The Power of a Quiet Mind
In today's article, I'm going to show you the first steps to gaining the power of a quiet mind.
Please read on, and more importantly, apply what you learn.
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There is a room so quiet that after you enter it and the door is closed, you can hear the normally silent activities of the body with a deafening roar.
You hear the rush of blood through your veins..
Your in breath and out breath are like waves crashing on the shore.
Your heart beats like bongo drums placed inside your ears.
This room is located in Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis and is called an anechoic chamber.
This quiet room absorbs 99.9% of all sound waves.
What you hear is experienced with such intensity that no one has lasted more than 45 minutes in the chamber.
What this shows is that in extreme quiet, you can notice aspects of reality that you normally would not.
And when you have a quiet mind, something similar happens.
You notice reality because the mind's noisy chatter about how things are is reduced.
The quiet mind doesn't react with automatic negativity to events.
The quiet mind feels free.
Free of fear, free of anger, free of stress, free to enjoy taking action.
And you can have a quiet mind when you learn some basic principles and practices.
I'm going to be showing you:
- The hidden cause of your struggles, strain and stuckness
- The five freedoms that come with having a quiet mind
- A 5-step process you can use right now to dissolve a negative feeling
I'm also going to give you a sense of what happens when real people apply this method to their own lives so you can see how it may affect yours.
1. The hidden cause of our struggle, strain and stuckness
So what causes our struggles?
Why do we have negative feelings?
Why can't we just set them aside and move on?
It's because of meaning we make in the moment. Something I call occurrings. I use the word "occurring" because I am talking about how events occur to you.
For example, if someone close to you yells at you, you may feel fear, or anger or a combination of emotions.
In that moment your mind may have decided that the yelling will result in something bad happening to you, which produces fear, or that the person is disrespecting you, which causes anger.
It's those occurrings that cause the emotions, not the events themselves.
But why are we often unable to get rid of our negative feelings?
It's because living through the lense of our occurrings is like getting lost in the pages of a book.
Your mind takes the words as reality … and you may even forget you're reading.
The story becomes your reality for a few moments.
The same is true when our minds create occurrings.
We forget we are making meaning. Our occurrings seem to us to be the truth, to be part of the events.
However, it's possible to step back and notice your mind has created a meaning for events.
You can notice that the words in your mind are different than the reality in front of you. When that happens the meaning just dissolves into thin air … and so do the emotions.
And as you do this process over and over again, stepping back and noticing becomes easier and easier.
Eventually you stop giving meaning to most events.
The few events you do give meaning to dissolve pretty much automatically, with little effort.
You've gained a quiet mind.
Now later in this article, I'm going to show you the exact steps you can take to dissolve a negative feeling you may be experiencing right now or have experienced recently.
But first, I'd like to tell you about the five freedoms that come with having a quiet mind.
2. The Five Freedoms that come with having a quiet mind
The five freedoms of having a quiet mind are based on the experiences of over 300 students who've taken my course. They show what's possible for all of us to achieve.
Freedom from fear
When your mind becomes quieter, you approach situations that used to be scary with less fear.
When your mind gets really quiet, in fact totally silent, there may be no fear at all.
Just imagine what you could do with your life if you no longer experienced any fear.
I know, that's hard to imagine. But if you could eliminate fear from your life–and you can, what amazing things would you accomplish?
Freedom from anger and annoyances
A noisy mind can get annoyed or angry about so many things.
I've had students tell me that they were experiencing road rage regularly, getting upset at spouses who were messy, getting annoyed at coworkers.
But once they gained a quiet mind as a result of dissolving occurrings, these issues vanished.
Freedom from self-criticism
A noisy mind can often be critical of others or itself.
It will find things wrong with what you do.
It will tell you that you don't have what it takes.
It will make you feel guilty over little things.
But my students tell me that the critical voice that plagued them all of their lives, just goes away. They can now do what they want without fear of judgement from their own mind.
Just silence… Even if they fail.
Freedom to take action
A noisy mind avoids challenges.
It tries to avoid failure.
When you have a quiet mind, you don't label events as failures.
You just see events and the results of what you do without any added meaning, so you have no fear of taking action.
And when you do take action, action comes without strain or struggle.
When you do something, you … well … to borrow a phrase … just do it.
And finally …
Freedom to relate to the real person and not our concepts about a person
A noisy mind judges others and holds these judgements as the truth.
It gets angry at others who do things to bother it.
They should know better right?
When you have a quiet mind you see only the person and the behavior.
You haven't forgotten the past but you live in the present and deal with the person in this moment.
As a result, you have fewer conflicts with others. You can relate to others with greater ease even if they have different views or behave in ways that are not the way you wish they would behave.
3. How to dissolve negative feelings
To make these ideas real, I'm going to show you the Lefkoe Freedom Process for dissolving emotions and I'm going to give you the opportunity to try it yourself on a problem of your own.
Here are the basic steps:
- Notice a negative feeling.
- Identify the event that happens BEFORE the feeling.
- Discover the meaning that produces the feeling.
- Distinguish between the event and the meaning you added to the event – notice the meaning is in your mind and is not really part of the event.
- Evaluate your results: did the feeling go away? If you make a clear distinction between the event and the occurring, the occurring will dissolve and the feeling will disappear.
Here's an example of how one student named Mario used these steps.
First, Mario noticed he was feeling anxiety.
Second, he realized that his boss yelling at him came before the anxiety
Third, he noticed that the meaning he gave to these events was "She's out to get me. I'm not being treated fairly." The anxiety he felt was the result of this meaning.
Fourth, he noticed the meaning he created was not part of the reality, which was only:
"All that's actually happening is that she's upset and she's giving me information about what she sees as a problem."
Fifth, he noticed that his occurring dissolved and the anxiety disappeared.
Here's what happened then, in Mario's own words:
Now when my boss yells at me I don't think, 'Oh no, I'll have to fight her.' That doesn't happen anymore. So I am much calmer at work. I don't waste my time anymore thinking about the worst case scenario that could happen. Maybe I could even prepare for some of those but I focus on what's actually happening. I don't waste my time with the negative stories and everything like that. So things move along much faster.
Dissolving his occurring whenever his boss yelled at him changed a stressful work environment into one that's more peaceful and calm… at least for Mario.
Avoiding the two "non-starters" that could hold you back
Now there are a couple of show-stoppers that can prevent you from learning this material.
One is thinking:
"My situation is so bad that I can't possibly let go of the meaning"–so you never even try to dissolve the meaning.
This occurring can show up if you have been in a pretty terrible situation or are still living in one.
So I can understand why it could seem to some that dissolving meaning can't help, or that it might not even be possible to dissolve the meanings causing negative feelings.
But what if it is possible?
What if you could let go of the meaning and you missed out on seeing this possibility because you never tried it?
Maybe you would continue to suffer when you don't have to.
So my suggestion: Give it a shot.
The other is "It didn't work the first time I tried it, so it will never work."
If you try something on your own and it doesn't work the first few times, it's easy to conclude that maybe it works for others and not for me.
But it's also possible that you can't yet do it on your own but that doesn't mean you would never be able to do it.
So if it doesn't work for you the first time, try again on some different topics. See if you can notice what makes it work sometimes and not at other times.
In upcoming articles, I'll be providing more exercises that can dissolve your meanings. Please try ALL of them as I'm certain at least one of them will work for you.
Summary
The hidden cause of our struggle, strain and stuckness are meanings our minds make up in the moment.
When you learn to dissolve those meanings, you can eliminate fear, anger, self-criticism, judgements of others and are free to take action without feeling resistance.
You can dissolve negative feelings using the following five steps:
- Notice a negative feeling.
- Identify the event that happens BEFORE the feeling.
- Discover the meaning that produces the feeling.
- Distinguish between the event and the meaning you added to the event – notice the meaning is in your mind and is not really part of the event.
- Evaluate your results: did the feeling go away? If you make a clear distinction between the event and the occurring, the occurring will dissolve and the feeling will disappear.
In that quiet room in Minneapolis, experiments have been done with sound.
One was to fire a gun and notice what happens.
Since your heartbeat and breathing are experienced as loud, you might imagine that a gunshot would be even louder … but it's not.
It makes a very small sound in the chamber that lasts a fraction of a second.
Why?
Because most of a gun's sound comes from the echoes it makes and the anechoic chamber absorbs the sound so well that there is no echo.
When you have a quiet mind, there will still be events that can provide some pain. But when you experience them, the pain will last for a short time and then disappear quickly.
Just like a gunshot in that room in Minneapolis.
