by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Learning the Art of Mastering Your Mind Can Help You to Grow Real and Build Flow
One of the most important and beautiful things we can do for ourselves on the journey into REALNESS is learning how to master our minds.
This doesn’t mean treating the mind as something ‘evil’ that needs to be defeated or anything like that – actually, pretty much the opposite because the mind is an extraordinary tool that can help us understand, create, plan, communicate, solve problems and turn ideas into reality.
The problem isn’t having a mind but being mastered by it instead of getting it to work for us.
This is because when we don’t understand how the mind works then it tends to default to operating in the service of the ego which just uses our thoughts, memories, fantasies, fears, and desires to keep us locked inside outdated patterns and conditioning.
The ego can also hijack our goals so that we spend our lives chasing things we think will make us feel whole and REAL when all we’re really trying to do is fill the Void created by our disconnection from truth and going deeper and deeper into a state of fragmentation and unreality (i.e. we think we’re pursuing a meaningful goal but, really, we’re just trying to escape ourselves)
This is why mastering the mind is such an important part of becoming REAL and exactly what this article is going to help you understand.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Mastering the Mind: What We Cover in This Article
- Learning the Art of Mastering Your Mind Can Help You to Grow Real and Build Flow
- The Mind Is a Tool
- Awareness Is the Beginning of Mastery
- Nature of the Mind #1: The Mind Will Always Wander
- Nature of the Mind #2: The Mind Keeps Returning to What Matters
- Nature of the Mind #3: A Lot of Mental Content Is Emotional Content in Disguise
- Nature of the Mind #4: The Mind Is a Problem-Solving Machine
- Nature of the Mind #5: The Chain: Emotion → Identity → Thought → Action → Result
- Practical Steps: How to Start Mastering Your Mind
- The Final Word: The Mind Can Either Serve Life or Destroy It
The Mind Is a Tool
The first thing that you need to understand on the journey to mastering your mind is pretty simple:
The mind is a tool that you HAVE – not a ‘thing’ that you ARE.
This is really important to know from the get-go because a tool can either be used to CREATE or to DESTROY – just like a hammer is a tool that can either be used to build a house or tear one down.
The hammer itself isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and what actually matters is how it is used – the mind is very similar because you can use it to either create something wonderful or to manufacture entire a whole world of fear, shame, resentment, fantasy and self-deception for yourself to live in.
The only real difference between one case or the other is how you CHOOSE to use the tools as your disposal.
When we don’t understand that the mind is a tool in this way, then we usually end up making the fundamental mistake of starting to identify with it:
An example of this kind of identification is that a thought like “I’m not good enough” appears and we treat is as being the actual truth instead of just an interpretation of the truth being filtered through the mind.
What’s happening here is that – because we think we ARE the thought instead of it just being something that we HAVE – then it becomes an identity which leads to beliefs that lead to our behaviour in the world (which in turn affects the results we get from life and how unreal or real those results are).
The whole thing can happen without us ever noticing because when we think we ‘ARE’ the mind we just end up getting carried away by it and being taken to places really don’t want to go to.
From the perspective of REALNESS, what we can say is that you’re not the ‘content’ of your mind or your mind itself but the Awareness in which the fluctuations of the mind appear.
A good way to imagine this is to envisage a blank piece of paper:
The paper represents Awareness and every thought, memory, image and mental story that passes through your mental experience is like a little black dot appearing on the paper that will eventually be erased as it passes and disappears.
The dot is an actual experience that you’re having but it isn’t the paper on which the experience unfolds.
Likewise, your thoughts are experiences occurring within Awareness but they’re not actual truth and they definitely aren’t the full picture about who you are in your realness.
Knowing this starts to create space between you and your mind and this space creates choice which puts you on the path to mastery.
Awareness Is the Beginning of Mastery
Normally, when we’re on a healing or transformational journey of finally working on ourselves and our inner ‘stuff’ then we eventually get to the point where we try to work on our thoughts and minds:
- We analyse them.
- We challenge them.
- We try to replace ‘negative’ thoughts with ‘positive’ thoughts.
- We read books.
- We journal.
- We meditate.
- Etc. etc. etc.
All of these things can be useful but the journey becomes much effective and allows us to actually get real results when we understand the wider mechanics of what’s actually happening and know that the mind is just a tool.
(If we don’t know that it’s just a tool and think that the mind is who we are then it just becomes a case of rearranging the furniture on the Titanic whilst it sinks – in other words, we’re only dealing with the symptoms and not the fundamental problem).
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the goal isn’t to stop having thoughts (which is literally impossible) but to stop being carried away by them and to passively get swept away to unreal places that we were never meant to go in the first place.
This is where Awareness becomes a vital piece of the puzzle again because it allows us to start making those real choices about what arises in the mind instead of just giving our power away and acting in an unreal way.
If you want to master your mind, then, one of the best things that you can do for yourself is to train yourself to stay in a state of Awareness as much as possible and the best to do this is to choose an ‘anchor’ that brings you back into the present over and over again.
An anchor in this case can literally be anything but it needs to be something that you can redirect your AWARENESS to and away from the fluctuations of the mind at pretty much any time (the breath is probably the simplest anchor and the one I use myself and recommend to others – usually, with one hand on the belly and one on the heart).
A Quick Daily Practice for Anchoring Your Awareness & Mastering the Mind
Here’s a quick daily process that you can use to start anchoring your awareness and learning to master the mind by consciously focusing on an anchor:
- Sit quietly for ten minutes or however long you want to commit to this each day and focus on your breath (if that’s your chosen anchor – it can literally be any neutral sensation in your body).
- You don’t need to make anything happen or to actively try and empty your mind – you just need to train your awareness to stay focused on your breath.
- What’s most likely to happen is that your mind is going to wander – that’s totally fine and nothing to be judged or worried about (it’s just the nature of the mind).
- All you need to do is to ‘catch’ the fact that the mind is wandering and then return your awareness back to you anchor (breath in this case).
- You stay in this awareness a little longer until – once again – you notice that the mind has taken you away from the anchor.
- Catch yourself again and then bring it back. Then again. And again. And again.
This might sound ridiculously simple but it’s actually really important because you’re literally training the ability to choose where your attention goes to keep it locked in on your awareness – over time, this becomes one of the most valuable skills you can develop because attention is one of the most important assets you have (along with time and energy).
Eventually, you’ll get to the point where the mind can produce whatever thought it needs to create but you can CHOOSE whether to follow it or not.
That’s mastery.
Nature of the Mind #1: The Mind Will Always Wander
All of this brings us to one of the biggest misunderstandings about meditation and mental mastery that people tend to face on their journeys into deeper realness which is that people sit down to meditate, catch their mind wandering after thirty seconds, and then tell themselves something like “I’m terrible at this” and then give up.
The truth here is that having your mind wander in meditation etc. doesn’t mean that you’re doing something ‘wrong’ but does mean that your mind did exactly what minds do which is WANDER.
In other words:
The mind’s nature is to wander and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
What this means is that the mind is a movement-generating machine that’s constantly fluctuating in some way (although we can actively think about things we want to think about so it’s not all random and spontaneous):
Thoughts will appear, memories will surface, plans will arise, old conversations will replay, imaginary conversations will begin, you’ll suddenly remember something you haven’t thought about for ten years, you’ll wonder what somebody thinks about you, you’ll imagine what you’ll say tomorrow, and then you’ll remember that you forgot to buy milk and start thinking about when you’ll remedy the situation.
The weird part is that all of this is totally NORMAL because it’s just a reflection of the wandering nature of the mind.
The mistake is believing that ‘successful‘ meditation or mastery of the mind means creating a completely silent mind and stopping the river of consciousness once and for all (that’s called “Death“)
Mastery isn’t stopping the river but simply learning how not to drown in it.
In other words, the thoughts can flow but you remain aware.
Nature of the Mind #2: The Mind Keeps Returning to What Matters
There is another fascinating feature of the mind which is that although our thoughts can appear random, they aren’t necessarily ‘random’ in the deeper sense.
This is because if we really take a look at the kind of things that we keep thinking about then we’re going to see that mostly we keep thinking about the same types of thing – i.e. there are clear patterns to what keeps showing up in our mental experience (in fact, some estimates state that 95% of our thoughts are pretty much focused on the same few things).
This gives us a powerful way of looking at our own minds where instead of asking “How do I get rid of these [negative / unhelpful / unreal] thoughts?” we can start to ask a more important question:
“Why does my mind keep returning to this same place?”
In general, the mind will keep returning to the same things to try and shine light on the things that remain unhealed and need some deeper attention.
For example:
- If you repeatedly think about rejection, perhaps there is something around rejection that needs healing.
- If you constantly rehearse arguments in your head, perhaps there’s some anger that hasn’t been integrated or something that you’re not currently expressing in a real way.
- If your mind keeps returning how you can ‘prove’ yourself to the world, then perhaps there’s shame underneath it that needs resolving.
- If you repeatedly fantasise or daydream about becoming ‘successful’, famous or admired, then perhaps you’re trying to fill the Void in some way.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The mind in this sense becomes a kind of ‘map’ that you can read by looking at where it keeps trying to pull your attention so you can see where there’s still some work to do.
Nature of the Mind #3: A Lot of Mental Content Is Emotional Content in Disguise
This one is particularly important because it helps us to see that much of what we experience as ‘thinking’ is actually connected to deeper emotional ‘stuff’ that’s bubbling away beneath the surface of things.
To grasp what I mean then imagine somebody carrying unresolved shame (which is essentially just the core assumption that “I’m not good enough as I am“).
This person may experience an enormous amount of mental content that seems it’s only operating at the level of the mind – for example:
- “I need to do more“.
- “What if people don’t respect me?”
- “I should be further ahead by now“.
- “Why did I say that?”
- “What will they think?”
- “I need to prove myself“.
- Etc. etc. etc.
On the surface, these all look like different thoughts but what’s actually more likely is that they’re all expressions of the same underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (in this case unresolved shame).
This is why trying to actively ‘think’ your way out of things usually doesn’t work (at least not in the long-term – maybe it distracts you for a little while but then the underlying ‘stuff’ just takes over again).
Basically, you can argue with your thoughts all day long but if the underlying emotional pattern remains unresolved then the mind is destined to eventually produce another variation on the same theme.
What this means, then, is that when we deal with the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ directly and focus on growing REAL rather than continuing to protect an outdated identity (ego) then many of the thoughts lose their energy naturally.
Nature of the Mind #4: The Mind Is a Problem-Solving Machine
The mind also has another aspect to it’s nature that explains an enormous amount of overthinking in our lives and that’s that it wants answers, certainty, and closure and will continue to seek these things even when they’re probably not coming.
The general rule is that:
If you give the mind an open loop then it will keep chewing away at it in an attempt to ‘close’ it.
For our purposes here, an open loop is just an unanswered question but it can be anything that causes tension in the mind that needs a release.
Here are some simple examples:
- “Why did they do that?”
- “What if I’d made a different decision?”
- “What exactly do they think of me?”
- “What is going to happen?”
- “How can I guarantee this won’t happen again?”
- “When is [x] going to happen?”
- Etc. etc. etc.
In all of these cases and any like them the mind will keep searching until it finds an answer and sometimes this is useful because there actually is an answer and so we end up finding one or solving a specific problem (really, a ‘problem’ is just an open loop that hasn’t been closed yet).
The problem, though, is that some loops can’t be closed at the level of conceptual understanding which is why you can’t always know why somebody behaved the way they did, what exactly will happen in the future, go backwards and change the past, or ‘think’ your way into certainty in an uncertain life where you can never control the uncontrollable.
This is where overthinking becomes a trap that often causes us to get ‘stuck’ and stagnate – all because the mind keeps asking a question because it hasn’t realised that the answer isn’t available.
In cases like these, the REAL answer isn’t another thought but in learning to ACCEPT and LET GO so you can actually LIVE.
Nature of the Mind #5: The Chain: Emotion → Identity → Thought → Action → Result
There is a useful way of understanding all of this and summing up a lot of what we’ve talked about so far in this article.
It goes like this:
Emotions → Identity → Thoughts → Actions → Results.
This isn’t a rigid scientific law but it is a powerful practical model for understanding how we can shape our lives based on what’s going on inside us and how we learn to master it or not:
- The EMOTIONS create a particular internal state based on how close to realness we are or not.
- The state shapes our IDENITY and sense of who we are.
- The MIND produces thoughts that are consistent with this identity.
- Our THOUGHTS influence our actions.
- Our actions create RESULTS.
- Our results then reinforce the IDENTITY.
- (And on and on it goes).
For example:
Shame → “I’m not good enough” → “I need to prove myself” → overwork → success → temporary relief → more pressure to prove myself.
The external result might even look impressive (which is why a lot of shame-driven people are relatively ‘successful’ on the outside) but internally we’re still trapped and in the Void.
We can change our lives at any of these levels but – in my experience, anyway – working with the emotional and mental layers is often one of the most powerful places to begin because when you change the underlying relationship with yourself, the thoughts begin to change and when you change your thoughts different choices become possible so you can show up in a more real way.
If want to go deeper into stepping away from the mind and into realness then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Practical Steps: How to Start Mastering Your Mind
You don’t need to disappear to a monastery and give up on life to start mastering your mind – you can actually just start right now wherever you happen to find yourself.
Here are some practical tips to build on what we’ve said here in this article:
1. Notice the mind
Several times a day, stop and ask yourself:
“What is my mind doing right now?”
Don’t judge it – just observe it and try to tune into that awareness instead of identifying with the ‘dot’ on the piece of paper.
2. Separate yourself from your thoughts
Instead of getting carried away with “I’m going to fail” try and actively replace it with something like “I’m aware of the thought that I’m going to fail“.
This might sound simple but tiny change creates distance so that you’re no longer completely inside the thought and can start making choices instead of getting swept away.
3. Return to the anchor
Use your breath or whatever else helps you to bring your attention back into immediate experience.
Like we said earlier, this is how you train your Awareness and learn to focus it on something real.
4. Look for the pattern underneath the thought
When the same mental ‘story ‘stuff’ keeps appearing, don’t fight it but ask yourself what it’s trying to show you.
Look underneath the thought for the emotion, fear, belief or unmet need that still needs ‘healing’ (which really just means bringing to awareness so you can integrate or release).
5. Stop demanding mental certainty
Learn to truly accept that some questions don’t have answers, some situations can’t be controlled, and some endings don’t provide satisfying closure.
In other words, learn to recognise when thinking has become an attempt to escape uncertainty rather than a genuine attempt to either solve a problem or to accept life if there is no solution.
The Final Word: The Mind Can Either Serve Life or Destroy It
The ultimate goal of mastering the mind isn’t to become some emotionless person whose mind is permanently ’empty’ but to let the mind do its job without allowing it to run your life.
All you need to do is increase your awareness of the mind’s nature so that it becomes easier to use it as the tool it was always meant to be rather than becoming trapped inside its stories in the service of the ego.
You are not every thought that appears but the Awareness in which the thoughts appear.
When you learn to live from this Awareness, you don’t have to destroy the mind but simply stop letting it destroy your connection to your own REALNESS.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If your mind is holding you back from living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to take real action and build some flow.
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