Ep.38 - If Your Mind Is Driving You Crazy, Start Here
At some point, most people start noticing a pattern. The same reactions, the same inner conversations, the same frustrations, just showing up in different situations. And usually that’s when it clicks...
Episode Transcript
There's a common denominator in my life
There comes a moment in everyone's life where they start putting more attention on themselves, on their own growth — whether you call that mental health, well-being, personal development, mindset, or self-awareness doesn't really matter. But there comes a point where they realize, or maybe start to realize, that there's a common denominator in my life. All the bad experiences I've had, all the shit I've been through, there's a common denominator, which is me.
You can't blame society, you can't blame your parents, you can't blame luck, you can't blame the economy. You realize that maybe I'm not just a victim of my circumstance, maybe I can change — and if I can change, maybe my experience can change too. That's when this whole Pandora's box opens. Maybe there's a moment in your life where you can visualize when that happened for you, or maybe it was more of a gradual thing. But when that happens, it's an amazing thing.
Your mind is driving you crazy
When you realize that your mind is driving you crazy — all the negative self-talk you've been carrying around for potentially decades — there's one thing we've been taught to do as a first step, as a tool. But I think that tool has been so badly explained, so vague, that rather than being the stepping stone to a really amazing journey that will change your life, it can be the thing that puts you off everything. That thing is meditation. So I want to take the time in this episode to explain first steps, to explain what to do.
Maybe you've realized that your mind is not a nice place to be, and that in itself is a massive feat of awareness — to realize that you are more than your mind. Because if you were your mind, if there was a complete identification with your mind, you wouldn't see your thoughts as separate to you, you would be your thoughts, you'd be engulfed by them. There wouldn't even be the thought of, I can change this, because it's you, it's all you know.
I've had conversations where I've told people that you are not your mind, and the look they give me is like, what have you been smoking, what do you mean you're not your mind, you are your mind. If you haven't come to that point yet, there's no way of intellectually understanding this, it has to be an experienced thing. But when you see for yourself that separation, and you start to go, huh, maybe I can change, the first thing you do is try and meditate — at least that's one of the common things to do, because it's what we've been taught helps people control their minds, go through this journey.
So you sit down, cross your legs, close your eyes, as you see in movies, and then all of those thoughts come up, all of the voices in your head come up — your mother's voice, your brother's voice, your friend's voice from 20 years ago — and instantly you go, I can't deal with this, it's too much. It puts you off. I've met people who've been put off by meditation straight away, it doesn't work for them, and I completely understand why. So I want to take the time to explain it in a way that may bring you back to it, or at least gives you some clarity on how it can help, without you having to spend five hours on a chair, or on the floor, cross-legged, with your eyes closed, just oming.
The reason why it's overwhelming
The first point is the reason why it's overwhelming, and it's because we've been taught our entire lives to put more attention on our outside world than our inside world. Simple as that. It's like having a garden that you just don't mow for ten years, because you think, what's the point, this garden's going to grow no matter what, there's no point mowing the lawn. Then one day you open the door and you're just hit by a bunch of weeds and grass, you can't see a thing, it's completely overgrown. That's what your mind is. At that point you go, I don't want to deal with this, it's way too much effort, where do you even start, you open the door and all you can see is grass. I understand why it's overwhelming.
But the funny thing is, even though we've been taught to put more attention on the outer world because the outer world is more real, ironically our inner world is so much more real, because it will affect the quality of your life 10,000 times more than the external world. You may think that's crazy — what do you mean, if I have money I'll be happy, if I have a relationship I'll be happy, if I have a nice house I'll be happy, I won't have to worry about my inner world. But if you really think about it, if you felt amazing all the time, if you just couldn't wait to do nothing, if you could sit around and do nothing because you felt so amazing, there'd be no need to distract yourself with TV or anything like that — would it actually matter what you have, how much money or how many relationships? And to put this even more so, if you felt so good that even when other people were saying you're lazy, why haven't you tried harder, why haven't you got money, why haven't you done this — if you felt so good that you didn't even care what they thought. Your inner world will make a lot more difference, and yet we're focused so much on the outer world.
And then even that backfires. Let's say you focus so much on the outer world that you become really successful, you buy back all your time, you don't have to work anymore, you've got everything you want — well, now you finally have the time for your mind to torment you. At least before, when you were working 12-hour days, you were kind of distracted in the doing of it, you didn't really have time to listen to your mind. Now you have no chance.
Meditation represents a gate
So meditation should be a first step that gives you some level of peace, but it takes a lot of courage — courage to be able to sit down and know you're going to be bombarded with thoughts about what you did 20 years ago, or your guilt or your shame. Every instinct will tell you to just get up and do anything else, because anything is better than putting yourself through that. On one level that's very true, you don't want to feel bad. But you not wanting to feel bad is going to hold you back for your entire life, because that's the same reason you maybe watch too much TV, maybe you drink, maybe you do whatever else. I don't mean to call you out, I just want to bring a level of awareness to the reality, if that is you.
Meditation represents a gate of: I am now putting more attention on my inner world than my outer world. I'm going to literally close my eyes from the outer world and put more attention here. Treat it like you would the outer world — which is weird — but give it the same amount of effort. I don't mean you have to spend eight hours a day, but give it the same level of intention. When you're in the outer world, at a job, you know why you're there — it's a very visceral feeling of I have to be here to gain money, to be safe, to have food. Treat it with the same level of mind: I have to be here, sitting down, meditating, because this is how I feel safe, how I feel okay, how I don't get stressed, how I don't feel like my world is crumbling around me.
That's very true for me. I have different meditation practices, and one of them is a way to release energy from the body. If I don't do it sometimes, I get so caught up in my mind, and once I'm there, it's so hard to undo, because you're just in it, in the inertia of it. I realized, you know, if I just spent 20 minutes at the start of the day and released all of that, if I just meditated and came from a place of clarity and groundedness, I would have had a completely different day. That's the mindset behind meditation, and it's probably harsher than you were expecting. But if you truly know that your mind is driving you crazy, and you also truly know there is a way out, then this becomes so important to the quality of your life. I wanted to start with that pre-frame just to anchor that feeling of, this is really important — because meditation is so airy-fairy, people say meditate and it doesn't really mean anything anymore, it's almost a platitude. So what really is meditation, what do you do with it, how do you do it?
It's giving attention to yourself
I want to frame it this way, because I think it's the most logical and easy way to understand it: it's giving attention to yourself. When you say it like that, meditation suddenly does not have to be you sitting on a couch, cross-legged, with your eyes closed — it can be anything, a form of self-care, if you will. But I want to emphasize something: you're putting attention on you, not your mind. If your mind is quiet, then who are you?
That is the question meditation answers. Without my mind, who am I? If my mind was quiet, what is left? The great thing about that question is it can't be answered by the mind, because if your mind answers it, by definition you're not meditating anymore. I wasn't even sure I was going to say it like that, but now that I've said it, it feels so true — I wish someone had said it that way to me.
Who are you?
This question is so profound, because it's the question that led you here — maybe not consciously, but for you to want to meditate, there has to be some knowledge, some knowing in you that you are more than your mind, that the voices in your head are just voices. Maybe at this moment you can't control the voices, they're just there, and you listen to them because they're there. But for you to see them as voices in your head rather than as you, there has to be separation — there has to be you, and the voice in your head.
So if there was you, and the voice in your head, who are you? If there was you, and your mind, who is you? Who are you? Again, the beautiful thing about that question is you can't answer it with the mind, because the mind will give you some story — I am this person, I grew up here, I'm this many years old — which means nothing.
So meditation is taking power back from the mind, because we've given all our power to the mind. And unfortunately the mind, the conscious mind, is just a record-and-playback unit, it's a computer — it takes experiences and then filters new experiences based on those old experiences. That's also why most people live the same life for their entire lives, the same experience of life, because it can't tell you anything you don't already know. But if you really sit with the question of who am I outside of this computer — and I'm using that language to build that separation, if it's a computer, I'm not a computer, I'm not a PC — then who am I?
The way you meditate, in its purest form, is just sitting there and taking energy away from the mind, putting it somewhere else. I realize the episode so far may be hard to grasp, sitting down and going, who am I? It may not mean anything yet, and that's on purpose, because the mind can't make sense of something like that. But it's something you have to sit with — just ask, almost as an affirmation: who am I? What is this mind?
This thing is dictating the quality of your life
Be honestly curious, because you're trying to understand yourself, the nature of who you are. You have this entity in your mind, this voice, this whatever — I'm trying to change the angle here, because the biggest part of meditation that's so difficult for people is the judgment, the irritation, the frustration. You sit down, and your mind throws so much bullshit at you — you should be working, you should be guilty about this, here's a mistake from 20 years ago, you better think about that — and we get caught up in it because we think that's us, and therefore we think we're failing.
But if you take a step back and realize, hold on, I am watching my mind, I'm bigger than my mind, it moves the lens from judgment and disapproving of yourself, to curiosity. Curiosity about why is it saying this, why has it taken this time for me to sit down, and as soon as I sit down, now suddenly it's bringing up all this stuff about the mistake I made 20 years ago, or that breakup. You're trying to decode this thing in your mind from a place of honest curiosity, trying to really just observe it — and suddenly you don't get as caught up in the emotion. That's what I'm trying to do here, because the emotion is what stops people — the angst, the irritation of sitting down while the mind goes, you can't do this, this isn't going to work for you — and we believe it, because it's there.
I want you to realize that for you to sit down and meditate, you've already realized to some degree that you are not your mind, so you don't actually have to listen to what it's saying. That has to come from a place of genuine curiosity, because you can't just shut it down — you can't sit down and start beating yourself up, saying, you can't say that, stop it, I don't want you here, go away. That just makes it worse. It's being genuinely curious: what is going on in my head? No one taught you how the mind works, no one explained it in school. It's this thing we've grown up with our entire lives, and because it's so familiar, we just think that's how it is — but no one actually explained it. It's your job to understand the nature of this thing, because it's dictating the quality of your life, deciding when you feel good, when you feel bad — at least you think it is.
The key here is not judging it, and that's what curiosity is — being open to any outcome, honestly just observing and going, I wonder what's going to happen next. Whereas judgment is, I don't want this to happen, I do want this to happen — you can feel the force there, the difference in energy. And the funny thing is you don't have to judge it, you don't have to push it down. There are different schools of thought on this — one says you have to stop thinking at all costs, push everything down. That's complete bullshit, but it makes people think the answer to enlightenment or feeling peaceful is pushing down your thoughts, and it doesn't work. So what I wanted to do here is give a different perspective, one that may remove some of the resistance around it — the fear of just sitting down, closing your eyes, and seeing what comes up.
I know how scary it is to not want to deal with that, to not want all those thoughts or fears or mistakes or guilt trips to come up, because it makes you feel like a failure, like you're going backwards. You're looking at all this stuff and it's overwhelming, whereas at least when you were distracted by work, you'd only have the occasional bad thought — so you think that's better. But it's not that it's better, it's just that you were distracting yourself. Again, it's the overgrown garden: you have two approaches. You can once a day take a normal pair of scissors and cut once or twice, leave it for the next day, or do it once a week, and by the time you come back it's basically grown back to what it was before. Or you get a chainsaw or hedge trimmer and start going at it — yeah, it's more overwhelming, but it's going to give you results faster, and peace of mind faster. That's the goal — there's no goal here apart from peace of mind, for you to feel like your life is yours, not just the amalgamation of all the voices in your head telling you what to do, what's right and wrong, what's good and bad, what you're capable of and aren't capable of.
If you apply resistance, you will get resistance
That's not something you can really think your way out of, but it's so ingrained, it's a subconscious belief, it's there — it was there to protect you. And then we judge ourselves for it, we start attacking ourselves, thinking why am I thinking this way, why am I so negative, why am I angry at this person, and we just make it worse, we push it in more.
It's the idea of — if you're opposite someone, or you can do it yourself — put your hands together, like you're praying, and with your right hand, push, keep pushing, push as hard as you can. Now what's happening? Your left hand started pushing back. Did I ask you to do that? No, you did it automatically. If you apply resistance, you will get resistance. So if you're judging your mind, you're just going to keep it there, you're just going to make it stay, because you're engaging it. The funny thing about resistance and conflict is that by pushing on something, you're keeping it there — it can't move, it can't go away, because you're pushing it, and therefore it's pushing back. Which is so ironic, because all we're trying to do is get rid of it, and we're actually keeping it there.
But as soon as you let go, as soon as you stop judging it, as soon as you realize there's no reason to judge this — it's not that this thing is bad, it's just that it was a pattern in my head from years and years ago, trying to keep me safe, and now I'm actually curious about it, where did it come from, what is this, why do I choose to keep this there, why am I resisting — you're gaining that agency, that sovereignty over your experience. And then you let go, and suddenly this resistance has no purpose anymore, resistance has nothing to push against, because you've just removed what it was pushing against. So sit with it, and I'm genuinely curious to see if that changes your perspective on meditation, and on your mind in general.
Because all it does otherwise is act like a kettle going over boil — you're just holding all of that in, the emotion is still there, the energy is still there, and it's still boiling the water, and at some point you'll just explode, you'll lash out, because you're still being affected by the thoughts, you're just hiding it. What I want for you is to not be affected by the thoughts, and that comes from the separation, from you feeling like you're separate to this thing — not in a bad way, not because it's a bad entity in your mind, but because it's not serving you right now. It maybe was serving you in the past — all these thoughts about don't do this, do this, that's from experience, from your mind trying to keep you safe in the past. It made up these beliefs and voices in your head to make sure you stay safe — the voice of your mother saying be realistic, don't do this, or your father saying obey the rules, follow the rules.
It's having the perspective shift to realize that the voices in my head were serving me at some point, they were there to protect me, but I'm now no longer in need of their protection, and now they're not serving me. It doesn't mean you push them away and hate them, it just means you can let them go — that's what the separation is, it's you letting them go. You can't let go of you. If you believe and know you are your thoughts, you can't do anything about it, you're stuck with it. But if you know, and you anchor yourself in the knowing that this is something separate to me, you can let them go. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying it as a thought in your mind, as an idea to sit with. And that's what I want you to do after this — sit with the idea, and see if it feels true for you, see if you resonate with any part of it, because peace of mind is a quiet mind. It's as simple as that.