Our busy busy lives
You are at the meeting with Paul but you suddenly have a tought: you haven’t sent that document to Julia. You are jumping to your bus to home and remembering you didn’t talk to James about that project changes. You are going to sleep and thinking about next performance evaluation: what if I don’t get promoted?
Sounds familiar? Is it stressful, isn’t it? You go to bed and you can’t relax, you wake up in the morning already tired and stressed out. You are probably thinking this is normal, it’s common and from one hand you’re right…
The monkey-mind
Buddhist calls this way of working of our mind Kapicitta and compares it to a monkey. Like a monkey jumping from tree to tree, our mind continuously jumps from tought to tought. We have 50.000 thousand toughts per day and most of all are on the same topics: fears about what’s coming, judgement about what has been. This mode of operation belongs to our more ancient side of the brain. Prehistoric people used fear to escape from dangers regularly. And that was productive because they actually were at risk of death. But how about us? Are we in real danger because we haven’t sent that document? Of course not, we just need a way to make more silent, or at least friendly the monkey in our mind.
Why meditate
The first step is being aware about this mechanism. We cannot fight the monkey in our mind but we can try an useful way to live together. After years of meditation, can be very easy to relax the monkey in our head but at the beginning, if we expect not to have any tought that could be frustrating. What to do then? Exactly like a real monkey: what would you do if you had to ask for attention and to make it quite from its restless activity? You probably will offer a banana. And you are right, this is something that is going to work. If you are familiar with real monkeys, you will observe the monkey will stop jumping, will look at the banana and will eat it. What have you done? What’s the magic? You just gave to the monkey something to focus on. And we can do exactly the same with the monkey in our head. We can offer something to focus on during meditation. That’s why I suggest to begin meditate with a body scan meditation. This is an easy way to focus on breaths, sensations of your body and feeling “at home”. Your body is your home and connecting with it will calm your mind and you will let you experiment a sensation of calm and peace, a connection with the deepest part of yourself: the stillness below the chaos.
If you want to begin the journey in familiarizing with your monkey mind you can join the facebook group Mindful living with Giulia Imbastoni Coach. You will find tips about how to live in the “here and now”, guided recorded meditations and you can share experiences with other people who are in the same journey for a more mindful living. If reading the article and was useful, even for a tiny 1%, please let me know in comments!