How To Deal With Knowing Your Power

So you’ve mastered meditation, you understand the ins and outs of our crazy powerful minds. Maybe the initial goal was to cure your mental hardships, anxiety or depression, or curiosity simply got the best of you.

Whatever brought you to where you are, I deeply congratulate you. Mastering the mind comes with beautiful freedom and a profound realization of just how much time we used to spend contemplating depressive thoughts, anxiety ridden moods, entertaining every possible outcome days before it happened, and analyzing each experience for days after.

It suddenly becomes strikingly clear why it was so hard to see the patterns you were stuck in and the feelings you were addicted to: your mind was working overtime to satisfy all of those ridiculous thought webs… you were exhausted!

Once the thought patterns have been exposed and the addictions have been broken, basking in the well deserved freedom is restoring. Enjoying the free space in our minds that used to be occupied by ‘mental illness’ is peaceful and powerful.

So now what?

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It’s a daunting feeling… realizing you have control over the thoughts running rampant inside your head.

It sometimes feels as if your efforts to alleviate the pain caused by your mind has brought you an even greater responsibility.

Being able to assert your control is only the first step.

Understanding and honoring how easy it was to get wrapped up in an anxiety or depressive causing thought pattern is easily the second.

Then comes the third, coming to terms with the plethora of negative chatter that seems to be on an endless loop that intensifies every time you pay it attention.

No wonder people are so unhappy with their lives, unhappy with how they look, with their partner, their job. The chatter doesn’t recognize happiness, accomplishment, or contentment.

How do you wrangle the chatter competing for your attention, especially when you truly are happy with your life? How strong does your happiness need to be to compete with the chatter that challenges it? Is it easier to meet each thought with dismissal, reason or ignorance?

The answer is obviously simpler than we make it, you don’t need to participate in the competition.

We only think we have to meet the challenge of the chatter with a counter thought, a line of dismissive reasoning or anything at all.

I’d like to offer the practice of meeting the loop of thoughts with nothing.

Giving unwanted thoughts any sort of attention still gives them attention, YOUR attention, which is what grows the initial thought into a web that welcomes anxiety.

By meeting a thought with annoyance or punishment from frustration that the thought was even present in your mind to begin with is STILL acknowledging that the thought has enough power to grab your attention in the first place.

EXAMPLE
the initial thought: I wonder what people will think of me / I hope my flight doesn’t crash / If I don’t catch this bus I’ll be late for my meeting.

By meeting any of these with reasoning is an honest attempt to alleviate the thought all together, to give more attention to why the thought is ridiculous would in return, make it go away. Right?

Our minds are powerful tools, and we often forget how convincing they can be.

Reasoning with what was a ridiculous thought in the first place risks entering a battlefield of back and forth with the supercomputer that is your mind.

“I don’t care what people think of me” can quickly be met back with, ‘but don’t you remember when you walked into five minutes late to your freshman year english class and everyone laughed at you and you didn’t find out there was toilet paper stuck in your pants until the teacher told you on your way out’ or ‘the last time you spoke in front of your company the receptionist kept whispering to her friend and even though they were on the opposite side of the room it was definitely about you’ and the list goes on…

You get the picture, your mind has access to every weakest point, all your embarrassing memories, everything you’ve seen, read, heard or experienced, ready and able to pull out all the stops at the first sign of insecurity.

I used to be someone who believed reasoning was the answer. My analytical mind needed cold hard evidence before it fully believed in anything and tried to convince me to play the back and forth game with myself, to engage with the negative chatter in order to alleviate anything that I didn’t want crossing my minds way.

I found that the more I challenged my mind, the more I was challenged in return. It’s an interesting game because it reminds you just how convincing your mind can be.

If you test your mind, be prepared to show it just how strong you have become.

Overcoming the grasp of the mind is beautiful, freeing and electrifying. It is an incredible way to experience your own power as you take back the control panel of your experience.

Reasoning with thoughts that you KNOW no longer matter to you is like teasing the control panel in its old users’ face.

The most dignified way to navigate the mess of unnecessary thoughts competing for your attention is to simply LET THEM BE!

See them as they are, indistinct chatter, the trail of old useless programming, the remnants of ad campaigns, marketing tactics, insults from jealous family members, leftover tactics that used to make you spiral, the mental residue from the old you.

Stepping into your power for the first time or for the millionth time always feels the same, like a huge breath of fresh air, a massive weight lifted from your shoulders that leaves you light with love and giggles towards the stress, anxiety and pain you thought you had no choice but to entertain.

Keeping that feeling seems tiring and impossible, but we tend to overcomplicate these things!

The power that comes from sitting in the control seat of your mind can be reclaimed every time you remember that the seat is there for you.

Getting caught up in any of the chatter that seem to be screaming at you is asking for a tug of war game for that control seat. You already know it’s yours, so stop playing around with your mind.

Accept it for what it is, allow the chatter to continue as it wills, distinct and below your intended awareness. Laugh at it, cry at it, but let it be.

It can exist beneath you, allow your power to show you how to rise above.

Judgement is accepting the challenge, indifference is knowing you are above it.

xx

AES

P.S. Congratulations!! Welcome to the other side…