Forget Your Guilty Mind

Image Credit: Shawn Phelps.com

To err is human. Indeed, living in this world can present us with situations in our lives which we feel as though we could have acted differently–an altercation with a friend, family member or colleague where words were exchanged which upon reflection afterwards, filled your being with the unsettling, culpable feeling we know as guilt.

Guilt, and negative emotions in general, can weigh on the mind to the point of affecting health of the body. In this world of stress and expensive medicine, maintaining command of your emotional mind is an important component in the maintenance of inner peace, and in turn, health.

It is something that we all experience, yet continue to bring upon ourselves over and over again. What are the origins of this feeling? And how do we keep guilt from consuming us to the point where we can’t live anymore?

Origins

“I hate you!” she said, pushing him back against the wall. “Get away from me! You’re so stupid!” A set of words and actions that emerged automatically the instant her blood boiled from hearing something that flew in the face of her normal expectations. There are only two emotions, love and fear, with all others being variations of the two, respectively. She was enveloped in the realm of fear, erupting forth from her reptilian brain.
When we react without conscious thought, that is the domain of the survival aspect of the brain–the reptilian brain, or R-complex. You can identify actions and feelings originating from the reptilian brain via their automatic, fear-ridden expression, followed by guilt and embarrassment due to the fact that you acted without thinking, and said and did things you now regret. When conscious thought is allowed to return, the guilt and remorse comes along with it. Think how many times we have said or had someone say to us “you really weren’t yourself. You were acting like a totally different person.” This is because the brain was under different command for a spell.

The reptilian brain is the oldest part of the brain, nestled at the top of the spinal cord in the center of the brain, with its function principally oriented for survival. In this capacity, it hasn’t the ability to think, and indeed it wouldn’t have such an ability, because it is a system that needs to act as fast as possible. Thus, there is no time for there to be any processing of conscious thoughts, simply knee-jerk reaction.

The Solution Goes Hand in Hand With the Problem

Acting in an unconscious manner in difficult scenarios seems unavoidable, but now that you know the source of the problem, the answer is hitched along with it. The best way to deal with guilt and remorse is to avoid it in the first place.
Here are three steps to take to prevent a reptilian brain-induced loss of control that leads to guilt after the fact:

1.Breathe
And breath deep. The reaction, fight-or-flight system causes an arousal in the body, because you feel as though your well-being and/or your world view is under attack, or that you are about to lose something important to you, like a boyfriend or girlfriend, for example. The breath becomes shallow and quick. To counteract that, breathe deep and slow, which enacts the relaxation response in the body.

2. Observe your thoughts.
The reptilian brain doesn’t think, so when you think and try to understand what is really going on, it takes away control from the knee-jerk reaction section of the brain. This ability improves with practice, as with most anything else.

3. Forgive.
To err is human, to forgive divine. This step is more applicable after the fact. Forgiving not only is directed at other people who have done us wrong, but also directed at ourselves. Letting ourselves get taken away by emotion is something that is not easy to control. After an altercation in which you’ve done or said something regretful, realize that it was something that took you away for a moment, and work on moving away from dwelling in its wake.

“Where there are rain clouds, so will be a storm. Where there are inharmonious circumstances, so will be the appropriate emotions. When there are no more clouds, there is no more storm. Let it also be so with the mind” – The Still Mind

“When problems become opportunities rather than disastrous set backs, you know the mind is evolving” – The Still Mind

Mindful Steps – The Art of Moving Stillness

The walking of everyday life tends to be birthed of a certain purpose, and rarely is a purpose of walking for the sake of walking. Busy-ness serves as the bow that launches the arrow of intent of such walking. Hurried walking from one day with the intent of making it through to the next day as quickly as possible, leads to weeks, then months, then years, and left unabated, then a lifetime of hurried steps. Hurried steps are not limited to walking, for the movement from place to place is the offspring of the workings of the mind. Thus, hurried steps reflect a hurried mind, and a hurried mind becomes a hurried life (I’m sure we all are familiar with the adage “haste makes waste”).

Walking may seem like the most simplest of activities, and sure it may be, but when we walk, are we really aware of the act of walking, or is it more of a means to an end? Mindful walking, however, is something far more involved than one might realize, simply because

Big Think – Rainn Wilson – The Coming “Spiritual Revolution”

“Enough is enough, you guys screwed it up, we need to take our planet back.”

When Are You?

Where Is Now? from Christina Ondrus on Vimeo.

The human world is an infinite sea of thoughts and attachments all trying to interact with each other. This is a recipe for disaster, when identity is dependent on these for it to even exist. This is the ultimate reason why there is an extreme lack of peace in our world. Billions of people all with their own identities, no one can agree on the way things should be, because everyone believes that their own thoughts are correct. In this way, identity breeds separateness. Separateness breeds disagreements. Disagreements breed turmoil. This is where the lack of peace is manifested. From an unflinching desire to hold on to any and everything, even if it does not exist — illusions. Past, future, good, bad. For whom is it that is good or bad? Where is your mind, in fact, when is it? If the things in your mind do not truly exist at all, than why does one torture themselves for an entire life, clinging clinging, running running. Always running. Always clinging. Always attaching. An idea pops into the mind, and immediately it must be realized. On with the running. Run run run. Running until the grave is dug. Finally, no more running.
The sun will rise again regardless of the fulfillment of thoughts. Pain is done to oneself. We must find out who we are. We must find out when we are.

Music For The Mind – Pansori 판소리, The Sound of Ancient Korea

Vibrations affect the mind, because the mind itself is energy. Vibrations are energy. This is why playing music for plants helps them grow, and why ancient civilizations established ways of singing and forms of music that tapped into the rhythms of existence. Even the Sun has a steady vibrational rhythm at 126.22Hz, which can be heard by use of instrumentation, and when tapped into, can soothe the mind. It is all energy, and the interactions of energy, the precise reason our brains are drawn to pleasing sounds.

It is interesting to note that in the world that we live in today — mass illness, and sickness of mind — there is a considerable lack in the ways of the ancients which kept them in tune with the way of the earth. Even ruling classes ruled in reverence to the heavens. The earth was the master.

Music and sound have an effect on the brain, and on matter itself, as evident by the extensive results found in the field of Cymatics. In Korean Pansori, the sonic registers of the of performer’s voice reach dynamics that our everyday speech patterns lack.

Please Enjoy!

All is of One Happening

What difference is there of a cell and a human being? A cell ingests and excretes, sends messages, handling affairs that a cell must handle. Likewise, a human carries out the same process, just on a larger scale. We have messengers to inform, food that we ingest and excrete. We have establishments for the purpose of taking care of emergencies that spring up, with ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, which respond to calls of distress, what ever they may be.

All that exists — be it a block of wood which grew from a tree, or a house that came from trees which humans have taken a rearranged in such a manner as to utilize the wood for an alternate purpose — is all one happening. A single, continuous process. There is no difference between this or that, a chair and you. All is of the same existence in multiple states. When it rains, there is no rain. It is the process. When the wind blows, there is no wind and no blowing.

It is one thing to have knowledge of this concept; another to live in it.

What Holds “You” Together?

Needing to be “held together” in the first place is a clear sign that there is something being grasped for that doesn’t fit with one’s surroundings. “What keeps you going?” “What holds you together so you don’t go crazy?” What we don’t see in these simple questions that we tend to inquire of people when we are trying to get to know them, is that it is a verbalization of the fact that it is known that one has attachments constructing a “self.” It is a verbalization that one’s self is something that needs some form of mental glue to keep things from falling apart and being lost.

We can grasp for things all we want. Like a polar bear clinging to a piece of melting ice in the ocean, he is surrounded by a sea of water. The ice will melt eventually, and there will be nothing else that the polar bear can do but to let go. Survival will be trivial, for death is almost certain. However, if he happens to catch a fish before he dies, it will be the greatest meal he ever had. No past, no future, only right now, and right now all that exists is the eating of the fish.

Day in, day out, clinging clinging clinging. Run run run. Running around to satisfy the clinging. A need for more clinging. More running around; always chasing. An entire life of running and clinging is only good for creating more of the same in the future.

Too much trying. Too much effort.

Put it down.

A Moment of Awakening

Awakening can happen in a single moment. Zen masters have been known to use loud noises and shouting to awaken their disciples. In that moment, there is no thinking, no judgements, duality, good, bad. All becomes quiet; still.

The same can happen when we are startled, in a moment that calls for quick response by the body. When we are startled, there are no thoughts, just being startled. Even for the tiniest instant, everything had been put down. The interconnected systems of the body are simply reacting to a stimulus — going through a process. There is no room for extraneous thoughts and trivial worries. To reach this point in daily life is the ultimate stillness; the happiness of no happiness. No extremes. No place for thoughts to abide. Thoughts pass like clouds over still water, reflecting in the pond when they are there, and having no reflection when they are not.