Let’s start with a scenario simulation. You have got this nice trip on cruise ship. You are enjoying yourself and all of a sudden the ship starts sinking due to a large hole. What do you do?
Option a) Leave the Sinking Ship
Option b) Dig the hole faster
You are probably thinking what a dumb question – obviously option (a) – Leave the Sinking Ship. That’s what all logical, sane people will do.
Yes, option (a) is the correct one but the question is which one do we really do/act on. We all know that leaving the ship is the best option. However we not only choose to stay, we even dig the hole faster.
What do I mean by this? Let’s me state another example. A person is learning how to swim – they go to their first class and instructor says pop down under the water and blow bubbles. They are scared but they take a plunge and to their surprise its quite easy to blow bubbles through the nose under water. Now the instructor says – hold the edge of the swimming pool and put your face down and blow bubbles.
And this is where the hole appears in the form of your mind chatter – “Oh! my god. How can I do this now? How will I breathe if I blow bubbles with my nose under the water? I should have never come for swimming. I will never be able to do this.
And this is how we make the hole bigger. The best thing to do would be to abandon the train of thought completely.
It is ironic that even though we know the best option we never actually exercise that option. It’s like we have been hit by an arrow and instead of nursing the wound we keep jabbing ourselves again and again. One of the reasons is that we are used to being under water the so much that we don’t even realize that we can be above the water. In fact some people find it scary if they are above the water and if things are going too well.
In the human predicament and due to the conditioning of our mind we [most of us] have a tendency to let our mind chatter go amuck and take us to places where we really don’t want to go. But we have no control over our own mind chatter or in some cases even the awareness that it’s taking us places where we don’t want to go.
What’s the way out of it you ask? The stage of evolution we are in it’s not possible for majority of us to get rid of the mind chatter but we can influence it, nudge it so that it takes us to happier places. This does not take us out of the prison just gives us better food. But at the very least our head will be above the water.
Like most things the first step is awareness – be aware of your mind chatter as much and as often as you can be. And once you become aware of what’s it thinking it will be impossible for you to not interject and change its trajectory.
What option will you choose? Swim or Sink with your Mind Chatter.