This Is The Shift We All Need To Create Space And Balance In Our Lives: It Starts With The Mind

How identified are you with your mind? How identified are you with the constant march of thoughts, ideas and narratives that stream through it on a moment by moment basis. How much attention do you pay to this deluge and, ultimately, how does this identification and attachment to this never ending flow make you feel?

If you had asked me to respond to the above questions around 10 years ago, if I’m really honest, I’m not sure I would have been able to answer them. More than that, it’s quite likely that I wouldn’t have even really understood the questions and where they were pointing. Perhaps some of you reading this today have a sense of what the questions are asking. Perhaps for others they feel quite abstract and at a certain level don’t make sense. I’m hoping to make sense of it as these words unfold over the page.

As I see it now, for the majority of my life, I had been living under what we might call the covert capture of the mind. That is to say, whatever my mind spewed out day to day, hour by hour, not only did I pay attention to it but it was the beginning and end of my reality. What I thought, was how things were. What passed through my mind directly informed how I felt at all times. This river of mind content was the primary, perhaps even the only, driver of all my actions and thus my way of showing up in the world around me. I had no concept of what it even meant to be in relationship to my mind, let alone which entities might be involved in such a relationship.

For this reason, and this reason alone, my experience of life was, to put it mildly, an emotional roller coaster. I can dig out a few examples of the fairground ride style of life I was living with all it’s ups and downs. These were not due to the circumstances of my life, but all importantly, how I perceived them, how I attached significance to them in various ways.

In the domain of my business life there could be days or weeks where everything seemed to be moving on an upward trajectory. Perhaps the company would win a project that the team had been pitching for or a senior hire we needed looked like it was starting to fall in to place. An adrenaline inducing business trip would add to my sense of being a globe trotting businessman (something my ego relished massively).The thoughts that started to flow through my mind were dominated by future projections of how successful we would be as a company, how this would help to increase my profile in the industry and the associated (although always short lived) ego gratification that would accompany these musings! I would be on a high of sorts. High energy, enthusiastic and optimistic in general.

A week later everything could be in reverse. Not winning the same project, some other prospects looking less promising and personnel challenges within our team could send me in to a spin of despair. My ego would feel crushed, my mood deflated, energy and enthusiasm sapped somewhere down below the floor. Pessimism engulfed my view of the future like a heavy fog on a grey morning. Sometimes it would hit me with such a thunderous jolt that I wouldn’t even make it to the office.

My inner narrative as far as career and so called success was concerned was a constant drum beat of judgement. It goaded me to work harder, to extend myself  beyond a reasonable capacity to reach my apparent dreams. My default mode was that essentially I wasn’t good enough and the only way to eschew these limiting and harmful beliefs was to ‘make it’ in the field I was operating

In my personal life, if we can even compartmentalise in such a way, things weren’t much different. I was ravaged by thoughts of the past. Injustices I felt had been inflicted on me at one time or another. My emotions were soothed and inflamed in equal measure by what ever happened to be informing my perspective at that moment of time. If in that moment of time I was in an intimate relationship with a fellow human being, the content of my mind tormented me with the possibility that this was the best thing to ever happen. Then, days later, the same mind would opine that the communion must be ended for some spurious reason or other. It’s hard to look back and to recall times when I was genuinely so emotionally imbalanced. Moments of joy followed in quick succession by anxiety, fear and often sadness.

Through all the experiences of our lives, our conditioning, and essentially everything we interact with we unconsciously create an algorithm in the mind. This algorithm, which we rarely have control over, is the substrate from which thoughts, narratives, perspective and patterns in our life emerge. Even if those patterns cause suffering we are often completely unaware of and blind to the algorithm, or the pattern that was consumes us. The algorithm informs the way we feel, think, act, engage with work, friends, family, and the world at large. It affects our health both mentally and physically. 

So, in answer to the first question I posed above, for me at least, the answer is that I was totally identified with my mind. This meant I believed everything it threw up and reacted to everything it deposited. Internally it was the only thing I paid any attention to. Had that continued to be the case I genuinely have no idea how I would have survived without it continuing to cause what felt like to me at least, substantial suffering.

A combination of two things started to transform my perspective on everything in life. These two things were not personal to me. They were and still are available to all human beings. They are of particular value to people who may find that their algorithms are no longer serving them.

First, as I’ve written and spoken about before, yoga arrived in my life like a knight in shining armour. The introduction of a regular practice that started to slow my movement, breath and thoughts offered moments where I could catch my breath rather than continuing to hurtle from one thing to the next. As one begins the journey of slowing down, of practicing presence in the now, and crucially of practicing turning our attention away from our thoughts to focus on the inner experience during our practice, something magical (but really quite rational) starts to happen. We develop a new algorithm that allows us to step back slightly from everything going on in our lives. This was totally new for me.

Second (and as a companion to the first), I started to hear about the concept, which is central to yoga psychology, that we are not our thoughts. Above I asked how being completely attached to and consumed by our thoughts makes us feel. In my case it was not good at all. That may be the case for you too. To hear that there is a possibility we are not our thoughts, combined with a practice that starts to slow you down and connect you to a space that exists beyond the movements of the mind, was a total game changer. 

Central to the practical reality that we are not our thoughts is the yogic proposition that there is a space within us that can observe or witness the mind and yet remains calm, stable and peaceful. This is the space of awareness or consciousness (known as purusha in Sanskrit). We are told that through experiential knowledge of this purusha (purusha kyatih) and by identifying with it as the true source of our awareness we are able to step out of the confines of our mind, the algorithms, and in many cases the torment and suffering that comes with it. The nature of this awareness is that it is unchanging and unaffected by the content of experience (including thoughts of course), so when we know this inner space we too sit in a place that contains those qualities too.

Henceforth as we develop and deepen our practice and identify with this inner space we begin to nurture a natural capacity to watch over our thoughts without reactivity, with a certain amount of detachment and crucially the ability to take our minds away from thought or towards some space or object that might be more beneficial. The dual benefit of being able to redirect our attention alongside the ability to take our thoughts less seriously can transform our inner world, our emotions, our capacity for resilience and our ability to feel compassion and to feel love. 

With the possibility of understanding and stepping back from the beliefs and inner narratives that cause certain patterns of actions and behaviours to arise in our lives, we create space to evolve in a new direction. Often that direction includes more balance, emotional intelligence, less reactivity, less overwhelm and in general a more stable disposition. This is a recipe for reducing the negative impact of stress in our lives and for finding a more peaceful way of existence.

The eloquent and profoundly inspiring teacher Ram Dass was once asked whether, through all his years of practice, he had managed to get rid of his fears and anxieties. He responded stating that his fears and anxieties were still as present as ever but that his relationship had changed with them. He called them ‘little shmoos’ that he had gradually learned to develop a jovial yet detached relationship with. He honoured their presence but understood he didn’t need to take them too seriously or allow them to dominate his life.

This is a possibility for all of us that find life challenging, that struggle with our thoughts, our emotions, with pushing ourselves too hard and too fast. We too can enter in to a new relationship with the thoughts and narratives that have driven us to this point. By connecting to practices that encourage us to step back from our mind and that teach us how to slow down we can move towards more balance, stability and peace in our lives.

Are you feeling that your yoga practice is helping you to reach this place or does it still seem some way off for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, or perhaps by sending me an email, where you are in your journey and where you might need support.

As always thanks for reading!