‘Your own thinking mind is not your friend, get rid of him.’
‘The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.’
I went clothes shopping in Cambridge with some reluctance - its exhausting.
Stop. There it is. A lie. An erroneous thought. Shopping in Cambridge is not exhausting - I believe in the thought it is because I make it exhausting. Shopping in Cambridge is not exhausting in itself. Logical fact. This is mindfulness born from meditation practice.
The truth is I only spotted this wrong thought far too late when I looked back in hindsight on a day in Cambridge which caused me so much anxiety, burnout and insomnia. All born from believing one wrong thought. I give myself credit for noticing exactly how I got in such a mess.
Yoga as a prescription - tell me what you are suffering from and I’ll tell you how yoga can help. And its very often not the poses you need, although they always help. The ancient tradition of yoga offers a vast toolkit for how to better deal with this business of living, from postures to ayurveda medicine, from breath-work to philosophy, from diet to meditation techniques.
And what is it people are suffering from now? Problems of the mind - anxiety, burnout, insomnia. You can deal with these problems via the mind and the body but the source of so many of our problems nowadays is believing our wrong thoughts.
Why are you anxious? Because you’re believing in your untrue thoughts. How did we get to burnout when the next person didn’t? Because of the way we think about work and rest. Why can’t we sleep? Because our mind is too loud and we can’t think what needs to be done, this hopelessness leading to more anxiety.
Meditation practice teaches you the nature of your mind so that it doesn’t so often sabotage you. Meditation helps us see there are only two ways our mind works - for us or against us. If we believe we are the mind, then we also believe the mind when its working against us. This is a grave mistake. There is a ruinous, treacherous side to your mind - you know, the voice inside which says you’re useless/fat/lazy/stupid/greedy/broken/depressed/unlovable or they/she/he/it is all those things. When you believe in this side of your mind, YOU are making yourself all those things quite literally by believing them. It’s a very dangerous game and is what we refer to when we say ‘he is his own worst enemy.’
Simply put, meditation practice helps you notice your mind and what it is up to. We learn to proceed when it is working for us, and ignore it when it is not. That takes some effort and can only be done if you noticed it was working against you in the first place, as I failed to do in Cambridge. Through meditation we learn to make our minds work for us , refusing to remain enslaved by it for a moment longer.
Watch this intro to meditation by Jonathan Hinde:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQgnhOEruiQ&t=561s&ab_channel=JonathanHinde
