(00:00): Right after my
spiritual awakening in 2013, I spent four years in solitude, completely alone, immersed in nature,
and meditating for hours every day. And for the most part, my mind felt calm and zen. I
felt invincible. I was happy. I felt like nothing would ever disturb me again. I felt like those
monks that everybody talks about that just sit there all day long and look so peaceful, the ones
that look like they are literally floating through space, floating monks. But then I met a girl and
she became my girlfriend. (00:40):
She lived in the middle of a city and had a four year old son. So off I went,
moving from a peaceful remote village in the north of Portugal all the way to the
capital city of Portugal, Lisbon. And now I was living with my girlfriend, her son,
and a hyperactive dog in the middle of a bustling city. Suddenly my brain wasn't sozan anymore.
With all the stuff going on, I had less time for meditation. And to do the things that monks do
that keep their brains quiet, my mind was getting louder and louder, and I was losing that peaceful
monk brain that I had cultivated with the years of solitude. Wait, don't leave floating monk. Don't
leave. Initially, I tried to do what I had done before. When I lived alone, I sat in meditation,
but I couldn't do it for as long because of all the responsibilities and activities I now had.
(01:29): I used to meditate sometimes for hours in a day,
but now I'd sit in meditation for five minutes and suddenly my stepson would come knocking on
the door, or my crazy dog would wanna sit on my lap. So I quickly realized that the things I used
to do when I lived in solitude weren't gonna work anymore. But was I really supposed to accept that
my monk brain was just gonna be lost forever? Or was there a way that I could have a little bit of
both worlds, a busy life, but mental stillness? Also, to answer this question, I first had to
understand what was happening on a biological level and a spiritual level. The chatter and
endless thoughts that we all have in our brains are coming from what's known as the default mode
network. This network is composed of different areas of your brain that all seem to be active
when we're not focusing on a specific task. (02:17):
It's what Chinese Buddhists call the monkey mind, and what western scientists call the
wandering mind. It's the ability of your brain to tune out everyday life and just wander in
thoughts that have nothing to do with the present moment or with a task that's right in front of
you. Scientist Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert have discovered that almost 50% of our
thoughts every day are not related to anything we're doing in the present moment. And get this,
the more that our minds wander, the more unhappy we are. And here's the million dollar nugget
Meditation decreases activity in the default mode network. This is why all those monks look happy
and like they're floating the hours of meditation decrease the activity of the default mode network.
And so they are more focused and present. Their minds aren't wandering into constant
negative loops or ruminations. They're focused, their present and their minds are very clear.
(03:13): On a spiritual level, when
your mind is too active, a couple of problems come up. The first one is energy polarizes. All right?
So your quantum, your aura, your energy field, the part of you that surrounds your body, that's that
you can't see that quantum part of you. It has many layers. And when your mind is too active,
one of the layers that gets activated most in your aura is what's known as the mental layer. It's one
of many layers of your aura, and it's associated with thought. The more that your mind is thinking,
the more energy polarizes in the mental, uh, layer of your aura. And it also polarizes up
in the head. And so this excessive polarization of energy creates more thoughts, and it's like this
toxic, uh, loop of thought feeding energy, energy feeding thought. And a lot of times, this is hard
to break out of this energy. (04:05):
Polarization can actually get so bad that people, when they have their minds overactive,
it's very frequent for them to actually get headaches. The second problem that comes up when
we have an overactive mind is disconnection. When your mind and when the mental layer of your aura
is overactive, it ends up disconnecting you from the more subtle parts of you, from your intuition,
from guidance. All of that mental chatter ends up drowning out the subtle guidance from our
intuition and spirit. So we stop being able to communicate with our guides. We stopped being
able to receive all this guidance. We even stopped being able to have access to our own inner knowing
and our own sensations, inner sensations that normally would guide us. We stopped having access
to that because the mind is just in this loop that never stops. And I was feeling these two problems
in my life when I moved in with my girlfriend at the time, not only would I, was I having a lot of
polarization in the energy and my mind just didn't shut up, but I was also having a lot of difficulty
connecting to my guidance and connecting to my intuition and receiving subtle messages like I did
when I was alone, living alone in a forest. (05:13):
As the months progressed, there were so many times when I longed to be back in the forest, to be back
in my solitary life, meditating for hours a day, all of this increased mental chatter and all of
this overthinking was causing severe issues. It was causing anxiety, restlessness, brain fog,
exhaustion. I didn't wanna live like that anymore. I wanted a little bit of both worlds. I wanted to
be happy in my new crazy family and my bustling city, but I also wanted to have the mental quiet
and be connected to my spiritual guidance so that I would receive messages and have access to my
own intuition. And that's when it came to me. Me, I'd have to throw the floating monk in the garbage
rest in peace. I realized I had this totally unrealistic expectation on what it felt to live
a life that was balanced and had a quiet mind. (06:11):
Sure, monks have these amazing brains that don't wander a lot, and that stay super focused and
calm and quiet, and this is amazing. But they also have very unconventional lives. They usually live
in monasteries or ashrams a lot of times. They live in silence. They live away from bustling
cities. They meditate for hours at a time. And so I was setting myself up for a failure
by having this really unrealistic expectation of holding the ideal that a quiet mind can only mean
a monk mine. And I know exactly how it feels to live this kind of solitary monastic life,
because I had spent four years doing that. So I know what it felt like in my brain. My brain felt
amazing. But now I was in a bustling city and I had a new life, and I had different obligations
and different things that I had to do. (07:01):
And so I didn't wanna hold on to this monk image in my, in my brain. I didn't wanna hold on to
that unrealistic expectation because it was really creating a lot of pressure in my life.
I was starting to feel like a failure or that I was doing something wrong because that was the
image that I was subconsciously holding onto to what it meant to have a quiet mind. It was quiet
mind equals equals monk brain. And I had to let go of that expectation so that my system would
calm down and I could learn and figure out what felt right for me and what felt like balance for
me now that I was in this new life in the middle of a busy city. So I started to experiment with
new spiritual and mindfulness tools that would help quiet my mind down. And I had a commitment
to myself. (07:44):
I was only going to do it. I was gonna take it one step at a time without any extreme or excesses.
I was gonna take it one step at a time, one practice at a time. And my hope was that together,
all those small steps and those small practices would all add up to hopefully shut my mind up
maybe just a little bit. The first hack I tried was simply to go for walks every day. So I was
living in the middle of a city, but I made a point to just walk out of my house and just go
for a walk. I would look for parks or trees or, uh, you know, just a bench by a, a park. Or I
would even look for trees at a local park, and I'd just go sit by the trees and relax. Maybe
there was a pond and I'd watch the ducks floating, or I would just try and be outdoors every day.
(08:30): And I would try to connect with something
related to nature. Even though I was living in the middle of a city, there's always parks,
there's always trees. There was always something that I could find related to the outdoors that
really helped me. And then I would just sit, relax, maybe do a little bit of meditation, maybe
connect to the trees, or connect to the ducks, or connect to the birds, whatever I saw, um, coming
from the animal or the plant kingdom that would really help to start tonen down my energy and tone
down the excessive mental, uh, over a reaction and, and, um, ruminating thoughts. The second hack
I used more, uh, when I was asleep. Um, my mind tended to be active most when I was about to go
to sleep in the middle of the night. And sometimes right before I would wake up in the morning,
(09:12): Wake up, filthy.
(09:14): And so when my mind would wake up with
incessant thoughts while I was trying to sleep, I would just gently say the word enough, enough.
And I repeated that word over and over again. This is what Buddhist do when they're chanting.
They just repeat the same sound over and over again. And the repetition of that sound is what
helps quiet the mind down, because the repetition of that sound is forcing your brain to focus on
that one sound or that one word. And so all the rest of the thoughts fall out. The third hack is
really associated with the second one. When I was doing my enough, uh, chanting, I noticed that when
I paired it with deep breathing, my mind calmed down, my body calmed down a lot more quickly. And
so what I would do is if my brain would make me up in the middle of the night or whatever,
I would say the, the mantra enough or, or sometimes I would use a different mantra
like calm, whatever I was using, whatever mantra I was using, I would parrot with deep breathing.
(10:18): And as I did that deep breathing, my
body would calm down and my mind would calm down a lot more quickly. The reason that deep breathing
works is because it's affecting what's known as the parasympathetic nervous system. And it's a
part of your nervous system that is responsible for rest and relaxation. So the more deep
breathing techniques you do, the more your mind calms down, and the more your body calms down,
the mind and the body go hand in hand. The more relaxed your body is, the more relaxed the mind
is, too. The last hack I used was meditation. Now, it wasn't the same type of meditation that I used
when I lived in a hermit life or when I was in solitude. It wasn't, I couldn't meditate for hours
on end anymore. So meditation for me, I had to change the definition of what meditation meant to
me. So sometimes I'd be able to meditate for five minutes, sometimes 10 minutes, but my meditation
sessions were definitely shorter, but then I also started to meditate in other ways. Sometimes
meditation for me meant just praying. So I would say mantras or I would pray, I would talk to God,
I would say things like, dear God, help my mind become still. Or I would do a quick session of
chanting with the sound. Om, oh, (11:32):
These hacks together did help me quiet my mind quite a bit. And I also connected to
my intuition and my spiritual guidance again. And these hacks also helped me stop feeling
like a failure for no longer having the mind of a monk. But speaking of failure,
if you are struggling with this right now, check out this video here where
I talk about what the fear of failure really is and how you can overcome it.