa?
Over the years I have collected what I thought were wise thoughts and practice reading and thinking about these sayings, aphorisms and concepts, usually first thing in the day, every day. This practice helped me in the last year or so to keep my head in the game most of the time, even though it was not at all easy, given the multiple disruptions of our emotional equilibrium.
So, here are some of those pearls of wisdom with some commentary that may be a help to you or someone you know to stay in balance, in flow and to just keep moving forward.
Admittedly there’s some obvious Buddhist influence here, an overabundance of maybe annoying positivity and even a hint of new age psychobabble. Mea culpa, but it all works for me.
To wit, wit the first:
We don’t remember the days; we remember the moments.
This really resonates for me because I have far more concrete and vivid sensory memories than precise recollection of specific dates, places and data. That’s just how I’m wired. Smells, pictures and images, sounds, feelings…stuff like that. Those are the moments I remember clearly.
And when I read the adage above, I try to recall specific sensory moments that were intensely pleasurable. Bringing a moment back in my mind and body and how I felt at the time is great fun.
When I get it right and feel good about it, I write it down on a list, so I can easily call it up again if I like. “Gratitude Moments” I call my list. It has over 2800 entries on it now after several years of doing this. 2800 moments in my life that make me feel a little better when I bring back the sensory feelings from them.
The point is the senses and your associated feelings matter. Moments matter. And you can use your recollection of them to trigger warm feelings in the present moment. And warm feelings now can crowd out some of the darkness that has afflicted many of us in recent memory.
A close corollary to this thought is a communication dictum I found especially valuable, which paraphrases Maya Aneglou:
They will remember very little of what you actually said, but they will remember with 100% clarity how they felt when you were finished.
Very powerful mojo there. Emotional memories are indelible, and they can be created in many and various ways by the full range of sensory inputs. Deft speakers get this. They focus on creating memorable moments in time emotionally.
I did a lot of public speaking when I was in business, and I learned how important it was to leave the audience feeling something very specific emotionally. They won’t remember the plethora of facts and figures you had in your presentation. They will remember if it bored or excited them.
It’s really true in every interaction you have with other humans. Ask yourself, how will this moment be remembered? Keep this in mind in your personal conversations. Leave your audience and your acquaintances feeling good that they had a talk with you!
This next one is a goal that takes some work:
To be calm is the highest achievement of the self.
I got that message in a fortune cookie at lunch one day once when I really needed it. Very fortuitous fortune cookie that. I taped the little slip of paper with its message to my desktop monitor so I would see it all day long, and that’s what I did. For years! (And I still have it.)
I’ve worked for over half a century on this one in so many different ways, and all I have to say at this juncture is it’s a good and helpful journey with many, many interesting methods to explore to increase the ability to remain calm in any situation, no matter how stressful.
If I should recommend one, it would be meditation practice and the breathing exercises that come with it, which can be used anytime and anywhere. Relaxation breathing is a haven when it is needed.
So, on the subject of calmness, here are a few good thoughts:
Be. Be now. Be now. Be here now.
Be positive. Be happy. Be hopeful.
There is a ton of information available on the power of staying centered in the present moment, and I can’t necessarily add to the expansive wisdom on the subject but to say that it works.
Almost always when I am anxious, worried or distraught I am ruminating about something in the past that can’t be changed or fearful of something that has yet to happen in the future, so locking into and making the present moment work for me settles the angst. It takes a lot of practice and discipline, but when you make it happen, it’s a joy.
Oddly and succinctly profound are these sayings, and they can make great mantras to combine with breathing exercise.
Mark Twain (one of my absolute favorites) had something quite astute to say about worry:
I’ve seen some terrible troubles in my life, some of which actually happened.
Paying attention to that inner voice and assuring it is saying healthy things to you is essential. Sometimes I just needed to gently quiet that inner child that was whining about past hurts and get on with the living!
And as Mr. Twain suggests, we are wired biologically to focus on threats, and as such tend to imagine an amazing array of catastrophic future outcomes, often with scant evidence. That primordial worry instinct can be very helpful when desperately needed, but a healthy dose of skepticism to it helps keep it in check when it’s out of control or gets you stuck or even frozen in place.
Monitoring how I reacted to the inevitable bumps in the road became a daily game for me, one that I kept score to and eventually winning a day or two became a fun habit. I would try to celebrate and reward myself every day I kept fruitless rumination to a minimum. And that fun habit…responding in calmer ways…is known to produce healthy, as opposed to unhealthy, body chemistry.
So a reaction to events creates emotion and emotion creates mood and mood creates body chemistry and chemistry becomes addictive, good or bad. It’s not easy to design exactly what you want in terms of a reaction, but the skill can be developed with diligent practice. So…
“Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.” Steven Covey
Self-monitoring can be fun! Yes, it’s the old Monkey Mind vs. Big Mind, as they say in Buddhist circles. Monkey Mind just chatters incessantly about annoying constraints and hurdles. Big Mind sees all the possibilities and opportunities and is ever so much more intelligent and soothing. It also helps produce favorable outcomes.
I have also found that high quality decisions are rarely made by the reptilian (survival) part of my brain unless a threat was actually immediate, so I just tried hard to understand where my thinking was located in response to the weird and seemingly threatening crud that sometimes happens. When the impulse was to eat or be eaten (reptilian) I came to understand it was a pretty good time for a substantial time out.
Counting to ten or more with deep breathing always worked wonders for me! Unless Haley’s comet is about to hit you. Then, your reptilian brain works quite well!
Along that same line of “thinking” I’m somewhat sure it was William James who argued convincingly that we have the ability to make a choice in how we respond emotionally to events and situations and are not necessarily the constant and helpless victims of our moods unless we allow that to happen. It’s never easy to redirect or reframe an emotional response, but we have the ability to do so.
For example, the hard-wired, primordial biological options available in response when confronted with perceived threats can result in various degrees of stress induced body chemistry that repeated incessantly over time can do damage to the physiology.
Erudite scholars posit that in response to seemingly existential challenges to our emotional equilibrium, we do in fact have options, the first three of which are encoded by our biological evolution as default settings, but with practice can be supplanted when appropriate with a fourth, rational and more measured approach.
Options in response to stressors and threats: Flight, Fight, Freeze or
FLOW!
Flow can in most cases be the most intelligent and powerful choice. Not easy to accomplish to be sure, but possible. And worth the struggle, because…
Mind of Peace = Peace of Mind
That one became a mantra for me for decades, and while it takes real effort, it turned out to be worth it for me in the long run.
Like anyone in business, occasionally in my career I came under attack and it felt like a horde of bloodthirsty heathens were yearning to feast on my business entrails. The best defense as it turned out was the “Whateva!” stratagem: “I’m just going to focus now on the quality and quantity of what I do well and learn what I can from this moment.” The point here is never play their game; play yours and play it well, and you can’t lose.
Moving expeditiously, demonstrably and routinely out of the hostility vortex and accomplishing something useful and healthy always worked well for me, and for all concerned, as it turns out. When I was able to quiet the chatter in my Monkey
Mind and get something useful accomplished, I more often than not found peace of mind.
So, this applied for me directly in an abundance of circumstances:
“If you are willing to look at another person’s behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves, rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over time, cease to react at all.” Yogi Bhajan
Said somewhat differently but equally as pertinent:
“How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.”
Wayne Dyer
While it’s certainly important to be sensitive to how others behave and behave towards you, I think it best that it is mostly in an observational / educational way, almost as a social scientist, anthropologist or psychologist might. What can you learn from their behavior? And it’s also important to adjust your behavior in response in ways that synchronize with your essence and priorities.
That’s not being selfish, that’s having integrity: knowing what you stand for and against and remaining solidly and consistently right there, while providing room for evolutionary growth and learning.
While I was tested constantly, I came to understand that I was not responsible in any way for anyone’s bad mood or drama or his or her willingness and even desire at times to inflict it on me. I would envision myself encased by a Teflon protective skin, which all negativity just slid off of!
And I don’t think I was being self-indulgent or anti-social, and it doesn’t show a lack of empathy, either. I think I was just being intelligent about my own emotional health, and my career-long research and study found dozens of pertinent studies and theses in the academic world that backstopped that approach with certainty.
I also found it kind of critical to stay focused on what matters, as it was always easy to let petty annoyances and marginally important minutiae overwhelm more significant things.
Summed up well:
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Albert Einstein
While I understand it’s necessary for some jobs and some people thrive on it, I was without question a lot more relaxed, productive and happy when I finally got smart, ignored the maddening crowd and CONTROLLED THE FREAKING MULTITASKING, consciously making the one task at hand whatever it was a focus of singularity and a meditation on doing things well, ONE AT A TIME!
Do less, but better.
That made it easier to stay in touch with my priorities and not let my time be constantly coopted by the profoundly distracting drama and anxieties of others. It helped a lot when I found the courage to stand my ground. I just had to…
Learn to be comfortable saying “no” without explanation.
It’s not always easy and it helps if you are in a position with some authority, but accomplishing what you want in life for yourself and those you care about is important and significant and in all likelihood it will be designed to benefit others to be worthwhile, so…
Keep your eye on the prize.
So I learned, sometimes from painful foul-ups, bleeps, blunders and embarrassing missteps, that whatever it is in your personal life, in your art, in your work and in your relationships that turns you on, calmly staying focused on it is a good thing and procrastination or getting constantly sidetracked ends up being mostly tiring and ultimately painful. So I always reminded myself of these two admonitions when I was fooling myself with what I called seductive distractions:
If not now, when?
“The enemy of the best is the good.” Steven Covey
Okay, now back to the breath, as they say.
It the grand scheme, nothing is more fundamentally relaxing than a good deep breath. About ten minutes of deep breathing, in through the nose and out through the mouth does wonders, so…
Remember to Breathe.
My wife is really good at this next one, making challenges a game helps immensely. Just the change in perspective from being frustrated to being intrigued by the possible solution calms the heart palpitations:
Relax. It’s all just a puzzle that can be solved.
And because complexity does not necessarily imply intelligence, I’ve always felt this is a good one to put your emphasis on the work to be done. Simplification is so critical:
Live simply, so others can simply live.
Wrapping up, this next one is important, straightforward and powerful for us all, coming from one heck of a percussionist:
“Please…be kind.” (Mickey Hart)
And the Last Word is perhaps the most critical. Be good to yourself. Love yourself. Care for yourself. You do the best for all when you do the best for you and you are then well energized to give your best to others:
Protect the asset. The asset is you! (Greg McKeown)
There you have it! Some cool thoughts of wisdom to help you stay on track. I hope developing a discipline that has you routinely focusing on ideas like these or those that turn you on will help you! It’s all about consistency. Like meditation, coming back to the same sacred place and soothing your soul daily, feasting on wisdom you can make your own.
Good luck! Stay healthy! Stay safe!
