Quieten your noisy mind
Video (0:04:05) recorded by Martin Palethorpe.
Martin Palethorpe talks about the noisy mind, and gives some insightful tips as to what you can do about it.
"Having a noisy mind prevents you from being as effective as you'd probably like to be.
And what do I mean when I say "noisy mind"? I mean when there's mind chatter going on, when there's lots of thought going on inside your head. And the thought could be just because you've got so many balls in the air and you're just juggling a whole number of different things.
The noise could be that you're worried about something, so you're over-analysing it, playing back in your mind or waking up in the middle of the night thinking about something. When there's so much going on that it prevents you from being effective, it prevents you from thinking as clearly as you'd like to. The first point I'd like to talk about is about the nature of thought.
So, you're having 70,000 of these a day, 70,000 thoughts a day, and they're coming in and they're creating your experience in every moment, and you live within the thoughts and the experience like it's real.
But, of course, we know that thought's not the truth. Let's think of an example where you're presenting, and you see someone looking a certain way, and you know that they don't like what you've said. You're convinced of it. And what it does is it shuts you down. It totally has you operate then, as a result of it, in a constrained way.
And then, guess what? A couple of hours later, you talk to that person, you find out that your thinking had hoodwinked you. It had you have an experience that was entirely wrong, and he didn't think that at any point at all.
So, I'm pointing to the nature of thought, and what it does to us, and how it constrains us, and it takes us and hoodwinks us, and prevents us from being as powerful as we could in any moment, and it creates the noise in our head. Now, the point is that the more you understand what thought is doing, and that it's simply neurological activity going on in your brain, the less you can be gripped by it.
There's a second point that I'd like to make. There's a big misunderstanding that we all operate within at the moment. So, most of society operates like the outside world is creating the feeling inside us. So, if my boss shouts at me, I feel upset. If it's raining outside, I feel frustrated. If my favourite sports team win their match, I feel happy. And it looks like those things are creating the feeling inside me, but I'm suggesting to you that's entirely a misunderstanding. How can something else outside of me actually physiologically create the feeling inside me? Doesn't work that way.
The only thing that's creating my feeling and my experience in any moment is my thought. So, this thought's coming along and creating the experience, not something outside of me. Well, when I realise thought and what it's doing, and I realise it's internally created, not coming from the outside, I can be less focused on the outside and more able to access the peace, i.e. less noise, inside.”
