MIND CALM | Why Is My Mind So Busy?
Why is my mind soooooooooo 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. I’m curious if you can relate to any of them.
Hidden Reason 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 to determine whether your life is good or bad, positive or negative, right or wrong, better or worse, Then, if it deems something to be bad, negative, wrong or worse, you end up with what is commonly called 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.
Hidden Reason 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 is a major cause of stress and negative emotions. Meaning how you feel is less to do with what happens, and more to do with whether you judge and resist what happens.
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 being the by-product of the resistance and the need to feel good once again.
Hidden Reason 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 upon the illusion that you can’t feel good now without fixing, changing or improving your body or life first. When attached, you end up caught up in your busy mind that’s trying to improve your life so that you can eventually feel good. All the time, missing all the beauty and abundance already present in your life that, if focused on, can make you feel great now.
Hidden Reason 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.
4 Quick Cures to Enjoy Mind Calm
1. See the judgmental thoughts in your mind, don’t be the judger
2. Remove reactive resistance so that you are in harmony with ‘what is’
3. Desire things, but don’t need them to be happy.
4. Be fully attentive to now so you don’t need the future to fulfill you.
