You can see where your mind is at by doing a balancing vinyasana yoga pose.
You’ll topple when your mind goes somewhere.
Where did it go?
What issue are you concerned with?
Conflict begins foremostly in the mind and then manifests itself in the body.
Here’s an example of great balancing vinyasana flow:
Sometimes we don’t know what’s weighing on our minds until it’s too late.
By too late I mean we push it so far back that when it finally erupts in the body it does so in unpleasant ways:
- Stress manifesting as a migraine
- Anger manifesting as lashing out
- Anxiety manifesting as a stomach ache
Get there before the worst happens.
Force yourself into your body every day and see where the mind wants to pull you.
You can do this with meditation too.
Fuck apps like Headspace with some suave British dude tickling your earbuds.
Meditation time is me-time, you-time, connect-with-your-own-personal-center-of-the-universe time.
Meditation is silent.
This is how you meditate:
- Set a timer for 5 minutes, sit upright and take a mental inventory from head to toe of where your holding your tension.
- Consciously squeeze, then release each tense area.
- Let the noises around you filter in, be with the noises (the cars honking outside, the washing machine hammering next door).
- Then connect with your breath and feel it fill up your belly, chest, and push it into your head.
Once you’ve got a rhythm going, you’re simply monitoring when thoughts start to stuff themselves into your brain.
Don’t judge or get annoyed.
Acknowledge them.
Catalogue their variety (“Oh, a thought about work”, “A thought about my plans this evening”), then return to no thought.
By the end of the meditation session or the balancing yoga flow, tag down the thoughts that were most intrusive.
If it’s a big worry that you can do something about right then and there, you need to either tackle it so you can move on with your day or schedule time blocked off later that day to tackle it.
Identify the disruptive thought pattern by connecting with your body, then get it down on paper.
Use this three-step method to journal that I learnt from Dale Carnegie:
- Analyse the situation fearlessly and honestly and figure out what could happen as a result.
- Accept the worst that could happen.
- Brainstorm how to improve upon the worst.
Simply collecting facts in an impartial way will cut your anxiety in half.
Carnegie advises you pretend you’re collecting the facts for someone else, which will make you seek the facts you don’t want to face.
Don’t even attempt to solve your problem without first gathering all the right facts.
Write down everything:
- What am I worrying about?
- What can I do about it?
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to switch off the overactive cerebral thinking brain.
You do this by immersing yourself in cold water.
Your thoughts mean nothing when you’re three minutes deep into an icy cold shower.
You do this by going hard with the weights.
Your problems disappear at the bottom of a heavy squat.
Your mind acting up is a sign to get into your body.