HCI conducted an interesting interactive session with Ms. Monica K., who is a spirituality mentor and therapist, a mindfulness expert and a successful author. She has a wide experience of 15 years in the field of mental wellness. The session was held at Bibvewadi, Pune on 23rd July, 2023.
The topic of discussion for the day was ‘From Chaos to Inner Calm – Using the Power of Thought’. Chaos here refers to the chaos that happens in our minds. Monica went through her personal struggles and one day she decided that she wanted to change her life and move ahead. She describes herself as a non-conformist, not a sticker for rules, an out-of-box thinker and a rebel against social norms and conditioning.
Monica believes that our thoughts are the source of our mental health issues. We stay with ourselves and our thoughts throughout the day. For example, if your parents or caregivers were very critical of you in your formative years, you carry those thoughts with you as you grow up. But how you deal with those thoughts or self-talk defines your outlook. Suppose you make a big blunder in your office. Immediately a plethora of thoughts attack your mind one by one: “How could I do this?”, “How can I be so stupid?”, “How do I fix this?” and so on.
Often, it becomes a record that starts playing on loop in your head and that repetitive thought process can remain with you for a day, a week or maybe 10 days. Such thoughts will drain your energy. When you go to sleep that night, these thoughts would still at the back of your mind. When you wake up next morning, your mind will immediately go back to that event and you will feel a burden that you have to somehow face and fix that problem. We need to avoid being pulled into such a vortex of negative, repetitive, energy draining thought process or else they develop into belief patterns that get stuck. Gain control of your mind and don’t listen to it when such thoughts develop. Monica made a profound statement when she said, “Please give a thought to your thoughts because your thoughts are what moves your lives”.
For example, if a teacher continuously tells a student that he is no good, over a period of time, such repetitive thought process in the student’s mind becomes a pattern and the student begins to stop putting efforts into studies, even though he may have been intelligent to begin with and the teacher’s assessment about him was incorrect.
Awareness is the most important tool you have in the process to control your thoughts. That is the first step to mental wellness and healing process. You need to be aware of your energy draining thoughts. One needs to simply practice sitting with one’s thoughts and be aware of what thoughts are coming in the mind. Unless we are aware of what thoughts are repetitively appearing, we will be leading robotic, routine, mundane lives without reaching anywhere. It’s like running on a tread mill that never has a destination. In fact, we will get tired at the end of it. Once you gain awareness of your thoughts, this is what spirituality essentially means. Spirituality is simply your connection with your inner self. Everyone’s inner self has a guiding voice. But most of us haven’t developed the habit to listen to it because there is always a chaos of thoughts present in our mind. In order to listen to the inner voice, we need to first arrive at a state of calmness. Some call this inner voice as an intuition or a gut feeling. Let’s suppose you get 2 similar job offers with similar salary and benefits. How do you choose one? There is something inside us that makes us take that choice. That is our inner voice talking to us.
Our mind is an input and output machine. Whatever we input in it, that is processed and the output is our thoughts. Throughout the day if we are exposed to negative incidents like watching news about disasters, accidents, an argument with someone, a neighbour coming to your house and telling about his unfortunate incident, all this is getting absorbed in the mind. When we go to sleep at the end of the day, all these incidents have been absorbed and we keep thinking about it. But what is the positive stuff we are inputting in our minds to counteract or balance all this negative inputs? We need to have a “go-to-goodness” stimuli that we input every day in our minds. Some could read a book that they enjoy, others listen to a spiritual leader, maybe go to YouTube and watch a calmness or a meditation video. Do any such positive thing for 15 minutes. We need to allow our minds to absorb this positive stuff so that negativity is not the only input for the brain throughout the day. Imagine if every day we are bombarded with negative news or images and we do not take the effort to seek out even a single positive thought, negativity is all that the mind will ever absorb.
Positive thoughts clean out the negativity and give us a fresh start. Every day we take a bath in the morning to clean our body. But just because we cannot see the mind, most of us don’t take an effort to clean the mind.
Remember that each of us is different as an individual and we have our own unique journey. This practice may not work the same way for all of us. It may work for some but may not for others. And that’s totally okay. We need to take efforts and carve our own paths and explore what works for our mental wellness. There is no rush or competition with others. Your mental well-being is not a race. It’s a journey.
When you start living your life connected to yourself and your inner voice, your life begins to change. But the first thing we need to reach that objective is to clear the clutter in the brain. The first 30 minutes of your day decides the whole day for you. When you get up in the morning try the following: don’t touch your phone, make your daily cup of tea (if that is what you like) and sit near a window or your balcony and do nothing. Simply watch the nature. Appreciate and enjoy that moment. We are so robotic in our lives that we have forgotten to even notice what is around us anymore. But at a spiritual level, we are a soul that has taken a human form and it is the journey of the soul that we need to experience. We have over stressed and over stretched our brains to an unhealthy level and we need to take a step back to reconnect with our mind.
Sometimes we want certain things in our life. We may have thoughts about what we want to achieve, where we want to visit, etc. But at times life takes us elsewhere that is not as per our expectations. That is where our dissatisfaction, stresses, depression, and anxieties develop. But when you accept the truth that you are on a soul’s journey and what path you had decided for yourself is not the path of the soul, you won’t feel that way. Mental health issues are simply your mind’s coping mechanism, as you are not able to accept the reality of the path that life is taking you on. Try to say “It’s okay” with a smile on your face when things don’t go your way and soon you will begin to accept reality rather than fight with it or get sad about it. It makes you feel relieved. You are giving yourself validation when you say this. It is the power of the thought. If thoughts have the power to make you go low, they also have the power to bring you up. Your perspective of seeing the situation changes when you say “It’s okay”.
When our mind is consumed by repetitive negative thoughts we even tend to miss out on the challenges and opportunities that come our way as our mind is too pre-occupied.
Monica was very forthcoming when she openly confessed to having dealt with mental health issues herself so she has spoken frankly from her own experience.
The talk was followed by a lively question and answer session, where Monica answered queries based on her own life experiences. One of the many gems that came out of the discussion was when Monica said she believes in following her heart and she is constantly learning even after such a long and wide experience in the mental wellness arena. She believes in not judging anyone else and therefore applies the same logic to herself by not judging herself. Let’s believe that each one of us is an amazing human being and we need to reinforce that belief in ourselves. It was an eye-opening session for all of us and we would love to have Monica back to gain from her wealth of expertise.
- Written by Amit Rai
- Compiled by Amol More
- Edited and uploaded by Mahrukh