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Training (or mastering) your mind.

7/25/2014

 
Last updated October, 2018.

​note: we link to our free guide to mindfulness and meditation at the bottom of the page (no email required).
Training your mind
That title is a little misleading in the sense that you don't train your mind. 

Instead, you train your attention.

Your mind will do what it does. Your job is to strengthen awareness of it - to develop the skill of noticing it all without getting caught up in it.

It's challenging, because we all get caught up in analyzing the content of our minds - we label, judge, and try to figure out why thoughts and emotions exist:
  • "What has happened in my past to cause me to think/feel this way?"
  • "Why does that story keep playing through my head?"
  • "Why is my thinking so negative? Why can't I just think positive?"

But, it's not the content that matters. What matters is you get wrapped up in the content instead of moving your attention away from it. 

If you let those thoughts, emotions, and urges be as they are, independent from your and your attention, they will pass. They will come back, of course! But then they will pass again.

If you practice moving your attention away over and over, you begin reversing a lifetime of conditioning that keeps you following your mind and habitually acting with desire for - or aversion towards - thoughts, emotions, urges, and the other things that arise in awareness.

This is training your attention. It's not controlling your thoughts. It's not forcing yourself to think positive. It's learning to notice your compulsive mind and it's non-stop activity without getting caught up in it. 

And, it's choosing to move your attention away from it.

Stop dealing with the symptoms.

Stress, anxiety, self-confidence issues, the inability to stop bad habits, problems with sleep and focus, and on and on and on.

These and the other things we struggle with every day are only symptoms. 

The good news is, they all share the same root cause. The bad news is, if you don't address that root cause, the symptoms will keep coming back no matter what you do.

That's why we wrote "An owner's guide to the mind." For almost 20 years, people have been using it to address the root cause of their daily struggles.

Click here to view the contents and learn more.​

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