The mind is a powerful tool when you know how to use it effectively, otherwise it is purely destructive, and extremely limited.
How amazing is this tool that we’ve been given called the mind?
For many years, I used my mind effectively to navigate, to control, to plan to visualize to affirm a life.
You’ll often hear people speaking about the fact that the subconscious really doesn’t know the difference between reality and what is imagined in the mind. And when you use the mind like this, there is this possibility for you to supposedly create a reality where you visualize an intended outcome. You visualize it so many times that eventually that becomes your reality. Now, I’m not disputing the fact that this is possible, because I myself have done exactly this. I’ve visualized things so many times, and even written it down, created affirmations. And then reflectively gone back and looked at the things that I’ve written down or remembered the things that I’ve visualized and see that they have become a part of my reality.
The only issue that I have with this is the mind is extremely limited. It only works in a binary. A this and that. The mind is a filtering agent, which essentially means that it only views the world through what it has already seen before. It is viewing the world through the lens of have I seen this before? And if I have, where did I see it, and what was the outcome of that particular experience. If it was a negative experience, I want to avoid that in the future. And if it was a positive experience, I want to have more of those in my life.
So, when we are visualizing with our minds, when we are trying to imagine a future for ourselves through our minds, we are doing this from an extremely limited perspective. In actual fact, we cannot really create anything other than what we’ve already seen before. Now, if we think about infinite potentiality, infinite possibility, this means that it’s outside of the realm of what the mind has seen today, of what the mind has experienced to date. And therefore when we use our mind as a tool like this, to create a potential future, we are essentially creating a limited future.
Now, in the years when I did a lot of visualization and affirmations, something that I started to notice for myself was that sometimes it would work and other times it wouldn’t. And one might say, “Well, you didn’t do it enough”, or “You didn’t bring enough emotion into it, you didn’t see yourself clearly in that space”. And what I would argue here is that sometimes those things are just not for us.
And so no matter how much we visualize, or think about them, they are never going to become part of our reality. The second thing I would say is, the mind is so powerful, and it can absolutely condition and channel us into a specific limited perspective of life. And yes, we can reach these goals, these things that we’ve visualized for ourselves. But what I found is that when I got there, they felt hollow. I was actually so discouraged by how empty, they felt, how I’d worked my butt off, how I had invested so much time and energy into these things, only to find that they really had very little meaning for me. They didn’t fulfill me in the ways that I thought they would. They didn’t bring the things into my life that I had hoped they would. And in actual fact, in looking back, I see that I wasted so much of my time and energy focusing on something that my mind had decided was important for me. When we look around at social media and at the media at large, we are literally saturated with the supposedly “this is what it looks like to be successful”. “When you have this you’re going to be happy in your life”. And it can be so easy for us to get trapped into thinking that this is where we need to focus our time and energy
I started off today by talking about the mind as being a powerful tool. And absolutely it is an incredibly powerful tool. It is so amazing how powerful our mind is and when we can put the mind to work doing the things that is actually designed for, it’s amazing. But what most people are using their mind for is really something that’s channeling them down a pathway that is so limited and really doesn’t get them where they deserve to be, where their life is meant to be.
I remember not too long ago, listening to an artist who had dedicated he was a singer, in actual fact, and he had dedicated his entire life to this dream of what it would mean to really be a successful singer. He practiced and he worked his butt off. Working, ridiculous hours, almost selling his soul, in many respects to achieve this dream, or this goal of what he thought it would mean to be a successful singer, songwriter. And after many, many, many years of hard work and dedication to his singing, he reached absolutely everything he had dreamed about, and all the goals that he’d set. Yet when he got there he looked around at his life and realized that all the people that he’d collected along the way to help him to achieve this goal, really, were not his friends, they were really not people who actually cared about him at a deep level. He didn’t feel successful at all, he actually felt completely dissatisfied with where he was. It was a bit of a shock to him, that he’d worked so hard to get this thing that he thought would be success for him only to find out that it didn’t feel successful at all.
He wrote wrote a song called Falling up, I believe it’s called Falling up, I need to check that I’ll put that in the notes to confirm. Link to listen to Falling Up.
Ultimately, the song is about his journey, the story of him reaching this high level of success, this outward projection of what success looks like in terms of a singer/songwriter, but in reality, no real feeling of success inside himself.
If any of you’ve done any kind of meditation practice, you would know that the mind is extremely critical. It’s very judgmental, it is essentially there all the time nagging you, pushing you, pulling you creating stress, fear and anxiety inside of us. When we’re not aware of the mind, essentially, what can happen for us is that we get lost in thinking that this is where we need to put out energy. This is where we need to put our time. This is where we need to put our focus.
What I’d really like to encourage you to do is to really view your mind from this perspective.
How are you using your mind?
Being able to watch your mind is essential to your success in this life.
How are you using a mind?
Is it a tool that you’re using, or is the mind in control of you.
For most human beings, what you find is a actual fact the mind is in control. They are striving for, pushing towards, dedicating their life to things that ultimately when they reach will not feel fulfilling or not feel meaningful, will not feel purposeful.
When you can start to use the mind to put focus on, to bring awareness to your life, to analyze things, but from an outside perspective, not looking in perspective, one can really access the true potential of the mind.
In this month, where we have moved into the quarter of mind. Where purpose is fulfilled through mind, I would encourage you to really understand your mind at a deeper level and engage in any practices that can help you to do that.To create that awareness, that separation between what is mind and what is true self.
What is that part of me that is my inner compass that is guiding me through life versus a tool called the mind which can be used for certain purposes.
If you would prefer to listen to the audio of this blog post:
Listen Now – Lynda Gaiao – Sharing Wisdom
Human Design and BG5 - Business Human Design brings awareness into your life. It helps you sift through what you are holding onto - your shadow - and enables you to let go.
With the letting go comes the ability to embrace the truth of who you are with wide open arms.
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BG5 Business & Career, Cycles and OC16 Consultant & Human Design Guide