Make Meditating Easy
4 of the easiest ways to find peace.
By Sandy C. Newbigging
Why is my mind so busy?! I know your frustration. With countless thoughts passing through my mind at a million miles per hour, I’ve tossed and turned through sleepless nights and found it near impossible to focus during work or play.
Motivated to move from mental chaos to mind calm, I’ve meditated for thousands of hours and observed the many people I’ve taught meditation to from around the world. Quite unexpectedly, I’ve discovered some of the more subtle reasons why so many people suffer from such busy minds and the ways to overcome it.
1. The Judgement Game
Making sense of life is one of the mind’s jobs. To do this, it plays what I call ‘The Judgement Game’ determining whether your life is good or bad, positive or negative, right or wrong, better or worse. If it deems something to be bad, negative, wrong or worse, you end up with a ‘problem’. There’s a direct relationship between negatively judging life and the compulsion to overthink. The mind loves to problem-solve and becomes highly active thinking about your problem(s) and coming up with solutions.
The Solution: See the judgmental thoughts in your mind but don’t be the judger.
2. The Resist Persist
Joined at the hip of the Judgement Game is resistance. The mind tends to resist whatever it judges as problematic. This often unseen habit of reactive resistance can prevent us from feeling bliss. How you feel is less to do with what happens, and more to do with whether you judge and resist what happens or not.
Naturally, the mind wants to feel good so whenever you notice ‘negative’ energy happening within the body, it feels compelled to figure out how to make the bad feelings go away – with copious amounts of thoughts becoming the by-product of the resistance and the need to feel good once again.
The Solution: Begin to remove reactive resistance and allow yourself to be in harmony with ‘what is’.
3. The Attach Catch
Attachment happens whenever you believe that being, doing or having x, y or z will make you happier, peaceful, loved, safe or successful. Being attached makes you move away from wanting things to believing that you need them to be OK. Attachment is based on the illusion that you can’t feel good now without fixing, changing or improving your body or life first.
When attached, you become caught up in your busy mind, trying to improve your life so that you can eventually feel good. But during all of that time, you’re missing the beauty and abundance already present in your life that, if focused on, can make you feel great now and even attract more good in.
The Solution: Desire things, but don’t need them to be happy.
4. The Time Trap
This final trick of the mind stems from the subtle belief that the past or future is relevant to your current levels of peace, happiness, love and well-being. If you believe that you need to change, fix or improve what’s happened in your past or what might happen in the future, then you are going to feel compelled to engage in thoughts about your past and future anytime they pass through your mind.
The Solution: Be fully attentive to now, you don’t need the future to fulfil you.
Watch a video of Sandy explaining the 4 hidden causes and what you can do to enjoy more mind calm at sandynewbigging.com/blogs. Sandy’s no.1 best-selling book called Mind Calm is out now.
