“The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” John Milton
There is only one thing in the planet that you have control over and that is your mind. Think about it; you can’t control the weather; you can’t control your health; and you can’t control other people. The only thing you really, can control is what you think. In real time you can be thinking of red and change it to blue which simply illustrates mind control. So, if you aren’t controlling your mind, why not, because it’s your asset, ally, and friend.
I have just finished facilitating a 4-day mental fitness retreat on the outskirts of the Okavango delta. It is amazing to see what happens when a group of uptight, stressed-out highflyers descend into dusty Maun, and find themselves on a retreat which takes participants out of their comfort zone. Several days going through a semi structured process of unwinding, learning about self and practising mindfulness, and you would hardly recognise the participants at the end of the programme.
In the words of Eckhart Tolle “The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all: It uses you.” From that mindset the essence of the retreat ran.
The two most evident challenges in my observation with delegates was getting them to be really present as in commanding their mind to be in the moment, most of the time at least. I am not referring to the mindfulness practice of state of alert, focused relaxation whereby you deliberately pay attention to thoughts and sensations non-judgmentally (there was however plenty of that on the programme). I’m talking about people so impatient before the retreat they claimed they “can’t wait” These same participants verbalised mid-way through that they were yearning to get back to their life, family and children. Even in their vow of commitment, their mind won the battle of persuasion that they would prefer to be somewhere else. Trying to get some of them not to connect to cell phones and practise silence in the morning could be met with similar resistance as if you were asking them to crawl through barbed wire.
Most people sabotage their happiness potential with goals “I will be happy when I … (fill in the blank). Remember your life plans when you were in secondary school? Perhaps you were waiting for your first relationship so you could be finally happy…or perhaps to get into university, or leave home, have your first job etc.? Of course, once you got any of those things how long did your happiness last before you filled in the blank with a new happiness goal? A classic case of ‘better to travel hopefully that to arrive’ since arriving often turns out to feel like you got off the train too soon; a nice enough spot but not one to linger in too long.
And that’s because the problem with ‘I will be happy when’ thinking is that there are two lies embedded in it. The first one is that you can’t be happy right now and the second one is a moving target because when you get there your feeling of happiness will be fleeting until a new goal emerges as a new destination for happiness. We know this from studying, for example, the happiness of lottery winners who go back to their base line happiness within a relatively short period of time. On the programme a key learning outcome was to teach people that happiness is not about the ‘when’, or the ‘circumstances’, but about who is whispering in your ear while interpreting the circumstances.
The other thing which was central to the programme, and what people struggled with, is empathy. Being empathetic to others is not the problem; it’s the empathy which we have to ourselves which we battle with. I guess that is because we have such a strong acquaintance with our inner critic or judge who frequently (sometimes constantly) harshly chastises us when we make mistakes or eat and drink too much or fail at something; sometimes it’s just harsh criticism, regardless of what we do. When you try to teach people the importance of empathy for self (we often use the term compassion) the biggest stumbling block is for people to accept that self-empathy is absolutely critical. In the words of Chamine Shizrad in his book Positive Intelligence, “empathy recharges our batteries and renews the vitality that is drained by the Judge’s (inner critic’s) violence toward ourselves. It bandages the wounds of the warrior before sending him out for another fight”
People are misguided by the role of the inner critic believing that if we didn’t have one shouting and screaming in our ears telling us we are a piece of crap, that we will end up a failure or a lazy, good-for-nothing Botswana couch potato (which is not a metaphor for absent by the way).
We erroneously believe that empathising with ourselves and others for failure is encouraging the behaviour that caused the hardship. We tell ourselves to be hard on self and others when they make mistakes because of the fallacy that empathising with pain means condoning the action that brought pain. Critical self-talk doesn’t make us stronger in fact, research shows that negative emotions are destructive and work against us in almost every way.
Being present, silent and empathetic is what we all struggle with. It does not matter if you are in you 20s or later on in life’s journey – these inner battles and ‘we will be happy when’ mindset are the challenges we all face, and conditions of the human mind. Poet and philosopher John Milton recognised the mind’s own capacity to control our inner heaven and hell 5 centuries ago. Maybe we really will be truly happy when….we finally conquer that age-old dichotomy of mind over matter?
