Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day

by Jay Shetty

It is important to find our significance not from thinking other people have it better but from being the person we want to be.

The process of learning to work with fear isn’t just about doing a few exercises that solve everything, it’s about changing your attitude toward fear, understanding that it has something to offer, then committing to doing the work of identifying and trying to shift out of your pattern of distraction every time it appears. Each of the four distractions from fear—panicking, freezing, running away, and burying—is a different version of a single action, or rather, a single inaction: refusing to accept our fear. So the first step in transforming our fear from a negative to a positive is doing just that.

Try shifting from I am angry to I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel afraid. A simple change, but a profound one because it puts our emotions in their rightful place. Having this perspective calms down our initial reactions and give us the space to examine our fear and the situation around it without judgment.

As my teachers explained, visualizing the mind as a separate entity helps us work on our relationship with it—we can think of the interaction as making a friend or negotiating peace with an enemy.

Within reason, I recommend removing unwanted sensory triggers from your home (or deleting the apps). As you do, visualize yourself removing them from your mind. You can do the same thing when you hit an unwanted mental trigger—a word that you used to hear from a parent, a song from your past. Visualize yourself removing that from your life as you would a physical object. When you remove those mental and physical triggers, you can stop giving in to them. Needless to say, we can never remove all senses and all triggers. Nor would we want to. Our goal is not to silence the mind or even to still it. We want to figure out the meaning of a thought. That’s what helps us let go. But temporarily, while we’re strengthening our relationship with our minds, we can take steps to avoid triggering places and people by adjusting what we see, listen to, read, absorb. From a monk’s perceptive, the greatest power is self-control, to train the mind and energy, to focus on your dharma. Ideally, you can navigate anything that seems tough, challenging, or fun with the same balance and equanimity, without being too excited in pleasure or too depressed by pain.

TRY THIS: WAKE UP THE SUBCONSCIOUS Write down all the noise you hear in your mind on a daily basis. Noise that you know you don’t want to have. This should not be a list of your problems. Instead, write the negative, self-defeating messages your mind is sending you, such as: You’re not good enough. You can’t do this. You don’t have the intelligence to do this. These are the times when the charioteer is asleep at the wheel.

Detachment is not that you own nothing, but that nothing should own you.”

Pride of wealth destroys wealth, pride of strength destroys strength and in the same manner pride of knowledge destroys knowledge.”

TRY THIS: TRANSFORMING EGO Look out for these opportunities to detach from your ego and put forth a thoughtful, productive response. Receiving an insult. Observe your ego, take a broader view of the person’s negativity, and respond to the situation, not the insult. Receiving a compliment or accolades. Take this opportunity to be grateful for the teacher who helped you further this quality. Arguing with a partner. The desire to be right, to win, comes from your ego’s unwillingness to admit weakness. Remember you can be right, or you can move forward. See the other person’s side. Lose the battle. Wait a day and see how it feels. Topping people. When we listen to others, we often one-up them with a story that shows how we have it better or worse. Instead, listen to understand and acknowledge. Be curious. Don’t say anything about yourself.

TRY THIS: KEEP A GRATITUDE JOURNAL Every night, spend five minutes writing down things you are grateful for. If you want to conduct your own experiment, spend the week before you start writing down how much sleep you get. The following week, keep a gratitude journal and in the morning write down how much sleep you got. Any improvement?

People usually think that gratitude is saying thank you, as if this were the most important aspect of it. The most important aspect of the practice of grateful living is trust in life. … To live that way is what I call ‘grateful living’ because then you receive every moment as a gift. … This is when you stop long enough to ask yourself, ‘What’s the opportunity in this moment?’ You look for it and then take advantage of that opportunity. It’s as simple as that.”

My mom would also not be the best person to ask about career moves. Like many mothers, she is most concerned with my well-being: how I’m feeling, whether I’m eating well, if I’m getting enough sleep. She is there with care and consistency, but she’s not going to counsel me on managing my company. I needn’t be angry at my mother for not caring about every aspect of my life. Instead I should save myself the time, energy, attention, and pain, and simply appreciate what she’s offering.

Believe in your worth. You may undervalue yourself in the moment of a breakup, but your value doesn’t depend on someone’s ability to fully appreciate you. If you wrap your identity around the relationship, the pain you feel is that you’ve had to sacrifice that part of your identity. If you expected one person to fulfill all of your needs, then of course there is a vacuum when they’re gone. Now that you’re single, use this time to build a community of people with shared interests whom you want to be in your life forever. Make yourself whole. You need to be someone who makes you happy.

The question to contemplate is: Who is wealthier, the one with money or the one who serves?

If a certain kind of giving makes you happy or benefits you in some way, that’s a great place to start.

There is no universal plan for peace and purpose. The way we get there is by training our minds to focus on how to react, respond, and commit to what we want in life, in our own pace, at our own time. Then, when life swerves, we return to that focus. If you’ve decided to be kind, and someone is rude to you, you know what you want to come back to. If you wake up resolved to focus on your dharma at work, and then your boss gives you an assignment that’s not aligned with your strengths, it’s up to you to find a way to put your dharma to use. When you fail, don’t judge the process and don’t judge yourself. Give yourself latitude to recover and return to a flexible focus on what you want. The world isn’t with you or against you. You create your own reality in every moment.