As I say in every podcast, “It’s time to free your mind.” To reach the peak of life potential, the ultimate summit of our personal and professional purpose, flourishing, flow state, and well-being, you eventually discover that we must master our own minds.
Mastering Your Mind
Mindfulness is about being aware of what is happening in the present, moment-by-moment, without making judgements about what we notice. I learned this early in my spiritual journey. Mindfulness transcends religious traditions. Meditation and mindfuness is even being practiced by atheists like Sam Harris and others today.
What does it mean to cultivate a non-judgemental attitude? Making judgements about our own experiences can often lead us to becoming quite distressed, anxious, or depressed.
For example, thoughts like “this is horrible” and “I can’t take any more” are both judgements associated with distress. In those moments, we are actually choosing, with our own thoughts, to create a negative reality by passing a judgement which is often, not reality at all. This is where we need to turn around our own thinking to free our mind from the prisons and shackles we create, and by doing so, a new reality suddenly appears which leads us toward realising more of of what we are truly capable of.
Practising mindfulness to free our mind and reach our potential teaches us to accept more of our experience without judging it. This has been shown to help people live more fulfilling lives.
Our minds can be focused on things in the past, present or future. We often find ourselves ruminating about events that have already happened, or worrying about things that could happen. These habits of thought are often distressing. By our judgements of ourself, others, and situations, we create a narrative and reality that is only one of many paths of potentiality. Negative judgements of life events always leads away from the path to the summit of our potential.
Don’t Believe Everything You Think
As Byron Katie says, “Don’t believe every thing you think. The world is what you believe it to be, and it changes as you change.” We must free our mind to do this.
Some helpful quotes about mindfulness:
“If you let cloudy water settle, it will become clear. If you let your upset mind settle, your course will also become clear”
“Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally”
“The non-judgemental observation of the ongoing stream of internal and external stimuli as they arise”
“Keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality”
“Mindfulness is simply the knack of noticing without comment whatever is happening in your present experience”
-Kevin Baker
Author, “The Peak of Potential”