How To Create A Peaceful Mind
Bruce Lee once said that the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness. The same is true for our minds. An empty mind is full of peace.
While it may not always be practical or even consistently achievable to have a completely empty mind, thankfully, it is not necessary for peace.
A perspective that has helped me better understand a state of no-mind is that it is not necessarily a state of no thought but a state of unattachment to the thoughts within our minds.
In other words, we may be having thoughts, but we’re not thinking about the thoughts we’re having. We’re just allowing them to come and go without needing to engage with them.
When we have a “friction-free” experience with thoughts entering and leaving our minds without rumination, that is peace.
A metaphor to help crystalize this concept is to imagine as if the neural pathways in your brain are highways and the thoughts in your mind are like cars on it. Traffic happens when any car stops long enough for the car behind it to be forced to stop. No one likes traffic, and it usually creates frustration.
Each time you engage with a “negative” thought and ruminate on it, it is like forcing a car to stop in the middle of the highway so you can talk to it. If you engage with this thought long enough, it will create traffic, and frustration follows.
The key is to engage with as few of these “negative” thoughts as possible. It may not be possible to never engage with these thoughts, but we can shorten the time we spend ruminating on them.
A happy highway is one where there is minimal traffic and cars are able to smoothly get on and off. The same is true for our minds. A happy mind is one where thoughts can freely flow in and out without them getting “stuck” by traffic we create through rumination.
Many of these thoughts just pop up without our own conscious effort, and that’s okay. We can’t always control what thoughts come up, but we can always let them go.
There is never a car that stays on the highway forever. There is never a thought that stays in our minds forever. Everything in our minds passes if we let it.
Let go to let peace in.
With All My Love,
Joseph
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