Conquer your own mind: An exercise to stop getting into small quarrels to big fights around you!!
The only thing that bothers a person is slavery by his own mind. A mind that is made to work for you and not against you. But we never realize it. Slavery has a simple meaning, when you give a noose to a particular situation or a person to control you. It comes in form of anger, the feeling to control things the way we want. There is always a tendency in human nature to control everything or something in life. Though, it sees as if one is taking things into favorable action all by himself, but that’s not the truth. Our mind easily detect the odd ones out first. It sees negative sides of everything very easily. The positive things of life are just so obvious in us such that it makes us so comfortable, that we never care to look into them. It’s like that, if there is pain in some part of the body, we easily recognize it but the organs that are working efficiently within us; it never comes to our mind to observe them. That’s called the natural tendency of a human body. Our body creates discomfort to tell us where the problem is. Similarly, same rule can be applied to the mind. But our mind plays tricks with us unlike our body. It really takes time to know what actually is bothering. Due to the lack of awareness of how a mind actually works, any simple situation becomes challenging to us. It needs training to get into its natural tendency which is to be free from slavery of its own noose and restrictions. But why our mind is not trained enough to take care of everything around us all the time efficiently? Why it gets upset on little things and why it never embraces the good things every time? The answer to these questions is our own willingness to not take charge of our own mind. It’s us and our wrong habits where we consistently train our mind to ignore that disturb us!! When we do not understand the true mechanism of our mind of how it works, we end up being in trouble and waste our time and energy every time thinking about what went wrong, blaming and criticizing others. Again, this only exhausts more rather than helping us.
Now, let’s dive into the solution for it without any further blabbering. When anything disturbs us, we always talk to our friends and family around us to ease our mind. Sometimes their guidance works so well and sometimes we remain stuck in the situation. The only motive of sharing the issue with people around us is because we always want second opinion about our reaction whether it is right or not.
To take charge of your own mind, the first step is to understand what self-analysis is. We will do a simple exercise now. Grab a pen and a dairy that will be your friend forever. Yes, a dairy!! The motive of writing a dairy is not to collect a bunch of experiences on papers but to create a toolkit that will direct you in the right path in life whenever you want. The focus of the dairy should be only YOU!! Before you start writing anything that I ask, make sure you keep this thing in mind..
“Be honest with yourself while you pen down your day experience. There is no one to judge you. It is only you who can give you the first sense of freedom.”
The first step is to recall the last uncomfortable situation you have been in, where you seem like losing control of the situation and yourself. For example, let’s say, you have a fight in your office with your boss or any colleague. Pen down the cause and mention its previous related event (if any). Just be specific so that only you can understand it, write them in sequel. This will open up your brain to assist the situation better. Once you have note down the event, second thing is to write your response and role in it of how you reacted. Were you shouting, or you were polite? Again be specific. When you will write it out, you mind will rewind of whatever happened.
The second step is to analyze the character with which you had fight with. Do not mention the name of the person. This is the most important thing because in your dairy, the focus has to be on you not on someone else. The behavior of that person can be rude or tough on you. But, here the catch is to make you strong enough so that your behavior does not depend on someone else’s behavior. People are nothing but accumulation of past karmas and experiences. The experiences include family environment also. They behave out of their experiences. That’s why we have to understand that controlling them and their nature is next to impossible for you because you have energy only to beautify your own life not others. It make some sense that for some time, only this time you now let go of what that person is all about. Just for this moment. This will take you to the third step.
In the third step, you write down of what kind of behavior and response should have been ideal to stop that fight. Just in one or two lines, write it down. I am not asking you to be polite or rude, just the ideal behavior. Now, I want you to write, what is the ideal nature of you, which works best for you, which does not deplete your energy. I want you to write that moment, when you were supposed to be angry but somehow you managed so well that you feel good remembering the same.
I want you to conclude the article with that one line that really made you to think of how important your inner peace and energy is that it cannot be wasted like this…