The Mind - Your Greatest Enemy or Your Most Powerful Weapon

Today, we'll explore the mind, and I'll show you how your thoughts can be both your greatest enemy and your most powerful weapon.

 

Today, we'll explore the mind and I'll show you how your thoughts can be both your greatest enemy and your most powerful weapon. Dr. Joe Dispenza is one of the most important researchers and authors exploring the neuroscience and the role of our brain and the mind-body healing. But it was not always his dream career. At 23 years old, he was just an ordinary doctor, just starting his practice. And he was also a passionate cyclist.

An accident was what set him on the direction towards his current career. Because on one afternoon, he was actually hit by an SUV while attending a cycling competition, and he was severely injured. The treatment recommended by the doctors in the hospital was to put two metal plates to stabilize his spine, invasive surgery. But surgery also meant years of rehabilitation and a possibility that he would never walk.

And in one interview, he was actually saying a similar thing at the time. I mentioned in one of the previous episodes that if it was one of his friends, he would say, "Yeah, just go for the surgery. It's even a miracle that something like this exists, just take it." But because it was him, it was different. And he also just refused to accept something like this as being his new identity, as something that was supposed to define him probably for the rest of his life, in his case, and leaving him basically disabled forever.

And so, he decided to use his mind instead and use his brain. And as he was lying in the hospital bed, because he could not even get up, he could not sit down, he could not even lie on his back, so he was lying on his belly, face down. Using all his free time, and he had a lot of it because he could not really do anything else, he started to imagine his spine just reconstructing and getting healthy again.

At first, it was very abstract and it was not easy to visualize properly, but as he continued practicing, he got better and better at it until he could really vividly see his spine and feel his spine in his body just reconstructing and getting in the shape that it was before the accident. It took him only three months until he was able to stand up again and another few months until he healed completely, and his spine was like new, like no accident had ever happened.

Because he was a scientist, he was a doctor, and he had now experienced something like this happen, but he did not understand how it was possible, so he dedicated the rest of his life to studying the brain and to studying the mind-body connection and how we can actually use our own imagination and meditation and our own mind to heal our body.

This story, as most of the other stories that I told you in the previous episodes, they all show the incredible power of our mind. It's really the most powerful weapon that we have. But for many of us, this super powerful weapon is actually working against us.

A beautiful metaphor was offered by the Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka in the Vipassana retreat, where he describes it as your mind being like a wild horse. An extremely powerful, strong, but wild horse, untrained, can even kill you if you are not careful and can be very dangerous. But if you catch this horse and start to train it little by little, domesticate it until it becomes a very well-trained horse, then it works only for you.

In the same way, it is with our mind. This huge power can work against us; it can even kill us if we are not careful. But if we learn to train it, then it will start working for us, and all this horsepower we will have on our side, and then we are invincible.

Now I want you to think, before you played this podcast, did you have to think about it? And the answer probably for most of you is yes because if you didn't think about it, you would not play it, and you would think about something else instead and do that. So, we see that everything in our life starts as a thought. So thought is really the base for our entire experience, and the quality of our thoughts directly determines the quality of our life.

The voice that we have in our head all day long is important, and what it says actually determines our actions and what we do, how we feel. And although I spent quite a big portion of my life training this voice in my head and training my thoughts to work with me and observing my thoughts, being aware of them, I'm definitely not immune to this. I was experiencing it just recently as I was preparing to start recording this podcast.

It was something new for me, and to be sincere, quite scary because I have never done it. To sit here like this in front of me and share my personal experience in so much detail and share my thoughts, it was something that was very exciting but also a bit scary. I have to tell you, my mind was not really helping me at times. In Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), we believe that everything your body does and everything your mind says, at the basis of it, has actually positive intent.

So even if there are harsh things or they are against you, usually there will be some positive intent, and most of the time, this positive intent is protection. So in this case, this part of my mind that was actually talking against starting this podcast was protecting me from maybe publicly saying something stupid, embarrassing myself, then feeling ashamed, maybe receiving some negative comments that would make me feel sad, and protecting me in general from some negative feelings and from some negative public appearance.

But if my primary goal was actually to start recording the podcast, it was not helping me at all. And there was one particular instance, for example, when I read a story of a woman who got stage four cancer, and she managed to cure herself by herself. And when I read that, I started to feel inferior, like a sense of inferiority that my own illness was not actually serious enough, which is ridiculous. The voice in my head started to say, "Look at this woman, stage four cancer and she healed herself. She should record a podcast, not you. What do you know about self-healing and your condition? It was nothing. Anyone could heal from something like this. It was just not important. Who do you think will be interested in hearing about this? It's pathetic. And what do you know? What do you know about life? You're so young. What do you know? You will just embarrass yourself. You are embarrassing."

Even though, as I said, I spent a lot of time training myself not to be drawn in with my thoughts, especially if they are mean like this, it took me a few seconds to actually catch myself and realize, what the heck am I thinking? What the heck is this voice in my head and why is it saying things like this? And that it is just completely ridiculous and it is just not helpful at all.

In NLP, there is a beautiful technique to deal with this kind of negative self-talk, and we can try it now if you like. So just take a moment. You can leave your eyes open, but just take a moment to realize what this negative voice in your head is telling you. It can be that you are not good enough, it can be that you are stupid, if you made a mistake, it can be that you are not lovable, that you are not beautiful. Anything, just take a moment to identify this voice, and you can even try to realize where in the head is it located—in the back of the head, in the front, to the side, in the middle.

And we do this just to identify that it's not us, that it's just something somewhere in our head, and sometimes we can even locate it. But it is not something that would define us, that we would have to even listen to and just take steps according to this voice that is not helpful at all. Most of the time, the things that it is saying, they are not actually true.

Okay, and now you can do it in your mind or even out loud, it's even more funny, you can start to change the tone of the voice to something like, "Who do you think you are? You are completely stupid. Who do you think will be interested in a podcast like this? What do you think that you know about life? You are so young, you are so embarrassing, you will embarrass yourself."

Okay, and the chances are when you did this, you can no longer take this voice seriously. It's just funny, it's ridiculous because often what happens, this voice in your head is very strong, its position is very one of power, and the voice sounds very authoritative, something that you should be almost scared of, obedient to. And then if you change it to this voice that is almost funny, like, how can you take it seriously anymore?

And so, what we do next, we use this voice that is very easy to believe, and in the same voice and a strong firm voice, we start to say the things that we want to hear instead. "You are good enough, you are worthy, you are amazing, you are beautiful, your ideas are incredible. Of course, there will be so many people who will be interested in your work, of course, you can help so many people change their lives, you have so many gifts to bring to this world, you are unique, you are loved, you are amazing, I believe in you, you can do it."

Okay, so now we know what to do with the self-talk that most of us have in our head, at least sometimes. But the problem is that very often, we don't even notice it as a voice, as something external that we have the ability to change. We get so sucked in that by the time we realize what is happening, it's already too late, and it has already completely ruined our mood, ruined our entire day, and talked us out of some amazing idea or some amazing plan that we were about to do.

And here is where the long-term regular meditation practice comes in. Here, I talk mainly about the concentration kind of meditation. When you concentrate on something, on some point of focus—me, I usually use the breath, but it can be a mantra, it can be some part of your body, it can be anything—and you concentrate, concentrate. If it's breath, it's usually inhale, exhale, inhale, and then your mind has wandered, and you are thinking, thinking, and then you notice that you are thinking, and you can bring your attention back to your anchor, being breath or mantra or anything else. And you just keep doing this over and over, this continuous process.

What you learn here is to be aware of your own thoughts. This is the main essence of this kind of meditation. So, probably you have heard before that meditating means having no thoughts, just clearing your mind. And you don't know how many times someone has come to me and told me, "Well, I know I have to meditate; it would be so good for me, and I even tried it, but I just can't meditate because I just have thoughts."

I don't know where it came from, but meditating doesn't mean not having thoughts. Actually, the point when you realize that you have thoughts is the most important point in the whole process of meditation because then you can bring your focus back. At that point, you learn to be aware of your own thoughts because thoughts will be there. I teach meditation, and I still have thoughts during my own meditation practice. So it's not about not having thoughts, but it is about learning to be aware of them.

When you are aware of your thoughts, then you can choose if you will be focusing on the thought or you will be focusing on your breath. If you are aware of your thoughts, you can then work with them, you can change them to work for you. You can train this horse to work for you, to be obedient.

In the description of today's episode, there will be my most favorite kind of meditation, which is the most basic one. It's the mindfulness-focused meditation, focusing on your breath. This meditation is here from the times of Buddha. He is the author of this meditation, and in the past two and a half thousand years, no one has actually come up with anything better than that. So, I love to stick with it because it just works wonders if you stick with it and you are regular.

So, go to the description of this episode and listen to this meditation. If you like it, you can continue listening to it every day, and you will see that after some time, the effect on your ability to manage stress, the effect on your focus—because this is essentially what you are training there, the ability to stay focused on one thing—so your focus will go through the roof, your sleep will improve, there are so many benefits. So go and try it and let me know how it was.

Let me know what you think, let me know what you think about this whole podcast, what you think about the other meditations. Let me know if you had success with any of the other things that we talked about in this podcast. Every single message, every single feedback that I receive is just a beautiful proof that this voice in my head was actually wrong and that there are people that indeed are interested in the things that I'm saying and that there are people that actually see benefit in those practices and that are getting help because of what I am sharing.

I am so grateful for every single message, every single comment, every single feedback that I receive. Thank you for being here with me today. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I am so excited to see you again in the next episode.