The Making of a Mind Master

a silhouette of a bird flying over a palm tree.

In his bestselling book, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, author Robin Sharma wisely states: “The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.” The simple wisdom of these words speaks to the heart of the human experience, for to be human is to be in constant thought. It is to live inside an endless loop of inner chitter chatter about everything that is, was, and ever could be. Without the light of our awareness and the spirit of our conscious intention, we are bound to be the servants of our minds. And most of us know what it feels like to live this way, at the mercy of our own thoughts, consumed by the contents of our minds. But through subtle shifts in attention and the implementation of simple practices, we can enter a new relationship with our minds, becoming their masters and wielding their greatest potential.

Our minds are remarkably powerful, and they’re particularly good at three specific things: storytelling, meaning making, and time traveling. As a therapist and coach, I know all too well how heavily these functions of mind can impact people’s lives. When the mind is the master, the stories it tells, the meanings it makes, and the places it goes can create tremendous suffering. But I also know that while these activities of the mind can be enslaving, they can also serve as the doorways for liberation; they present an opportunity to become the mind’s master.

As storytelling machines, our minds run an ongoing narrative of everything that happens in our lives. The stories they tell us are captivating and distracting, holding our attention and heavily influencing our experience. Our minds can keep us from connecting with the present moment, because instead of attending to what’s happening in that moment, we’re caught up in the stories they tell us—either about what’s happening, or about something else altogether. It’s easy to feel disconnected when the mind is in control; while life unfolds right in front of us, our stories keep us trapped and unable to make contact.

To move from servitude to mastery, we must heighten our awareness of the mind’s propensity for storytelling. Through the development of practices like mindfulness and meditation, we can learn to notice when the stories in our minds are pulling us away from the present moment. The quicker we notice, the quicker and more effectively we can bring our attention back to our experience in the here-and-now. Becoming the master in this way means being more grounded, connected, and present to life.

Our minds are not only great at storytelling, they’re also pretty magnificent meaning-making machines. They interpret everything, filtering information through our personal biases and beliefs, and influencing how we make sense of the world. When we are servants to our minds, the meanings they make can blind and constrict us, keeping us stuck and limiting our perspective. We hold these interpretations—the meaning our minds generate about our experiences—as truths, and we get completely caught up in them. A great example of how this operates is a former client of mine, who came to me after suffering for 30 years from a sense of unworthiness. He shared with me that when he was in the 3rd grade, a couple of boys in his class teased him about his haircut, and a few other kids within earshot laughed along with them. The meaning my client made of that experience was that he was an “unlovable reject,” and he carried that with him throughout the rest of his life, until the point that we met. This example is as common as it is painful; we all know what it’s like to believe what our minds make up about some event or experience, and we know how limiting and damaging that can be.

The shift from servitude to mastery with respect to meaning-making comes with identifying our core beliefs and recognizing the things our minds make up about what we encounter in life. Therapy and coaching are particularly effective ways to develop mind mastery in this area. The more aware we are of the interpretations our minds create—and, most importantly, the ways in which those interpretations affect us—the more we can distinguish the facts from the interpretations, and the less we suffer.

As I mentioned before, our minds are highly sophisticated time-travel machines. At any given moment, we can travel to the near or distant past, the anticipated or imagined future. And while this is, no doubt, a pretty cool thing, it can also get pretty ugly. Because the reality is, our minds let us travel to the past and future, but we have absolutely no control over either one of them. The past is gone, and the future hasn’t happened yet, so dwelling in either one can be an exercise in suffering. When the mind is the master, its time-traveling adventures can cause depression, by dwelling on what’s already happened, and anxiety, by agonizing about what could happen. And that’s not to mention the ways in which all that time-hopping robs us of our ability to be in the present, where life is happening. Many of my clients speak to me about how terrible it can feel when their minds take control and zap them back into an ugly past or zoom them forward into an uncertain future. There’s a reason the Buddha taught so much about being in the present moment; he was wise to the reality that the mind likes to travel, and when it takes us with it, we’re liable to suffer.

To become a master of the mind’s time-traveling nature is to acknowledge that there are some undeniable upsides to this capability. The past is full of rich material; it contains our memories, the lessons we’ve learned, and valuable information that can guide us through life. Thinking about the future can also be advantageous, as we can plan, get excited about upcoming events, and anticipate things on the horizon in order to prepare for them effectively. When we learn how to travel to the past and future with intention and be in the driver’s seat for the voyage, we can use this function of our minds to its greatest capacity and avoiding unnecessary suffering.

The human mind is magnificent. As John Milton so aptly put it, it can “make a heaven of hell, a heal of heaven.” To master the mind is to master life, so why not start moving toward mastery right here and now? As always, I wish you peace and love and am here to keep you company on your journey however it supports you.

Calling Bull***t On Your Beliefs

The woman rummaging through clothes next to me at the department store is a judgmental snob. The family that lives next door to me, whose conversations I can sometimes overhear, is totally dysfunctional.  Some of my friends have completely childish and immature ways of dealing with life. My boss is too demanding; she doesn’t appreciate anything I do.

People are out to get to me.

The future is uncertain.

The world is a terrifying place.

Aside from the particularities, does any of what you just read sound familiar? I would bet that, to some degree, it does. And the reason I’m willing to bet so is because if you’re reading this, you have a human brain, and the human brain is—among many things—a judging instrument. It takes in information from the outside world and makes assessments. It generates assumptions and creates distinctions, which is what helps determine what each of us thinks, feels, and does in response to the world around us. This is generally a good thing. If not for our brain’s capacity to process information, we’d have no way of making sense of anything or making our way through the world.

But here’s the tricky part: Our brains don’t process things in a neutral way. What we perceive and interpret depends on the beliefs we have in place. You know the expression “Seeing is believing”? Well, it’s really a lot more like “Believing is seeing.” Whatever we believe about ourselves, other people, the world, and life in general shapes what we see. And it gets trickier. According to the psychological principle of confirmation bias, we are skewed to notice things that confirm our beliefs and ignore things that contradict them.

Have I lost you? Maybe an example would help. If I believe that all people are rude and unkind, my brain is primed to find examples of this in the world around me. So when I go to the grocery store, I’m going to notice people behaving in rude and unkind ways. If there’s someone acting in a way that contradicts this belief—demonstrating generosity or friendliness, for example—I’m not likely to notice it. Our beliefs have a powerful filtering effect. They assign meaning to everything we encounter and, thus, play a big role in determining how we experience life.

It’s easy for us to fall into the delusion that everything we think is real and true, because our thoughts are always entering our minds and distracting us. In essence, they make up the soundtrack of our lives. There’s a ceaseless stream of chitter chatter carrying on throughout our waking moments, and if we aren’t careful, we can get swept under by it. Once that’s happened, we have difficulty seeing things clearly. We lose perspective.

There’s a powerful quote attributed to the late, great writer Anais Nin that goes like this: “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.” With those words she perfectly summed up the way beliefs work: They influence us to see the world in particular ways. We become convinced that the way we see it is the only way to see it, and because of that, we set ourselves up for unnecessary suffering.

Since our beliefs play such an important role in shaping our reality, it helps for us to be mindful of what we’re going around believing. And, more importantly, it’s a good idea to hold those beliefs up to the light, so to speak, and question how much they’re serving us. One way that I’ve seen this manifest particularly powerfully is with a common belief of unworthiness that has plagued many of my clients throughout their lives. Each of their beliefs about this looks a little different, but the basic idea is, “I am only worthy if I’m ­_______ enough.” That blank can be filled in with anything from thin to powerful to wealthy to approved of by others, and the list goes on. Until that core belief is addressed, it negatively impacts my clients’ lives, limiting their potential and hampering their ability to live as they desire. As I mentioned before, our beliefs are the birthplace of our thoughts, feelings, and actions; whatever we believe will influence what we perceive, which will ultimately determine how we experience and respond to the situations that arise in our lives. If we want to change our experience in the world—if we want to change the world, period—we must begin by exploring and challenging our own beliefs.

The reason I titled this post “Calling Bull***t On Your Beliefs” is because one of the cornerstones of personal growth and transformation is a willingness to question and replace irrational, unhelpful beliefs. Most of the beliefs we carry around have been in place for most of our lives; we formed them in early childhood based on the things we were taught and picked up on from scanning our environment and observing our most significant attachment figures. We came about our beliefs honestly, and at one time, we relied on them to give our lives a sense of order and predictability. But our beliefs can become a source of suffering if we don’t keep them in check.

Please understand that I’m not saying all beliefs are unhelpful and invalid. Believing that touching a hot stove will burn you is a perfectly rational and adaptive belief. There’s evidence to support it, and holding on to it will help keep you safe. But other beliefs—like “I’m unlovable” or “People can’t be trusted”—serve a far less adaptive purpose. It’s those beliefs—the ones that trigger unhelpful thoughts, unpleasant emotions, and undesirable actions—that require some challenging. If you can call bull***t on beliefs like those, you’ll significantly improve the way you feel about yourself, other people, the future, and the world at large.

The best way to start questioning and discarding unhelpful beliefs is to recognize when you’ve gotten caught up in a stream of negative thoughts. If you’re paying close enough attention, you’ll be able to identify the thoughts that are stemming directly from irrational beliefs. Once you’ve recognized the belief-based thought (e.g., “Everyone rejects me;” “I’m stupid;” “Things are never going to get better;” “The world is a scary place”), ask yourself the following questions:

  1. What is the evidence to support that this is true?
  2. Have I ever experienced anything at all that would suggest it isn’t true?
  3. How does it help me to continue believing this?
  4. How does it harm me to continue believing this?
  5. Who would I be if I no longer held on to this belief?
  6. If I were to let go of this belief, if only for right now, what might become possible?

Do you want to live a freer, more content life? Do you want to experience more self-esteem and a greater sense of connection to the people around you? Why not start now? Stop believing the bull***t. Question everything. Release your certainties. Shake off the shackles of your self-limiting beliefs, and watch yourself, your world, your life transform before your very eyes.