John Milton, in his classic ‘Paradise Lost’ wrote “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
Indeed, mind is the root cause of all success as well as all evils in the society. A well-cultivated, disciplined mind can create the equivalent of heaven within oneself whereas an uncontrolled, wayward mind can create a situation that is worst than hell.
What do we need to create a healthy mind? The solution is very simple. Yet, because it is so simple, we tend to ignore them and handle our mind in a careless manner.
The first tool needed to bring balance to our mind is to have faith in ourselves. Swami Vivekananda, a great saint-philosopher said: ‘The ideal of faith in ourselves is of the greatest help to us. If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practised, I am sure a large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would have vanished.’ Martin Luther King, Jr says ‘Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase’. To give another example, when you learn to swim, you will have to have faith that you would be able to float and not drown; otherwise, you won’t learn to swim.
The second tool is to have hope through rational thinking. The nature of life is that it throws out challenges which will derail us. But getting up and restarting our life is important. We need to say to ourselves ‘this too shall pass’ and surge ahead. ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ said Jesus Christ – we should bury our hurtful feelings, victim mentality and such negative emotions and go onward in the journey of life.
A third tool we can adopt is to fix realistic goals. For example, if a person is in the habit of waking up at 7am and as a result is missing his transport and getting delayed at the workplace, instead of setting the goal of waking up at 5.30am, he can set the goal to wake up at 6.30am. Slowly, he will find that by exercise of will power, he would be able to wake up earlier and would accomplish much more.
Nurturing and enriching one’s will power is an extraordinary tool in mind management. Will power is that which helps a person to do what he or she knows is good or right and avoid those things which our inner voice tells us is wrong. It is a positive and creative tool which enables us to follow the right path in a definite way. To develop this, a simple exercise is to devote 15 minutes a day to sit quietly, turn off all devices and watch our own mind. As the mind gets watched, it will become calmer and the intellect will get the strength to make affirmative decisions.
