3 Ways to Handle Our Mind & Emotions

Hello and a warm, warm welcome to our live event today with myself, Ashok Gupta. I'm so excited to be here with you today on our topic of how do we handle our mind and our emotions. Isn't this such an important thing that so many people talk about as we go through our day? You know, living, working, breathing, all the things that we do? There's a little part of us that realizes, well, my mind is pretty busy most of the time. I can't seem to stop these, what they sometimes call ants, these automatic negative thoughts which keep popping up out of nowhere. How do I handle my mind? And that's what we're going to be looking at today. The three best ways, or three ways you can handle your mind and your emotions. And straight after this live event will be going onto the Irise platform, the Irise app or the Irise website for an interactive discussion, which you can join us on Zoom for. And if you'd like to join us for that just in 20 minutes, then simply go to irisetv.com life events. In fact, you can just go to irisetv.Com and you'll see the Live Events tab and there'll be a Zoom link for us to all be together and join that discussion. And it's always fun, fascinating, because not only do we hear then from me, but we get to hear from all of you and your experiences of what helps you deal with your mind and emotions. And it's a really beautiful group that we've got, so I hope you can join us for that. And we do this every Wednesday, of course. So how do we handle the mind and the emotions? The biggest question of all, the first place we start is really understanding, well, what is the mind? How can we handle something if we don't really understand or can't define what it is? And there are so many definitions of what the mind may be. And a definition that I really like that helps me understand what it is all about is this idea that the mind exists when there is a flow of thoughts and emotions. So the mind exists when there is some kind of thoughts or some kind of emotions that are being experienced within consciousness. So we can be conscious and aware, and the mind comes into existence the moment that there are thoughts and emotions which flow. And you don't need me to tell you this. You can do your own experiment. This is always the nature of truth, is to listen to different people's points of view, but ultimately to come to your own deeper truth through your own experience of it. So let's just do A little exercise to understand what the mind actually is and what it does and the characteristics of the mind. So all I want you to do right now is simply close your eyes. So let's just close our eyes. Okay, let's open our eyes. Now, what did you notice in that little experiment there? Now many of you will be sitting there thinking, well, is he going to say anything else now? What happens next? You know, the mind starts anticipating and analyzing the situation. Why is he not saying anything? I've just got my eyes closed. I mean, I didn't come onto this live event to understand that. So the mind starts judging, analyzing, trying to figure stuff out. So that's one characteristic of the mind that you just noticed in that moment. And then what it starts to do is sometimes, and when we do this in workshops, it starts defaulting to worry. The nature of the mind is think, what do I need to worry about right now? What's negative in my life? And you might say, why does the mind do that? Why does it stop going into the future and anticipating some of the fears in the future? Why does it start thinking about what happened to you yesterday or the week before or the conversation you had with somebody? The anger that was generated from that? The mind keeps going past future, past, future, and generating this negative worry or sadness and anger about what happened in the past. The reason often that is quoted is that our minds are evolutionary machines. So they are designed to protect us. And protection inevitably a negative or fearful approach to the world. Yeah, it's safety first. So it's a bit like Sam the fireman, who you'll know is not a friend of mine, but a kind of friend of mine, a puppet that we use that is all about looking out for danger, spotting the danger. So the mind defaults to worry because it wants to protect us and keep us safe. That's why we're here. Over millions of years of evolution is a system analyzes dangers and protects us. But in the modern world, this danger analysis machine up here starts overplaying its hands and finding potential concerns or dangers in so many different places. So 95%, 99% of the things that we worry about are never actually going to happen. But the mind must, even if there's a 1% chance it will keep analyzing in order to warn us. The challenge with that nature of the mind that it defaults to worry and negativity is that each time we allow it to do that, these automatic negative thoughts, these ants, which keep filtering up to conscious mind, the more we allow it to do that, It's a form of negative visualization. So don't we hear, hey, we need to visualize and imagine our goals and where we want to go to. We hear that in so many aspects of personal development. Yet imagine that a lot of the time our brains are thinking and visualizing the negative consequences of our decisions or what could happen. And then the second whammy of that is that not only are we imagining the worst case scenarios in our lives, but by imagining it, the brain can't tell the difference between what's real and and what's imagined. Isn't that incredible? To give you an example of this, I want you to think of your favorite food. So just close your eyes and think of your favorite food, the one that's so delicious. The moment you put that piece of food in your mouth, wow, you just start salivating. So think of that food that really makes you salivate. So delicious. Yeah. How tangy or tasty it is in your mouth or chewy or whatever is the sensations that make it taste so good and makes you salivate. Okay, just open your eyes. Now what's happening now? Do you notice any saliva in your mouth? Yeah. Now isn't that strange that just through the power of imagination I was able to elicit a physiological response in your body. Now imagine all those negative thoughts, those worries. Your brain is thinking it's actually going to happen and is happening right now. And in doing so it releases the cortisol, the adrenaline, all the stress hormones in your body unnecessarily. That is what happens if we allow our brains to default to its worry and negativity space. So that's why it is about a continual awareness of what's going on in the brain and in the mind. So that's one of the aspects. Defaulting to worry, imagining the worst. I remember my nephew at Christmas I gave him a T shirt that said no fear on it, right? Have you seen those T shirts say no fear. That's a nice T shirt. I'll give it to my nephew. And he said, I can't wear that. I said, why? Because I've got fears. I thought that was so cute the way that he said that just so innocently. And of course that's the way that we feel. We feel like, well, yeah, I want to be positive and I want to feel happy, but I've got all these negative thoughts and worries, so how am I allowed to be happy? We postpone our happiness into the future because what we're trying to do is fix the world outside to make Us feel better on the inside. So the conclusion we come up to is, well, I've got a lot of negative thoughts, a lot of worries. Yeah. So the solution to that is I need to change this situation or not have that the way it is. And by constantly working against what is, so I'll be able to relax and be happy. Because then we would have sorted out the outside world and we live life in this space of right, I'll just be happy when this is fixed, this is done, then I can relax. But we aren't realizing that that is a thankless task. It's not going to happen. Do you think suddenly one day you're going to wake up, all the problems in your lives are solved and you can finally let go of that worry and negativity? Because the worry and negativity in the mind is the core issue. And so this is our first point about the nature of emotions in the mind, that the mind defaults to worry, defaults, defaults to negativity and imagines worst case scenarios which fill our bodies full of these stress hormones which then go on to creating mental, emotional and physical challenges in our health. Our health is challenged because we allow this worry machine to continue and continue and continue without doing anything about it. Now the second aspect of the mind is, is that the mind creates emotions and emotions are our response to people and situations around us. So we're feeling happy, relaxed, suddenly someone criticizes us. Yeah. Now for some of us, we may be criticized and think, I don't care, they can say whatever they want. Others, especially those who, others who are more sensitive, we suddenly have an emotional reaction. The, the emotion is a reaction to that situation or that stimulus. And the response is, right, I'm going to speak back to that person or I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that. You just wait till I see them again. And then when we see them again, we don't really say what we want to say because we're all wearing these sunglasses, right, which are our filters on the outside world. So we don't see the world the way it is. We see the world the way that we are through our own lens. So the nature of the mind and the emotions generated is they're based on our conditioning. And conditioning simply means what we've learned in the past. We've learned to be sensitive to criticism. Then when a new piece of criticism comes up, guess what? We look at that criticism through our filter, bring up emotions from the past and then have this emotional reaction. So our emotions are essentially triggered by these repetitive events in our lives based on how we responded yesterday and the day before. And they say that 80% of our thoughts are the same as yesterday. Now, I could keep these on for the rest of the session, but I won't be able to see you then, will I? Later. Once again, please do share this on your social media. Please do share our livestream here with other people, with other groups that you may be members of. You want to spread this knowledge out there as part of the Irise app. And of course, you can encourage others to join us on the discussion straight after. And it really is, I can't emphasize it enough, what a beautiful group we have, what amazing conversations come out of it. And it really makes your week when you come onto this discussion group. It's fantastic. And to give an example of this, you might say, well, hang on, Ashok, you know, I don't understand this conditioning thing. Like, what do you mean conditioned? I'll give you an example. Think of a fast food chain. First thing that pops into your head, think of a soft drink. Right? What popped it up into your head? Now, for most people, when I say think of a fast food chain, they. They think McDonald's, right? When they think of a soft drink, most people say Coca Cola. Now, why is that? Because these two companies and many other similar ones spent millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, persuading you that each time you think about food or think about eating or you see their sign, it triggers an interpretation within you that I'm really looking forward to eating that delicious burger or that delicious drink. I actually did this exercise with a group of people into holistic health. And I asked them, you know, think of a fast food chain, whatever. And half of them thought of like, you know, whole foods or kombucha shots or whatever. So it doesn't always work for everybody. Depends on, once again, your interpretation of the outside world and what's healthy and what you're prepared to put into your body. So just like McDonald's and Coca Cola, your brain repeats what it's learnt and it's learned all of this in the past to react to people and situations in the same way again and again and again through worry and negativity, which is creating this ill health within us. And the way that the mind creates this negativity is through inner self talk. And I'd like to go deeper into this because we've all heard of inner self talk. I think, yeah, I can hear my mind just chattering away. It's Being very negative. I've got a negative mind. I've got a worrisome mind. And there are three types of worry or three types of inner talk that I notice in people. And it relates to the first person, I, the second person, you, and the third person, it or life itself in the first person. We often talk to ourselves in the victim mode. So say, nothing good ever happens in my life. Why has God made this happen to me? This is just not fair. Do we notice that little inner talk within us when something happens? And by going into that victim state once again we focus on the negative. We focus on the worry which affects our health. That's the I state. We start going inwards and feeling sorry for ourselves and feeling the victim of life and situations. Why does this always happen to me? Oh, this always keeps happening. Poor me. Then the second one is the you situation. And that's where there's a little voice in our head talking to us, which we call the inner critic. And the inner voice says, oh, look what you did. This is all your fault. How could you have done this this way? Right? Do we notice that voice? And that voice has been conditioned, it's been learnt and often it comes from our childhood. And it can be the ghost voice of a parent or a teacher or a sibling or someone else in our lives or it could even be an ex partner of ours. This little inner negative voice that starts blaming us and criticizing us. And the third one is how we describe the world around us when we're stuck in this negative self talk is the cynic, let's say things aren't going our way or we feel like we've been battered by the ups and downs of life. A little cynical voice starts getting created in our mind that starts thinking, oh, life's just like this. Life's just terrible. Not nothing good happens in life. I don't want to bring a child into this world. Look at the world around us. People are bad. The cynical part starts getting created to describe the world of people and situations around us. So let's watch out for this negative self talk because it is incredibly damaging to our psyche and our sense of being. So number one, the victim talking to ourselves in a negative way. Number two, the inner critic criticizing ourselves and putting ourselves down. And thirdly, the cynic, you know, blaming the outside world, people in situations and thinking it's all bad. That's a type of negative self talk with us coming in our mind. Our mind's so creative, it's even found three ways that we can talk to Ourselves. And all of this noise in the mind, this constant chatter, this negative self talk, is a triple whammy in our lives. Let's wake up and see that if we allow it to be unconscious and fester continuously in the mind, there's a triple whammy. Number one, 99% of it isn't even true. It's not even going to happen. And yet we're visualizing all these negative things, right, which affect our health. So then the first whammy is it's not even true. The vast majority of it's not true. How many times do we say to ourselves, oh, I didn't do that well, you know, or I don't think that was very good. And a friend may say, hey, what are you talking about? That was great, that was fantastic. We say, no, it wasn't, it wasn't right. We keep putting ourselves down. We keep underestimating ourselves. Now why is that? Is that some state of false modesty? No, it's just a bad habit we get into. So firstly, it isn't true. Secondly, it affects our mental, physical and emotional health through the visualization of what we're imagining in the negative sense. And thirdly, it starts manifesting the very situations into our lives that we don't even want because we are manifestation machines. What goes on in here projects or certainly influences what is out there in order to help us grow. So you may say, well, most importantly, Ashok, this is all fine, but what do we do about this? And I want to introduce three key ways that we can handle this noisy mind, these emotions flowing in and out the minds. And it is simple as ABC, as the Jackson says, A, B, C easy is 1, 2, 3. So A stands for awareness. So these three techniques, ABC really flow into mindfulness. How can we become more aware? So having a mindful state of being to disidentify from this busy mind. Yeah. So these are three mindful ways to disidentify from this crazy mind and to be able to open up a space, to be able to calm these thoughts and emotions and deal with these strong emotions. So A in a mindful way stands for awareness. First step of any personal development is awareness. We have to hold the problem in our hands to be able to let it go. So becoming aware. Ah, look what my mind is doing now. See, most of the time the mind is just chattering, chattering, chattering. And we identify with this chattering voice. And the whole purpose of meditation, mindfulness, self awareness, personal development, is to take a step away from this chattering mind and Go, hey, look at this chattering mind over here. And to accept it, first of all, to accept that there is a chattering mind within you. So, awareness, acceptance. And then we become amazed. Wow, look at this chattering mind. I'm not even going to try and change it. I'm just going to be amazed and even amused at what it's doing. So the four A's, Awareness, acceptance of what your mind is doing in yourself. Thirdly, amazement. And then even fourthly, amusement. When we smile at our dear beloved minds, then we don't take it so seriously. Not so heavy. Oh, look. Negative mind, Negative mind. So what? Just be aware of the negative thoughts. And just by being aware of it, it begins to calm down. Just like if you've ever noticed when there might be a spider or a cockroach walking across your floor, as soon as you put the light on, like, as soon as you shine a light on that spider, it stops, it pauses. Because it knows it's been found out. So now it thinks, if I just freeze, then maybe no one will notice what I'm doing. So in the same way, when you start becoming more aware of your mind, oh, how interesting. What is really bothering me right now? What is my mind doing? You shine a spotlight on your mind and your mind begins to just know that it's being watched. Even that begins, 50% of the work is just being able to disidentify and go, wow, that's what my mind is doing. And not be affected by what it's doing. Not take it for real. You know, we have these little bumper stickers. Don't believe everything your mind thinks. Don't believe your emotions. Your emotions and thoughts are reactions to the outside world based on your past. You're not coming at the world cleanly. You're not seeing the world the way it truly is. Your mind fills in the gaps. This brain has limited capacity for conscious awareness, right? So when you look at something, your brain fills in 80 to 90% of the gaps based on your past. And it's simply an imprint in your mind. So you're not seeing the world the way it is. You're simply interpreting, interpreting it within your own consciousness. So A is for that acceptance, awareness, amazement, amusement. And sometimes that's enough to disidentify and calm the mind. B stands for brain retraining. And that's what we specialize here. You know, there's courses on irise, obviously, many of you might know the Gupta program, where we use brain retraining and neuroplasticity for anxiety Right through to chronic fatigue, long Covid and many different illnesses. And the secret behind that is really to say, okay, if I have mindfully accepted what's going on in my brain, it still continues. Like, sometimes those conditionings, those learnings in the mind are so deep, the grooves in the mind are so deep that that flow of water keeps going down those little channels, those little thought channels in the brain. And so we need to retrain the brain to imagine and think something different. And so within the Irise platform, we have a fantastic technique called the new Groove technique. Many of you will know it. And it's not a dance move. Yeah. Although you can certainly dance whilst you're doing it. And it's got four steps to help us retrain the brain. Each time we have an emotion or a reaction to our environment. So you can find this on the Irise apps and you go to iriseapp.com or download the Irise app and you can find the new Groove technique there to help you practice retraining the brain and retraining the mind. The third C is that compassionate self talk, which you can also be part of brain retraining. What this means is that most of us have those three types of voices. The I voice, poor me, I feel so bad, my life's terrible. Right. So accepting and being aware of that little victim voice inside and compassionately speaking to yourself in a loving way. Or the inner critic saying, hey, why are you so hard on yourself? You don't need to be so hard on yourself. You're a great person. You've got so many gifts. Everyone makes mistakes. It's okay. And that compassionate self talk is a training, helping your mind understand that it is loved and it doesn't need to go down these paths of negativity. And thirdly, that cynic, once again, compassionate self talk, helping this part of you understand that you become cynical about the world and the way people are because of all these ups and downs, and you can let that go. So speaking to yourself in that compassionate self talk as part of the abc, and of course, those are the things we do inside our own minds in a mindful way. And at a practical level, it's so important that we engage with things that uplift our brain. So here we at Irise, we always talk about the men's protocol. So M stands for mind. So what are you doing for your mind every day? Breathing and meditation techniques. So on Irise, we have lots of meditations that you can engage in, lots of breathing techniques. As you know, here we also, I'M a big fan of the art of living course that you can do. Artofliving.org which has incredible breathing processes that you can go through and meditation techniques. And we've got a lot of great stuff on Iris as well. So breathing and meditation for the mind. E stands for exercise. So regularly having some exercise that gets your blood pumping, your heart racing so that you are clearing out the cobwebs of your consciousness. N stands for nighttime routine. So sleep, essentially having good amounts of sleep, that can really help calm the mind. And D stands for diet. If you're drinking lots of caffeine and alcohol, that will increase the negativity in your mind and the rigidities and the amount of noise that's being created. So looking after your diet and your physical health. So that's on the practical level. And today we focused on our inner consciousness, that inner mind. So in summary, what we've talked about today, and please once again do share this on your social media. When I get this message about is that, number one, this mind of ours is a flow of emotions and thoughts and tends to default to worry and negativity. And that worry and negativity affects our health because it's a form of imagination and visualization. So we are inappropriately causing ourselves in health, ill health, by imagining something that's never going to happen. Now why would we do that? So number one, defaults to worry and is bad for our health, number two, it's conditioned. It's reacting to the people and situations from our past, number three, that encourages that inner negative self talk through those conditioned reactions of being the victim or criticizing ourselves or being cynical, which we want to change. And fourthly, that noise is a triple whammy. It's not true. It affects your health and it manifests the very things that you no longer want in your life. Why would you then do it? So we often allow this stuff to proliferate in our mind unconsciously. And the abc, the mindfulness abc, is firstly to accept what's going on in our minds and accept and be aware of the people and situations and go into a deep place of acceptance and eventually even surrender. B stands for brain retraining. Having a technique that enables us to snap ourselves out of those automatic negative thoughts and train the mind into more positive ways of being. That as a regular technique is very important. And the new groove technique is there available for you on Irise and C. Compassionate self talk, speaking lovingly and compassionately to our dear beloved mind that sometimes gets stuck in these negative self patterns being the adult in the room and helping our minds through those situations. And of course, breathing and meditation, regular breathing meditation can help calm the mind and help get us to this state of mindful awareness where we associate with that loving witness. And when we associate with that loving witness, all of the mind calms down. We start experiencing our true deepest nature, which is bliss and love. So please join us now on Irise Love for you to be part of our discussion group. So please do go to iriseapp.com click on the live Events tab and there we'll be having our interactive discussion on how we can handle our mind and emotions and what works for other people people. So thank you so much for watching. Please do share this and we'll see you next Wednesday for our Meaning of Life show and of course our Meaning of Life discussion. And just a quick announcement. So tomorrow we'll be having a great workshop with Honor Celestino on the greatest relationship you'll ever have. That's 7pm UK time. Tomorrow Thursday. And then this Friday we'll be having our Laughter workshop with Sharon Miller on the IRISE platform. We're having Laughter Yoga every Friday at 6pm UK time. It's an amazing, amazing experience and it's free to all. So I hope you can join us for that. So thank you for watching and we'll see you on the discussion. Thank you and goodbye.