Quieting Our Minds When Life Becomes Challenging

This is a guest post by Antonia Lyons.

I have been quiet for a couple of weeks, mainly due to a mysterious illness while away on vacation in Italy which forced me to stop and reconsider a couple of things in my life.

While this would have normally thrown me into a state, I instead found myself watching my week evolving as if I were enjoying a play at the theatre.

I sensed freedom in my ability to witness the events that came up during my holiday with some sort of detachment. Nothing was going to change; I was stuck in a bed and needed to be so because my body was obviously exhausted.

So I took this time to pause and re-think the direction my life had recently taken.

I had to admit that I got trapped in an unhealthy pattern of wanting to control life as much as I can.

Isn’t it funny how even those in my field will from time to time succumb to the attempts of their mind to try and manipulate reality so to make it  ok?

I thought I knew better, and I obviously didn’t.

But strangely enough I didn’t see this to be problem. While I’d normally panic, this time I just shrugged and thought “Oh dear, here we go again, I’ve been trying to manipulate life!”

Trouble is we all do that, to an extent.

We all try to manipulate circumstances to feel good.

It’s what our mind does, it’s its job. It doesn’t really do it well, but it’s what our mind is programmed to do. Our  mind is programmed to take us back to a state of balance whenever life gets challenging, but it does so based on data that it’s been storing since our birth.

So while we try and control things outside of us based on whatever our mind is telling us, we drive ourselves to exhaustion because not only we will never be able to control life from happening but we will also react to our feelings about what’s happening.

Pretty messy, huh?

So if me getting ill while on holiday may look like the worst of luck, it was actually a very good thing.

It gave me the chance to realise that no matter my studies and my job, I still believe my mind. I believe it so much in fact, that I’m always doing what it says even when it’s apparent it’s all lies.

So here I am, on my way back to health, knowing I had this a long time coming.

This is my time to really ask myself the question I have been dreading “am I or am I not going to let my mind run my life?”

Because I could spend hours meditating my life away or throw myself in all sorts of techniques to keep my mind at bay, but I know only too well that it will never ever work.

Until I make the decision in my heart that I can truly be ok with whatever my mind wants to think and that I am not my mind, I will spend my life trying to control a game I cannot control. Life will always happen, the sun will always come up and go down, people will be born and will die, one moment I’ll feel happy and next I’ll be in tears: all of this will happen regardless of what I do or think.

This is the game of life, and I’m here, same as everybody else, playing it the best I can.