Meditation is not all about long robes, a secret temple and a life time dedication to inner peace. We can all use a form of simple meditation to help get past some of the more difficult situations that occur in our day. As you know there are many times throughout the day that you’ll need to find some “inner peace”. Screaming kids, annoying customers, phones that wont stop ringing, you know the feeling.
Identifying the Cause
Here’s a little experiment you can try. Next time you’re feeling annoyed or stressed stop everything your doing. Just completely stop, don’t even move. Take a second to identify why you’re so worked up. Is it something that’s about to happen, something that’s happening now or something that’s happening now that’s reminded you of something that occurred in the past? Don’t put it to the back of your mind, identify the issue and make a quick note of it and why it is annoying you. Deal with this mind splinter in the now.
Splinters in The Mind
The things that annoy us are like little splinters in our mind, or little bugs in a computer system. We need to deal with them as they occur. When something annoying happens, recognise if there is something you can personally do about it in the moment, and then do it. If you can’t do anything about it, realise this is not your fault and move on. I know, this is much easier said the done. Is there a method you can use to make this process easier? You bet, it’s called a mindfulness exercise.
Transfer The Negativity
If you can’t do anything to resolve the annoyance at the time, them, instead of wallowing in stress and self-pity, transfer that negative mind power onto a different task. This will turn it into positive power. By moving forward, having identified the stress/annoyance, you can positively make a change in another area of your life. Accept that there is nothing you can do in this moment to correct the situation, and instead channel your energy elsewhere. You will feel 10 times better for it.
Hack Your Brain
Of course, your brain will try and pull you back to the thing that was annoying you, but you must not let it. Bring your thoughts to the center of your mind and focus on what is happening right now, not what could or might happen in the future. You must let go of such thoughts because they aren’t helpful. Anything that hasn’t happened to you is outside of your experience and remains a non-reality, and therefore it is silly to focus upon such things.
Meditation is all about finding a form of inner peace, a way to do that is by using mindfulness. Understandably tuning out can be hard when something has wound you up, and because we have been conditioned in the modern day to be fearful and forward thinking. But try, you can do it.
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All good stuff! Leads right up to the “brain-hack” point of “You must let go of such thoughts because they aren’t helpful.” In other terms we sometimes hear, such thoughts need to be “liberated” ~ but how to do this when we are already engaged in strongly grasping at them? Yes, they will go away eventually, but the tendency is to have great difficulty in actually dropping them and not coming right back to them.
How to drop them and have them really vanish and stay gone?
The key is to immerse them in the natural clarity of mind that they arise from and return to. This is an easy “hack”. You just get a good visualization of “clear” – actual clearness – and immerse the thought in this “clear” while keeping mindfulness of the “clear” together with the thought! The thought will vanish directly into this “clear” and stay gone as long as you maintain mindfulness of “clear”. This is a perfect little “mind-hack” solution to the problem of “letting go” of the nasty disturbing thought issues. It works great on “self-notions” too, those thoughts that generate the illusion of ego-self and bring on the negative reaction in the first place!
So if you want to “just drop it” take the proactive approach and “just Clear it”!
Enjoy!!
Thanks for sharing your technique Jim. Have a wonderful day!
Good tips which i will bear in mind and identify what annoys me when it happens. I too often tend to “dust it under the rug” instead of facing issues up-front.
Brillant. Just what i needed