Developing a success mindset starts with managing your mind: it is an idea that’s gaining traction now. I learnt about it in the 90s when I started practising mindfulness meditation. Since then, it’s become a way of life and I do it twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, just like I brush my teeth.
Meditation and mind management go hand in glove. Through the former, you become aware of millions of thoughts crafted in your mind each day. It is like getting the key to a locker you didn’t know existed. Once you watch your thoughts without judging them, you allow them to flow freely.
Your mind is flooded with thoughts around past happenings and future worries. Your mental framework makes you absent in the now. Meditation trains you to accept both the positive and negative, to breathe in the moment. I was taking a yoga class, when a student asked, “What is sin? What is sinful?” Sin is when you don’t use your mind to its fullest. It is then you are a sinner.
While meditating is an excellent way to feel the power of the moment, choosing positive thoughts over negative is a path-breaker in getting productive. Being aware about directing the mind to positive encourages you to step out of daydreaming that most of us are accustomed to without even knowing. It ends up playing havoc with our attention span, emotions, decisions—a perfect stop from living our dreams. Instead of maximising our potential, it degrades and restricts the possibilities, as our perceptions run through a cloud of personal and environmental ignorance.
Mindfulness meditation increases the resilience in people, and specifically to uncomfortable emotions which, in turn, has them process negative information more objectively. Normally we have
a tendency to block certain information, like an investment that is no longer worthwhile or a friend who betrayed our trust. The reason is that even just thinking about such information triggers worry, fear and defeat. Neuroscience calls it ‘cognitive bias’.
Opening your mind to accept the negative and the positive upgrades your decision-making, which helps you handle a bad investment or a breakup. “When pleasure is sleeping in your bed, pain is resting on the piano waiting for its turn,” said Kahlil Gibran. Both pain and pleasure are fleeting, like a passing breeze that will never come back. When in a rough patch, remind yourself: This too will pass. Move on. Do not waste your energy reacting to it.
Anu Aggarwal
Actor, speaker, yogi and author
Instagram: @anusualanu