Category: Calming The Mind

Sometimes the best way to go into a long day… is completely relaxed and accepting.

What makes a long day long is the relentless desire for it to be finished.

The next time you have a long day ahead… try to shift your perspective.

Instead of meeting it with dread, anxiety, and stress… try calming your nervous system and surrendering to the path ahead as it has laid itself out for you.

Meet each moment with a relaxed, calm, clear energy that’ll carry you smoothly forward to the next.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ll discover that your long days suddenly don’t feel so long anymore.

Landscaping this weekend made me appreciate, once again, the impact physical environment can have on our mental headspace.

There are things I would see daily that, in retrospect, would cause me daily irritation. Things like overgrown weeds, sunken landscaping bricks, and grass creeping onto concrete. It wasn’t an irritation I would really notice consciously though—this was the retrospective realization—it was something that kind of irritated me in the background of my mind as I continued with other thoughts.

…And I think the same thing happens in reverse when these things are cleaned up and have a nice aesthetic. It’s almost as though I can feel a background sigh of relief that calms me as I soak it all in while I continue with other thoughts. I’m sure this is why meditation centers, spiritual facilities, and religious organizations place such a high emphasis on the physical environment aesthetics…

It’s a subconscious means of communication that lets you breathe a sigh of relief as you process your conscious thoughts.

…And until we visit those types of places, maybe we can take our own physical environments a little more seriously, eh?

…Start by giving your mind some peace.

Turn off the screens. Mute the notifications. Go to where it isn’t so… people-y.

Peace of mind starts with awareness of mind. With looking at what’s happening up there. With sorting and sifting and allowing and settling.

If you’re serious about wanting peace of mind… You have to prove it.

…And be present with your mind—distraction free—for dedicated blocks of time every day. Starting with a block that’s manageable according to your current lifestyle that grows over time.

Otherwise, don’t be surprised if your mind continues to be a reflection of the (non-peaceful) environment you continue to expose it to.

1) Brain dump. It’s quite hard to sort through a swirling, ever building chaotic mental mess that filled with half-baked ideas, unrelenting distractionary thoughts, and painful emotions that want to be simultaneously felt as they do suppressed. Writing everything down that’s swirling through your mind allows you to: 1) take it out of your mind (which leaves less there to swirl) and 2) see it all plainly written out so you can make sense of it all. Which leads to:

2) Draw connections. Once it’s all plainly written out in front of you, organize it. Connect thoughts that are related. Simplify thoughts that are unnecessarily complex. Question each thought’s validity and eliminate those that are baseless or fantasy. By reorganizing your brain dump into a sorted list, so too will you be reorganizing your brain space from a dump to a sorted space. And finally:

3) Prioritize and act. Once everything is organized and cleaned up, the final step is to problem solve and act in accordance to what you’ve deemed as a priority. If there’s an easy solution to a problem, take it. If there’s a hard solution that you want to avoid, break it down into the smallest steps possible and take the first one. Or get the necessary (professional) help. If there’s no solution, drop it. The goal here is to close open-ended processes until that thick tornado that was rampaging through your head is thinned to just a few gusts of wind. Heck, maybe you can even get to a point of mental stillness and calm…?

…This is the way.

Today Amazon delivered a package of mine to the wrong house.

Not only that… but, it was a house that was 20 minutes away from mine.

And the picture of the package proved it.

Once I realized this, I felt a wave of annoyance arise pretty quickly.

Feeling it continue to bubble up, and knowing if I didn’t do anything I would feel waves of annoyance for the indefinite near future, I decided to control what was in my control and just drive to the house—with as little hesitation as possible. I didn’t want there to be any wasted time or energy in annoyance if I could avoid it.

So I went.

Once I got there, the package was no longer on the porch.

So, I rang the doorbell and a gentleman answered. I explained the situation, and he told me that Amazon took the package back and was going to re-route it to me.

…And before I let another wave of annoyance arise from feeling like I just wasted a bunch more time and energy driving to this person’s house to find out the package wasn’t even there—I quickly interrupted the thought with another.

I told myself that the situation had been handled and that I saved myself hours and even days worth of annoyance and vibe killing emotions.

…And that a little car ride with loud music and droning thoughts was long overdue anyway.

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P.s. In case you missed it, you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week, here.

One of my goals for 2024 is to become as consistent with meditation as I am with writing.

When sharing this goal with some of my associates, two of them said they want to meditate and know the values of meditating, but “can’t.” That they “aren’t good” at it. That their mind is “too busy” and “chaotic.”

One even said he plans to start meditating after his business reaches certain goals so that he can do more “relaxing” things like meditate.

…This is a misunderstanding.

Meditation isn’t something you’re “good” at. It doesn’t require you to sit and have zero thoughts. It isn’t something you do only when you aren’t busy.

Meditation is the means towards mental clarity. It’s precisely the strategy you deploy to calm a busy / chaotic mind. There are no prerequisites and having a certain number of thoughts isn’t the measure of how “good” or “bad” you are at it.

It’s an opportunity to (finally) cease the constant influx of information. It’s an opportunity to allow the already overstimulated mind a chance to settle what’s there. And there’s nothing to be good at—it’s literally the act of doing nothing.

…It’s the antidote to the media driven, information crazed, busywork addicted modern society so many of us live in. Again, I repeat: it’s the antidote—not some type of reward or achievement that comes from a calmer lifestyle.

And to say you’ll start when things “calm down” is to miss the point entirely. Because you know when a great time is to calm down your mind, witness your thoughts, and become more present in your life? …Now.

While life is happening to you.

This is the point.

…That’s what I tell myself when I collapse into my bed at night.

…And I open a book and start reading as soon as I can manage.

My thought is this: we spend every waking moment of our day thinking… trying to stay one step ahead of what’s next; solving problems; avoiding distractions and staying productive; imagining future possibilities; reflecting and learning from past experiences; keeping our priorities prioritized; remembering to eat enough food and drink enough water; entertaining stupid random stuff that we can’t help… etc

And collapsed in bed, exhausted, shouldn’t be another time for us to keep doing all of the above.

In fact, continuing to think critically and solve problems from your day before you sleep is an excellent way to lose sleep and wake up more tired the next day leaving you with less energy to solve the very problems you thought thinking about in bed would help.

Here’s the strategy: don’t tell your mind to stop thinking—this doesn’t work. Just like trying not to think of Pink Elephant doesn’t work. Give your mind something to guide it. Something that can carry it forward on a ride and relieve it of its incessant nature to problem solve and replay experiences. Books do it for me.

…Until your eyes are so heavy that you can’t help but put the book down and pass out.

Collapsed on your bed = enough thinking for today. Try it.

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P.s. If something randomly pops into your head that I don’t want to forget, I write it down or record it on a note app. Trying to remember things before you sleep will stimulate you back to a wakeful state.