Mental Wellbeing, perhaps, is the most crucial facet of our existence. If there is one thing that we all need to train our minds for is to achieve a state of internal peace and balance. Now to achieve that state, we need to beat the stress, which has unfortunately become our constant companion. And we seem to have no clue as to how to get rid of it. The irony is that we put all the blame of stress only on the external factors, little realising that the reason mostly lies right within ourselves.
Have you ever wondered that although we do most of the things in our lives for being happy, our own mind does the opposite stuff like excess worrying and getting unhappy frequently? Quite often we also realise that our reaction to some uncomfortable situation earlier in the day was not something that we would have wanted. This, you see, is the bitter reality of our lives!!
Now, in order to improve the state of our Mental Health, regulate the mind and emotions, it’s important to know how the mind works. Let’s understand this with the help of an interesting metaphor.
You are standing at a busy crossing on the road, watching the cabs pass by. These cabs are like thoughts which we flag down and get in them, without ever realizing the bumpy ride that awaits us. And the thoughts do take us for a ride, literally. The worst part is that at the end of the ride, there is a huge bill to pay, in the form of all the stress and anxiety which we heap upon ourselves!!
So the biggest irony of our existence is that we can’t choose our thoughts and emotions. It is, as if, our thoughts choose us and there is no internal freedom of choice.
What if we could learn to observe the Mind – all our thoughts and emotions? Just the way an observer watches all the cabs go by, without hopping onto those which he knows would end up in misery. This is what Mindfulness is all about. With awareness, the identification with the thoughts, and our constant reaction to them abates. And slowly we get released from the clutches of our emotions that creates stress and mental suffering.
