We All Play Favorites. Don’t We?
(A Love-Hate Relationship with our Mind)
You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe,deserve your love and affection.
Buddha
When we use the terms like ‘I’, ‘Me’, ‘Myself’ who exactly are we talking
about? Our body or our mind?
Think about ‘Body’ and ‘Mind’ as our two children. It’s our duty to take care of them, to protect them. Right?
That makes us their parents.
We are supposed to spend our entire lives making sure that they are happy and healthy. These two children of ours are so beautifully connected that, if one is sad the other gets upset too. They are the perfect siblings. However, most of the time we fail to be a good parent. We neglect our duty to take care of these precious children. We take them for granted.
In fact there is one child in particular whose health and well being is never a priority for us. Mind. We always prefer our physical health over our mental health. We prefer our body over our mind.
We love them both, however, most of the time, unintentionally, we play favorites.
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Body — Our first child. We are born with it. It includes our external self, as well as internal organs like heart, brain, kidney, etc. Think of our body as an extrovert child. The one who is very vocal. The one who demands our constant attention. It communicates with us when it’s hungry, tired, in pain,or coming down with fever. It lets us know when it needs more nourishment, more hydration, more exercise, more TLC.
From a very young age we learn to take care of our body. When we are little we are regularly taught about physical hygiene. We learn that we should brush and floss our teeth , take a shower, wear clean clothes,wash our hands, comb our hair. We also learn that we should eat healthy, exercise regularly, take our vitamins, put sunscreen on.
Right from a tender age we become aware of the fact that if we ever fall sick, or get hurt while playing, we are supposed to take immediate action to heal our body.
Gradually we start realizing that our external self is what the world notices about us. So what do we do?
We constantly make an effort to put our best foot forward. However just when we think that we are doing everything right by taking care of ourselves, suddenly one fine day it dawns upon us that, we have ignored a very important thing within us.
Mind — Our second child. It’s our ability to think, feel and understand emotions. It starts developing within few days or weeks after birth. Probably when the first time we begin recognizing faces, expressions, voices.
Have you ever noticed babies around 10 months of age, looking at their reflection in the mirror? They have such a profound exhilaration and twinkle in their eyes. May be that’s the first time they become aware of their existence.
In the early childhood the mind development seems like a very exciting process. We are experiencing so many wonderful things for the very first time.
However, unlike our body, the mind is rather reticent. It doesn’t ache or bleed nor does it smell bad. But it does exist.
Gradually, our minds develops even further.Soon we begin to understand that by doing certain things our mind becomes happy.
Happiness and Joy — We like that feeling. We want that feeling.
When we are little the world we are exposed to is also very limited. So the definition of happiness for our mind is limited too.
Eating ice creams, jumping in the puddles, watching our favorite cartoon, playing in the rain, a cuddle from our mom, gifts from Santa, the visit from tooth fairy. Things like these send us over the moon.
Our demands are less, our expectations are simple. The whole world seems like this beautiful wonderful place.
From a very young age we also get introduced to some other nasty feelings.
Feelings like sadness, anger and fear. We are not fond of these feeling. But luckily at that age there is one thing that’s yet to develop. Memory.
So even if we are sad, or angry or afraid, we don’t remember these things for long. As soon as our mind comes across something that makes us happy again, we totally forget about what had made us sad and we begin to laugh and dance with joy.
I sometimes envy the ability of little children to cry their eyes out at one moment and giggle at the next.
When we are young taking care of our body and mind seems like fun and games.
As we grow older, things begin to change. Our mind, that was once so happy and cheerful starts getting out of our control.
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One day our mind gets exposed to one of the nasty feelings. It might be anger, sadness, fear, rejection. Whatever it is, we don’t like it. So we cry or get angry. Basically react in a way we have always reacted. People around us try to cheer us up just like they had done so many times before. They wipe our tears, give us a treat, take us out somewhere, do all those things that used to make us forget our sadness.
This time however, we feel something has changed. Even though we have access to the things that used to cheer us up, we are somehow not able to forget the experience that made us feel bad.
Even while we are doing our favorite thing, our mind keeps on reminding us about the bad incident that had happened with us.
That’s because now the mind has developed a new skill — MEMORY.
Little do we know that this memory is probably going to stick around with us for the rest of our life.
Somethings we will always remember and others we would think we don’t remember but they’ll be buried deep inside our mind. So this ‘memory’ the new skill our mind has learned, is good and bad at the same time.
Good because, it helps us remember all the lovely and beautiful moments in our lives. Bad, because it keeps on reminding us all the bad and hurtful experiences that we have been through.
Beginning of a Love- Hate relationship with our mind.
Our mind, our child, whose happiness is what we are striving for, doesn’t always seem to cooperate with us.
We, and everyone around us is programmed to heal our hurting bodies but to distract our hurting minds.
So we follow the ritual of cheering ourselves up every time we are sad. What we don’t understand is, by doing so, we often fail to address the real problem. By never acknowledging the real reason behind a certain emotion we are not able to completely heal.
As C.S Lewis said, “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
If we ever decide to talk freely about our mental pain with someone, we get advice like, ‘Oh. Come on cheer up’, ‘Don’t think too much’ ‘ Don’t worry’ ‘Wipe your tears and give me a smile’.
People give these suggestions as if we have never ever thought about these options of cheering up, smiling and not thinking too much.
It’s as though suggesting someone with a high fever to just reduce their temperature.
But again no one does it on purpose. In fact most of the time they mean well. Unfortunately though, words like these are of no help.
Soon we start believing that, this is what we are supposed to do. So we keep on looking for the ways to cheer ourselves up and to keep us happy.
Our mind though doesn’t cease to remind us that it’s not yet completely cured.
As if it’s trying to say to us, ‘ Hey, going for a run, or shopping, or eating ice cream or getting wasted, doesn’t help me anymore. I have not healed yet. You need to do something about it. You need to talk to someone. You need to address the real problem. Just distracting me won’t help.’
However, it’s voice is so subdued by all the other chatter going on inside our head, that we are not able to understand it. We ignore it more and more.
We unknowingly start abusing it.
There is one more thing we do.
We sometimes hold a pity party for our mind.
We say things like, “Why do these things keep happening to me?”
“Why do people behave badly with me?” “Why am I the only one who
suffers?”
Playing victim feels good for sometime but it’s of no help either.
So again we try to push away those negative thoughts. We try to lock all the negative emotions in some dark room making sure nobody sees them. We gradually become very skilled at it. We plaster a smile on our face, wear our best clothes, all the time trying to portray ourselves as a happy and confident person.
Deep inside however we are still hurting.
We pamper our bodies and expect our mind to be happy. It’s just like giving candy to one child and expecting the other child to be grateful about it.
We say to our mind, ‘See, I am doing everything to make you happy. You better cheer up. Don’t be difficult. Don’t talk about unnecessary stuff. Don’t remind me of the things I want to forget.’
But what we don’t understand is, the more we ignore these feelings of our mind, the more it acts out.
Then one day, just like any unloved, and ignored child would do, our mind has an effusion of emotions.
‘You have ignored me for too long.’ It says. ‘Enough is enough. Now you see what I do. I will make sure I get the deserved love and attention. You can’t do that to me. You can’t lock me forever. You have to love me just the way you love your body. You have to heal me.’
Then something very unusual happens.
What was once just sadness, now becomes depression.
What was once just fear, now becomes anxiety.
What was once just anger, now becomes rage.
It doesn’t stop there. The mind chatter becomes louder and harsher. It starts doubting our every action, criticizing everything about us. It mocks us, tells us that we are not good enough. It feeds negative feelings about everyone around us. It distorts our physical health too.
‘You have shut me down for too long.’, it says. ‘Now I will speak and you will listen.’
It becomes so aggressive that gradually we decide to move in with it.
We start living in our own head.
We let go of our physical well being, our physical fitness. We eventually stop caring about our bodies.
We let ourselves go. Mentally and Physically.
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Could all of this be prevented?
May be, may be not.
But it can definitely be cured, if we accept the fact that our mind needs same level of care, nourishment, cleansing and TLC as our body .
To heal our mind we first need to detect and diagnose the problem. Prevention is definitely better than cure, however, if required, we must by all means go ahead and seek help.
For example, we all want a healthy and fit body. But when we fall sick, endure any kind of injury or suffer from severe health issues, what do we do? Do we try to hide it from everyone? Are we ashamed of it?
Absolutely not.
In fact we go ahead and take the necessary measures to recover from our sickness. Healthy diet, medicines, exercise, treatment, whatever it takes to improve the condition of our physical health, we are ready to do that. Right?
Then why are we so reluctant when it comes to issues related to mind ?
Reaching out, asking for help, talking about our mental health concerns is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact that’s the first step towards healing.
1 out of 4 people suffer from mental illness.
What that means is, if you don’t, then definitely someone very close to you must be going through severe stress, depression, anxiety, feeling of loneliness or some other kind of mental suffering.
It’s a very serious problem. Yet seldom talked about openly.
We all want to be happy. However, it’s not possible for human mind to stay in constant state of happiness.
Our mind encounters several emotions depending upon a lot of external and internal factors. So instead of running after happiness and running away from any kind of negative emotions, we should embrace and acknowledge them.
We must understand the fact that it’s okay to feel sad, angry, upset, depressed, lonely, anxious. Having these emotions doesn’t make us a bad person. It’s not our fault just because we are feeling a certain way. These emotions should be understood and healed, not distracted and suppressed.
Just because mental pain cannot be measured, that doesn’t make it less significant.
Mind and body are not different from each other. A healthy mind means a healthy body and vise versa.
So we should be taking care of our mind just like we take care of our body.
We must practice a regular mental hygiene and mental fitness routine.
We must identify the bad mental habits we have been living with and try to replace them with positive habits.
It’s not easy, but just like everything in life, with consistent effort it’s achievable.
Our mind is like that stubborn, difficult, out of control child who sometimes makes our life unbearable. It might be wounded, angry, sad, arrogant, negative, depressed, anxious, mean, paranoid or even rebellious. But still, it’s ours. And it is our responsibility to love it no matter what.
Just like we would never give up on our children, no matter how difficult their behavior might seem, the same way we must never give up on our mental well being. In fact we must learn to control it and make it our best friend.
Cause when the mind finally heals and calms down, only then it reveals the superpower it always possessed.
To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
- Lao Tzu
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