How to Turn Your Mind from an Enemy to an Ally

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled,

and if you spend your whole life unravelling it,

don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying

that mystery because I want to be a human being.”

Each of us occupies two worlds. There is

the outer world of people, places and things,

and there is the inner world of our thoughts, feelings,

sensations and intuitions.

The outer world we share with others,

while our inner world is a place where we stand alone.

These two worlds also differ in the skills

needed for their navigation. We can be a great success

in the external world and all the while be wracked by immense

inner suffering. On the other hand, the world

may be crumbling around us, but if we have learned to conquer

our psyche we can still exist in relative peace.

In our day, where success is primarily measured by

external metrics, most of us devote more energy

to conquering the world outside of us

than we do to mastering the world within.

But this choice can come with great costs,

for our inner world is the one place from which

escape is impossible and so the quality of our life is

always contingent on the state of our psyche. In this

video we are going to provide a guide for achieving a more

harmonious relationship to this world within

“Not everything that is faced

can be changed,

but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

The first step toward attaining a greater mastery of our

inner world is to stop denying, ignoring or

numbing ourselves to the events of our psyche.

Many people, afraid or ashamed of what they may see if

they take an honest look within, resort to drugs and

alcohol, or other defense mechanisms, to quiet

any psychic conflicts. But the more we seal

ourselves off from our inner world, the more we create a

threat from what should be our greatest ally.

The path to inner harmony always goes through our psychic conflicts

as denial will only cause such conflicts to

intensify. If shame is preventing us from

admitting to our psychological problems, then it can be

helpful to realize that psychological discord is far more the

norm, than the exception and that inner demons

are but an inevitable part of what it means to be human.

As we begin this process of opening up to our inner world,

we may be frightened by what we discover.

For the longer we have spent denying what is going on within

the less comfortable we will be with the strange thoughts and

disturbing emotions that may rise to the fore.

We may even wonder if the state of our psyche is

in such disarray that a descent into madness is

possible. The psychologist Carl Jung noticed that

many of his patients had this very concern,

but he believed this concern could be tempered when

we recognize that this is but a natural

phase in the process of inner growth

“When a patient begins to feel the inescapable nature of his

inner development,

he may easily be overcome by a panic

fear that he is slipping helplessly into some kind of madness

that he can no longer understand. More than once I

have had to reach for a book on my shelves. . .[to] show my patient his

terrifying fantasy in the form in which it appeared

four hundred years ago.

This has a calming effect, because the patient then sees

that he is not alone in a strange world which nobody understands,

but is part of the great stream of human history,

which has experienced countless times the very things that he

regards as a pathological proof of his craziness.”

Once we are willing to face up to what is taking place

in our psyche, we can then determine what is causing

our inner discord. Are we crippled by anxiety

and self-doubt, are we consumed by hopelessness and

depression, or do intrusive thoughts haunt our every move?

Identifying what is wrong with us is far more

important than answering the question of "why we are the way we are"

Trying to solve the riddle of ‘why’ will often lead us on a

never-ending search that only produces self-pity,

resentment and no clear answers. But if we

answer the question of what exactly is ailing us

then we can focus our attention on devising

strategies to overcome our problems.

The strategies we devise, however, must obey

one overriding criteria – they must

introduce a tangible degree of novelty into our life.

More of the same will only perpetuate our problems and

therefore our goal at this stage is to search

for techniques and tools that change the way we experience

and interact with our inner world.

But what tools will work best for us can

never be known in advance. Far too often people

view psychological ailments exactly as they

do those of the physical body. We all share the same

general structure of the body and so the cure for a broken leg,

an infection, or a virus will require similar steps

for each of us. But in searching for

ways to overcome the conflicts of our inner world,

we need to recognize that while there is a uniformity to our

psyche, there is no unity. For on the one side,

our psyche is sculpted by our human nature and this

produces the collective side of man. But we are

also individuals. No two people share the same environment,

life history, goals, or innate

strengths and weaknesses, and this individuality

produces a unique configuration to the terrain of our inner world

and necessitates an idiosyncratic,

trial-and-error approach to the mastery of our psyche.

For as Jung never tired of stating, there is no

one psychology that defines us all, nor is there

one set of psychological techniques

that will be universally effective.

“To speak of a science of individual psychology

is already a contradiction in terms.

It is only the collective element in the psychology of an individual

that constitutes an object for science;

for the individual is by definition something unique

that cannot be compared with anything else.

A psychologist who professes a “scientific”

individual psychology is simply denying

individual psychology. He exposes his

individual psychology to the legitimate

suspicion of being merely his own psychology.

The psychology of every individual would need its own manual,

for the general manual can deal only with collective psychology.”

Richard Bach echoed Jung’s sentiment when he said that if

ever there were a manual written for “advanced souls”

t would have to end with the following words:

“Everything in this book may be wrong.”

We can turn to people for advice and use the tools they have devised,

but what will work best for our current situation

is for us to discover.

If we try a technique that others have used with great success and it does little to help us,

we should not take this as a sign that we are incurable,

it just means we need a different tool to escape from

the chasm of our mind into which we have fallen.

If we really desire to attain a level of mastery

over our psyche we should experiment with techniques

that work on all three of the main forms of human experience:

our behaviours, our thoughts, and our emotions:

“Behaviourists have favoured behaviour as the primary force in human experience

and argued that changes in motor activity

produce changes in attitudes and affect.

Cognitivists have rallied around the primary power

of thought and argued that changes in

thinking produce changes in both behaviour and feeling.

The third group – variously called “humanists,”

“experientialists,” and “evocative” therapists – have

asserted the primacy of emotionality in driving the other two realms

Not surprisingly, each group has endorsed a

different emphasis in psychological services.

Behaviorists have emphasized action, cognitivists

have been partial to insight and reflection,

and humanists have encouraged emotional experience and expression.”

Fortunately, there are behavioural, cognitive

and experiential techniques that address all the most

common forms of psychological suffering and so there is

no shortage of tools at our disposal.

We merely need to seek them out, experiment with a variety of them,

and exploit the gains from those techniques that have

a positive effect on our life.

As we begin on this trial-and-error journey there

is a simple shift in our mindset that can help us remain persistent

and this is learning to take life a little less seriously.

For while W.B. Yeats may have claimed that

“We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy,”

it may be truer to say that “We can only begin to live when

we conceive life as Comedy.”

Many people are perpetually weighed down by their fears, anxieties,

doubts and hostilities because they see everything

that happens to them as having life shattering implications.

But with such a mindset we place the weight of the world

on our shoulders and in so doing we are inevitably crushed.

To grant us a lightness to our step that can energize

and embolden us as we strive to overcome our inner demons

and to create a more harmonious state of our inner world,

we should try something different: We should laugh at

the darkness of our thoughts, smile at the moment of a

fear or feel excited at the rush of anxiety.

“As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it”.

This may seem like strange advice but as the poet

Robert Frost wisely remarked:

“If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.”