Olympic Gold Mind

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“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.  To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.  To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

–Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps the Olympics should have a category for the brain.  Each competitor would sit in meditation and be evaluated on heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, stress hormones and muscle tension.  The meditator would also be hooked up to a “brain monitoring device” for measured results of beta, alpha, theta and delta waves.  Along with these numerical results, an energetic score would rate overall posture, steadiness and ease of the meditators’ seat.  Would you be excited to enter this competition?

It is ok if the idea of this anti-yogic meditation competition scares you, but it is really meant to illustrate what is out of balance.   You can train your muscles endlessly and eat impeccably to be strong in body as we see with many athletes.  But without training the mind, you will find it challenging to become more balanced and content.  Your outer body is just a shell that has nothing to do with who you are.  Your true potential lies within.

If knowledge is power, honestly ask yourself why you are not interested or invested in strengthening your mind?  You might be a Jeopardy champion, but this kind of factual knowledge will not lead you to greater wealth about who you are.  You have as many as 60,000 thoughts per day, so now is the time to begin understanding your thoughts before you allow them to run your life in the wrong direction.

Your training begins by being conscious of the 60,000 thoughts per day.  When you realize how much you think, you bring awareness center stage.  Awareness is your coach in this journey. It will keep you disciplined.  You can use meditation to heighten this awareness, but keep tuning in as you go through your day.

Phase two of your training is recognizing that you are not in control of your thoughts.  I know this is counter-intuitive.  But your thoughts are “involuntary, automatic and repetitive”.** Like digestion, thoughts happen to you because they are born out of your conditioned, habitual patterns and reactions to the world; in other words, your past.

Once you begin to consistently hear your thoughts and learn the pattern and origin of them, then you can transition to the next phase.  This phase allows you to distance yourself from philosopher Descarte’s flawed idea of “I think, therefore I am.”  You will discover, at the soul level, you are much more then your thoughts that shift like the weather…but more on that later.

If this doesn’t make much sense to you, then welcome to your spiritual path.  It won’t make sense until you begin to investigate.  This isn’t an intellectual process, but an intuitive one.  Daily practice is necessary to begin to reveal answers.  Achieving golden enlightenment comes by embracing the unknown and unexplainable.  The deeper you go, the less words you will find for describing what you know.  And that knowing is the deepest sense of your spirit or soul.  Doesn’t that sound like gold worth capturing?

**A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Tolle