The noise of the mind

Just for a moment, try to stop thinking.
No judgement, no thought, no conversing, no planning.
Still, quiet.

Can you still your mind?  If you can't control your thoughts, who is in control?

The mind is an amazing tool but thought can never be present, as in in the present moment.  If you are thinking, you are in the past, the future but you cannot be present.

The idea of a still mind really scares some people.  They think they will become a zombie, or have to be removed from the world, be unable to function, a smiling idiot, a person with no personality etc  but that is all fear based.  These people do not understand the reality of what it is like to have a quiet mind.  It is fear that is guiding their judgement.

Having a quiet mind means you are fully operational!  (my sci fi talk there..kids would be proud)  It means you are completely present and able to respond fully to the situation you are experiencing, as opposed to unconsciously react.  

Here is an example that I experienced with a client last week that I saw in the street.
I said hello, smiling and I asked her how she was.
She became tense and flushed and said she was fine.
It was clear that she was not, in that moment, fine.  Trusting the moment that guided me, 
I commented that it was nice to see her, we said goodbye and we each continued on our way.  I gave it no more thought and moved with the next thing that came into my awareness, happily and peacefully.

She came to see me a few days later and she mentioned our meeting in the street.
She said she that simple question had sent her into a spin.  Her mind had taken over and she was swept away in what she described as mental madness or insanity.

She commented that in that she was flooded with mental noise like, If she had have replied to my question that she was good, would I see through it and know that she was lying?  If she said she was a bit stressed, it meant that I would think she wasn't applying the tools that she comes to see me about, she wasn't practising what she "should" in her eyes.  She would be a failure, she would be exposed, she would not be living up to my expectations of her.  She didn't want to admit that she was unhappy.  Her mind was going crazy and she experienced anxiety for periods throughout the day.

So we talked about how the mind had taken control in that moment.  What I actually asked her was a simple question.  Her mind and ego took a simple question and assumed, translated, twisted, brought up her fears etc to taint and complicate the question.  Her fears, doubts, vulnerabilities, anxieties and neurosis all came up and she was unable to respond in the way she wanted to.   What could have been a pleasant and simple exchange turned in to something that her mind, though her unconscious emotions, used to change her experience  into one of stress and anxiety.

The mind does that to us.  If we have unexpressed (or suppressed as most of us do) emotions, thoughts, desires, anxieties, fears etc, they tend to rule the show.  Our decisions are never based on what we want in that moment, they are based on all the heaviness and loaded nature of our unconscious emotional world.

Does it sound luminous?  Well, its easy to change, I say "easy" as it never takes as long to move through the blocks we have as it took to put them there but it does take effort.  Effort to merely reverse a habit.  We created the current situation of events that we operate by through unconscious habitual doing, thinking etc so why not focus on changing the program?

More about changing the program later.

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Is it hard to be still?