Strategies For Managing
Your Mind

by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.

You can change your habits and learn to manage your time, but without learning to manage your mind, inner peace is impossible. Even when you're sitting in a comfortable living room, surrounded by loved ones and trying to relax, your mind is capable of producing outrageously stressful mental movies. You probably create them several times a day, perhaps without even noticing what you're doing. The key to making your mind your ally, rather than your enemy, is to become aware of how you produce and direct your very own cinema of the absurd. Then you can choose to run a different feature. Awareness and choice are the keys to mental peace.

Here is how the average stressful mental movie gets produced. I was on my way to facilitate a weekend workshop at a cozy conference center in upstate New York. It had just snowed, and the trees were bowed to the earth, shaking off their frosty offerings in a light breeze. The sunlight sparkled off the flakes, and the world was enchanting in its beauty. I was in the moment, feeling spacious and present. My body was relaxed and comfortable. Then I had some constricting, afflicting kinds of thoughts: What perfect skiing weather. I moved to Colorado to spend more time outdoors. Everyone at home is probably out enjoying the snow. I'm on my way to spend the weekend teaching indoors. Poor, poor pitiful me. I'm so busy.

One moment I had been peaceful, expansive and present, thoroughly enjoying life; the next I was feeling deprived, crabby, and stressed. Nothing had changed except my thoughts, but that's where we live the majority of our lives. Much of the time, the suffering and busyness we feel has very little to do with the reality of the situation. It's a direct result of our thinking.

The Buddha had a great analogy. He said each of us has some suffering, like a cup of salt. If you choose to dissolve your salt in a small bowl, the water will be undrinkable. But if you dissolve it in a lake, the water will still taste sweet. The mind, and how you deal with your thoughts, is the equivalent of the bowl or the lake.

Life is filled with very real suffering. God forbid you or a loved one gets seriously ill, a child dies, your business fails, divorce rips your family apart, or you're betrayed by a person you trusted. These things happen because they're a part of life. As you get older, you realize there's no magic amulet or formula that prevents suffering. Bad things routinely happen to good people. Suffering is part of the human condition. You may wish this were not so. There are plenty of books that trade on that hope, dispensing advice on how to think, eat, pray, and behave in order to avoid suffering, but suffering will come just the same, in spite of your best efforts. The only thing you can really control is how you respond to life's inherent challenges.

However, there are two types of suffering-mandatory and optional. On my drive through the snowy countryside, there was no external cause for suffering. It was all in my mind. This made me recall that the original definition of yoga had nothing to do with stretching exercises. It was defined as learning how to control the mind and banish the afflicting thoughts that create needless suffering. Learning how to do that, said the ancient sages, is the most difficult of all disciplines. Learning to walk on water was said to be much easier.

Getting control of your thinking may not be easy, but if you want lasting peace, it's a worthwhile practice. As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." It takes consistent effort to overcome that internal enemy, but you can do it as part of your daily life. It takes no more time to use your thoughts well than it does to let them drive you crazy. The basic skills of awareness and choice are available to every person, in every situation, during every hour of the day and night.

For example, in order to stop my mind from creating suffering over its preference to go skiing, I had to notice what I was doing. That is awareness. "Uh-oh. I've lost it. I've made myself miserable." The thought of skiing started the process of woolgathering, or bringing up other thoughts about how busy I was. The next move in the practice of mental martial arts was to change my thinking.

Modern cognitive psychologists suggest you internally yell, "Stop it," then start in on a more productive train of thought. In the skiing example, I might have nudged my mind onto a better road by thinking, Next weekend I'll definitely go skiing with my family. I'm glad I remembered how much we love to do that. Today I'm going to enjoy my work. These thought corrections are called affirmations. I like to think of them as station breaks for the opposing point of view. This might all seem very simple, but it's not easy. If it were, we would all be yogis.

This week, notice your thinking and develop the habit of awareness. Witness your thoughts with the recognition that you are not your thoughts. They are just a mental movie, and you can make the choice to run another film. Try saying an emphatic mental "Stop it" when you feel tense and constricted by unproductive obsessing. Then substitute a train of thought that can be your ally in experiencing inner peace.