The Homage to Self-Care continues with a much needed perspective on care of the mind, from my favourite inner explorer, Sandra Pawula of Always Well Within.
The ultimate way to care for your self is to make friends with your own mind.
Why? Because the mind is the creator of happiness and the creator of suffering; the creator of goodness and the creator of harm. How you experience your world – your internal world and the external one – all depends on how you perceive.
[pullquote]”There’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare, Hamlet[/pullquote]
Who’s the Boss?
Simply said, there are three avenues through which we create happiness or suffering for ourselves and others: the body, the speech, and the mind. But which one is the boss?
I’ll let you in on the secret right away. It’s the mind that’s running the show.
You might say, “Hey, wait a minute. I suffer because my body hurts. Isn’t it the body that’s the culprit?”
But it’s not the pain sensation itself that determines how we perceive it. A prime example in mainstream medicine is the way that pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn are teaching mindfulness meditation as a highly effective pain reduction technique. You don’t have to be a meditation master to see the beneficial effects. Mindfulness meditation is a safe form of medicine that works extraordinarily well when it comes to pain reduction and improving other types of illness for ordinary people like you and me.
Biofeedback is another mechanism through which we can manipulate physiological functions and control processes like brain waves, muscle tone, skin conductance, heart rate, and pain perception with the mind.
So it’s not the body that’s in control. The mind is powerful and can indeed transform our perception of physical experience. But it does take training.
When it comes to speech, what you say is entirely up to you and is determined only by your mind – unless you happen to be controlled by demons! Your words are the result of your thoughts and emotions.
Of course, there are times when you “speak without thinking.” But even so the words didn’t appear out of thin air. They’re the result of your own habitual patterns of thinking, emoting and responding which have created specific neuronal circuits in your brain. Exciting breakthroughs in modern science show us that these confused neuronal pathways can be redesigned as we consistently change our patterns of thought and action.
So back to mind.
