3 Mental Wellness Skills
Imagine a black box that is connected to a huge power grid via an electrical cord. Imagine that that block box represents the memories of your experiences stored in your brain. That black box, or your brain, is a storage system.
The power grid into which it is plugged is the source of the substance ‘Thought’. That substance is the ‘clay’ from which we mold ideas, images, beliefs, etc. etc. Once formed, they are stored in our storage system — the brain.
In any moment, we can know whether the thinking we are experiencing is a surge from the memories stored in our brain, or whether it surfaces fresh from the power source. We know via the feeling that accompanies it. Tight, narrow, constricted, gripped, ensnared feelings tell us we are experiencing thought from the memories stored in our brain. Light, insightful, flowing, fresh, open thoughts feel expansive, untethered, solid, ‘knowing’.
Many of us have learned to pay more attention to thoughts from memory and less to those from ‘the grid’. We ‘wake up’ to our unconscious use of attention when we reach a point at which the thoughts from memory become unbearable (even though it may look like circumstances and people outside us are creating that unpleasant experience).
Moving from psychological pain to psychological freedom is a journey in awareness of the inside out process by which we create our experience of life via thought. In developing three simple skills that shift our attentional emphasis from thoughts that feel constricted to those that feel liberated we change. Heed constrictive thinking and we behave one way (what we have always done). Heed uncontaminated thought and we behave another way (fresh, new, different). We reap what we sow. Sow the ground of memory and we reap more of the same, sow the ground of ‘memoryless’ and our bounty can be beyond our wildest (memory carved) dreams.
We all fluctuate through memory based (formed) and possibility (potential) thinking. Every day. We just don’t notice it.
Three skills enable us to form a different relationship to the contents of our mind. That relationship changes everything.
The first skill is Noticing. Noticing when our mind is caught up in the contents of our brain …. the contents of our memory. In its mildest form, we feel under par. At its most intense, we can experience unbearable suffering. When memory based thinking surfaces (as it will for everyone every now and then), notice and pause. Don’t act on it. Instead, create a gap.
In that gap, choose to use Free Will to either ride the choppy destabilizing waves of memory or turn in another direction. Uncouple from memory. Find a way to reengage with what sits before you rather than with what is going on in your head. Get back into the flow of the life you are in, rather than getting swept off into the past. Pause and get on with things.
As your thinking settles, and spaciousness prevails, wait for the power grid to Rewire anew. Rewiring will come via thoughts you have never had before … different perspectives, whispers, nudges, a more expansive perspective. Follow them. Do what comes and see what happens. Break the cycle of reaping what you have always sown.
Maybe you are fed up with with your life, fed up with more of the same — the memories stored in your brain. If this is you and you yearn for a fresher way of being, face to face or Zoom based consultations for more personalized coaching are available.
