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Last updated December, 2017. note: we link to our free guide to mindfulness and meditation at the end of this article (no email required).  That title is a little misleading in the sense that you don't train your mind. Instead, you train yourself. Your mind will do what it does. Your job is to cultivate awareness - to develop the skill of noticing it 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:
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 dictates automatic actions and reactions to thoughts, emotions, urges, and other mental noise. This is training yourself. 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. We have a free guide to mindfulness and meditation that’s been shared over half a million times. You don’t need to register or provide any information - just go read it. < A request: This is an ad-free (and, pop-up free) site. If what we write helps you, please share it by copying the URL https://www.thetadprinciple.com/tad-blog/training-or-mastering-your-mind and posting it to social media (or, email it to a friend!). Thank you! Comments are closed.
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