Using your mind to change your mind

Have you noticed your mind swinging between positive and negative thoughts a lot? Do you find yourself getting stuck in the negative thoughts, even though you know they don’t serve you? Like it’s hypnotic? It’s like it can have a will of its own?

I’ve been reflecting recently on how my mind switches between positive thoughts and “good” feelings on one side and the part of me that can get distinctly less positive. What I’ve been exploring is how I can shift my state from one to the other.

The discovery that I can shift my state at will was a breakthrough for me. It didn’t come as a sudden flash, more a gradual process of realisation. I’d been in what I’d call in retrospect quite a long period of depression, what I referred to in an earlier posting as a prolonged “dark night of the soul”. During this time, I’d experience repeated bouts of anxiety.

As I found, I learned to manage this state by purposefully stopping my thoughts about whatever I was thinking anxious thoughts about and instead allowing myself to feel the anxiety, to really go into the feeling and then allow it to flow through me and dissipate. That in itself proved an effective release.

However, what was more useful was to find that I could manage my mind at will. It seems that the whole period just referred to was one big learning in mastering my mind. That whole process of stopping my negative thinking, exercising my will, was powerful.

Patterns of thinking and feeling are habitual. The habits don’t just change overnight. We need to teach our unconscious mind to work differently. This takes practice – and self-awareness. We need to catch ourselves being caught up in the pattern, to interrupt the process and bring our awareness to focus on an alternative, more positive path. That could be to let go of thoughts and enter the space of “no mind” as in meditation. Or as another option, maybe related, we can take our mind deliberately to focus on something more positive.

In my case, it has a lot to do with the exercise of will, choice, intention and purpose. I have a very clear sense of purpose and a strong belief, although – yes – that’s been tested and gets tested still. But I come back to that set of choices. So I have another state to shift my mind to. What I notice is that in the midst of the mental preoccupation with negativity, as I’m calling it for convenience, I can pause, notice what my mind is doing, and re-direct my awareness to my other state, which has a very different set of awarenesses, feelings and thoughts.

It involves an act of will – but it works. It was a knowing of that alternative space, having a very clear sense of purpose, and being very determined to not allow the “negative state”, the negative thinking and feeling to continue. Knowing that the “negative state” tended to take me where I didn’t want to go and draw to me all sorts of experiences I didn’t want.

What has also been useful to do is learn about the bandwidth between those two states, to know how the process works, to calibrate it, and to act, mentally, in conscious awareness in redirecting my awareness.

The mind is a powerful instrument and one we do not even partially understand. It has huge creativity, far more that we currently realise. Becoming aware, shifting state and bringing ourselves into equilibrium is an important precondition to consciously creating what we want. Because it is from our state of inner connectedness of being that we can truly create all that we want for our higher purpose.

(c) John Gloster-Smith 2008