Mystic Jewels Official Blog

By Susie Surtees

Red-robed, silent, cross-legged Buddhist monks. In rows. Eyes closed. Meditating. Practising mindfulness. But mindfulness isn’t just for monks. It’s a powerful, proven, free, non-religious, non-philosophically aligned transformative practice for everyone! All it takes at first is you, a quiet place, a little time and some patience. Later, you can use it everywhere with open eyes to increase your awareness of how you operate in the world.

Where’s your mind right now?

Is your mind on automatic pilot churning out the same old fear-based worries or ego-puffing thoughts that mask your vulnerabilities? Are you aware of what you habitually tell yourself? If your mind’s an untended garden, consciously weeding it and creating more powerful thoughts puts you in charge of your reality. An untrained mind repeats thoughts that generate the same old unsatisfying actions and results, keeping you from a richer, more contented life.

Evolution

Although we’re cutting-edge sophisticated creatures now-transformed from single-celled organisms through a dazzling evolution that’s swept us through several billion years-our instincts are very old. The legacy of billions of years of life-threatening natural events, aggressive neighbours and bloodthirsty predators who saw us and thought, ‘Mmm, that looks like lunch’, is a brain always vigilant about survival threats. Woody Allen was right on the money when he described nature as ‘one big restaurant’! Thankfully, in the 200,000 years since modern humans emerged, we’ve rocketed from primitive haphazard survival to cultures that design more predictable survival, and place a high value on love, creativity and connection through a deep shared humanity that blooms into the beauty of poetry and music and art.

Automatic Negative Thoughts

Avoiding being lunch gave us ANTS-Automatic Negative Thoughts-protection that’s always alert to survival threats. A mind on red alert when it registers what may look like a snake on a path, only relaxes after we reinterpret the threat as a fallen branch. Those ancient alerts kept us safe through the ages, but are often redundant now. And our young brains, up to about age six, did what they were designed to do-observed people and events around us and internalised-mostly unconsciously-the values, behaviours and beliefs that would keep us as safe, accepted member of our group. Anything we deciphered as a threat to our protected position built thoughts and behaviours that joined with instinctive survival thoughts and behaviours to generate Automatic Negative Thoughts. You’re not alone-they’re still integral to our survival, but we need to understand why they’re arising and override the ones that no longer serve us in the modern world.

There’s a party in your head

When you first sit quietly in mindfulness practice the sheer number of thoughts rushing around in your head can seem like a noisy party with crowds of uninvited guests! That’s how it was for me years ago! But awareness of the quantity and quality of your thoughts is the precise reason for practising mindfulness. Thoughts are as natural to the mind as clouds are to the sky! But it is up to you to choose which to focus on and which to let drift away and dissolve. Mindfulness brings you into full awareness-maybe for the first time-of the repetitive nature of your particular thoughts, of the incessant chatter of pesky swarms of ANTS that replay disappointments, rehearse future disasters, and dish out self-criticism.

Relax and choose your PETS

Once you tune in to your ANTS, the idea of boring yourself endlessly with the same old unproductive thoughts is a great motivator to choose Performance Enhancing Thoughts. Takes time and practice, of course, but it works. Your brain will respond to your thought choices by rewiring itself and strengthening the new neural circuits-it’s even been filmed in recent times. It’s quite literally a pruning, then a reseeding process. At any age! The well-worn tracks of your old thoughts fall into disuse as you align with your PETS. Your PETS get to run the show more often, and you’ll experience the world differently. I’ll show you the how of mindfulness practice in future posts and you’ll eventually experience how meditation softens us, opens our hearts, and deepens and widens our connection to everything. But for now, try noticing your habitual thoughts. And begin turning ANTS into PETS by asking ‘What thoughts would cause me to feel or behave differently in this situation?’.