Making Friends with Your Mind: The Mind is NOT Your Enemy

Making Friends with Your Mind

I have spent more than a decade getting to know myself on a very deep level. My life and how I experienced it changed in a powerful way when I learned that I didn’t have to listen to all of the thoughts in my mind (there was a long time in the journey where I really believed everything the mind told me!). The seemingly incessant chatter in my head was like spending all day with a super annoying person who just didn’t know when to stop talking. While I have always enjoyed being alone, it took decades for me to realize that I didn’t enjoy being alone with my own mind. I was completely mired in using distractions to avoid engaging with this awful frenemy of mine: I would read, listen to music, text people…anything to avoid what was happening in my mind.

I used to believe that the purpose of meditation was to learn how to silence the mind and stop thoughts from arising. When I believed this, I found meditation to be difficult and eventually I just stopped doing it. My own mind felt like a dark plague that would always be present in my life and I just had to learn to somehow live with it.

Learning to live in harmony with the mind

It turns out that I was partially right in that I would have to learn how to live with the mind. What I’ve learned over the years, though, is that my relationship with the mind needn’t be one of strife. We all have the power to choose our perception and take back control of the mind.

One thing that has worked for me is to see the mind as a tool that we have been blessed with as humans have evolved. So much innovation and creation has come from the human mind as has an incredible amount of pain and suffering both on the individual and collective levels. Spending more than a decade getting to know my own mind has taught me that we all have the ability to take back the power of our minds and to use this power for good for ourselves and others. When we understand that the mind is a tool that we can learn to master and utilize more effectively, we empower ourselves and can consciously choose to harness this power to serve the desires of our hearts, of our souls (and stop feeling like a slave to the mind!).

Where to start with befriending the mind?

This all sounds great but how do you uncomplicate the mind and ultimately unravel all of the complex beliefs and limitations that hold you back from totally thriving in all areas of your life? Where do you start? Your power lies in your ability to harness control of the mind and to direct the energy of the mind in ways that serve your highest good. Here are 3 simple steps to help get you started: develop awareness of your thoughts, embrace the mind, and become familiar with the thought patterns created by your unique mind.

3 Simple Steps to Help You Get Started

1. Develop awareness of your thoughts

Begin to observe the thoughts that come up in the mind throughout the day. You can do this in meditation or any time that you think about it. I started with my shower in the morning: I made a conscious choice to be fully present when I showered and to use that daily routine to observe my mind (my shower became a meditation!). You may even want to get a notebook or journal and write some of them down (after the shower, haha). The key with developing awareness of your thoughts is to do so without judgment (you can even make note of judgmental thoughts as they arise) and to sit calmly in the seat of the observer. Get to know the mind. You will begin to see patterns and this is the first step to regaining control of the mind. One thing that helps me is to ask myself if the thought is coming from a place of love or a place of fear? This pause allows me to consciously choose thoughts that come from a place of love thus changing my perception, my reality, and my experience.

2. Embrace the mind; don’t resist it

One function of our minds is to keep us safe, to warn us of danger. Be grateful for this function while also recognizing that for many of us, this function is on overdrive with repetitive and fearful thoughts. It can help to begin to see the mind as a tool that is there to help us. We need not suppress the mind, we simply need to get to know it and learn how to direct it to serve our highest good.

3. Become familiar with thought patterns created by your mind

Before you can transform your mind and your relationship with it, you must become familiar with the patterns it creates. Bringing your awareness to the patterns allows you the opportunity to make a conscious decision about what you wish to create. It can help to think of the mind as a garden with many seeds. We all have the seeds of anger, love, kindness, sadness, etc. As we gain more awareness of our thoughts, we can make conscious choices of which seeds we water and thus what type of garden we wish to create in our mind.

Our thoughts really do create our reality and by beginning to develop awareness of our thoughts, we can begin to deprogram the mind and discover our deep shadows that need healing. Shifting our perspective to seeing the mind as a tool that we can train allows us to reclaim our power and utilize our mind to serve our highest good and relieve the suffering that we can so easily create with an unobserved mind. Embracing and befriending the mind helps to create space for growth and supports us with letting go of the resistance that keeps us stuck in the same unhelpful thought patterns.

Master your mind and master this life!