How flexible is your mind?

I have decided that Monday is the new Sunday, after all it’s good to have a flexible mind, right?

But how do you get one? Zen Buddhists would say: Meditation. Globetrotters: Travelling. Jamie Smart: Insightful Understanding. He is one of the leading figures in the world of NLP, but recently discovered a different approach for himself, Sydney Bank’s Three Principles. Sydney Banks was a welder in Scottland, but was lucky enough to become enlightened and discover the above mentioned three principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought. So he quit welding and travelled the world instead, teaching and writing about his philosophy. (I’m thinking about getting a welding job, too. It’s all about having a kick-ass bio nowadays.)

The easiest way to explain the three principles is comparing them to watching a movie: Mind is the movie projector (the universal energy that animates all life), Consciousness is the light that throws the images on the screen (the ability to be aware of one’s life) and Thought is what you see on the screen, the movie (the power to think and to create one’s experience of reality). The key assumption is that reality is what we experience inside our heads. (A bit like Matrix only without the computers.) Therefore we can change it. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Understanding the three principles intellectually is only the first step, though. And this is where my beloved emotions come into play.

As Jamie Smart explains in his new book “Effortless Evolution” the learning and understanding we’ve been taught at school and university is purely intellectual. We analyze what we hear or read and then decide whether it fits in our model of the world or not. That’s why it’s not enough to tell someone with an eating disorder: “You have to eat more/less/not throw up after every meal”. They know that. Rationally. Just not emotionally. So how do we arrive at an emotional or as Jamie calls it insightful understanding of the world and ourselves? I don’t have the answer, but there are a few things you can do.

Patience for example. Remember how much patience you had as a child? That’s because the future lay sprawled out like the sea in front of your nose, no end in sight. Time? You had lots. As you grew older however people told you that the sea is more like Lake Ontario: It seems to be borderless, but it is not. (Of course the sea isn’t borderless either, but you know what I mean.) And you suddenly felt rushed, in a hurry. At least I did. The thing is that complex processes take time as I pointed out in my blog post “Why it’s sometimes best to do nothing” from June 12. New insights need time to sink in. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to have a psychotherapy session every day. You need the gaps in between for the new realizations to take root in your unconscious.

Then there is openness. You would think that the older you get the more rigid are your views. In my case the opposite is the case. In high school I was a true pighead. My model of the world was made of iron: unbendable, indestructible. In short – I was always right. (Yes, remnants of this are still alive, but hey – I’m still young!) It took me years and years to knock down the walls surrounding my cast-iron house. (Now I’m working on the iron itself – heat seems to be the best strategy; it simply melts.)

We all know that the learning is in the doing so yes, you actually need to practice patience and openness, ideally on a daily basis. A good starting point is to copy others: Why not give meditation and travelling a try? The former at least doesn’t require big expenses. And the latter can be done in your imagination if your budget’s too tight for buying an actual flight ticket – it’s all in our heads anyway, right?