Spring clean your mind

Hey, this is Mary Schiller. I think it's 1 o'clock here in New York City, and this is my very first live Facebook broadcast, so please excuse a little bit of wobbliness on the camera because I can't seem to get the tripod to stay steady. But in any case, Thanks for joining me, and if you're watching this on a recording later, thank you for watching. So I wanted to chat for a few minutes today about spring cleaning the mind. And this came to me because I was looking around our apartment and realizing that it needed a bit of spring cleaning. We've collected a few things over the last few months. That we really need to get rid of. And hopefully we can start to kind of make some headway on clearing out some clutter here. If you are commenting on this, I have no idea where to look for those comments. So supposedly they're going to appear on my screen, but I don't see them yet. So please forgive me if I don't respond to your questions because they're not appearing. In any case, I wanted to talk to you about this idea of spring cleaning the mind because I think that in the past I would have seen a topic title like that and thought, okay, Mary's going to talk about, you know, clearing out negative thinking and trying to think more positively about life, and that's really not what I'm talking about at all. What I want to talk to you about for a few minutes is I'd like to introduce you to the idea that spring cleaning the mind is actually a very simple thing to do that doesn't involve trying to catch our negative thoughts and, you know, put them in a box and stow them away somewhere. It doesn't have anything to do with trying to look at all the old stories we're telling ourselves and, you know, put them in a shoebox and give them to Goodwill for someone else to listen to. It's nothing like that. For a long time I really thought that the way to feel better, the way to have clear thinking and really to feel happy, was to try to control or manage my thoughts. I believed that I had a lot of negative thinking that was causing me a lot of distress and that the key to feeling better was to learn what to do with that thinking. In other words, I was told by people who I considered to be experts that I had to do a lot of things to cope with the negative thoughts I was having, and I had to try to change my outlook to be more positive. I tried that for years and years and years. I tried that and it never worked for me. It just never worked. And then I was told I needed to just decide, basically, that I could be happy. And so I tried that too. I tried to decide to be happier and that didn't work. And so I started wondering if there was actually any way for me to really feel as good as I wanted to feel. What attracts me to this idea of spring cleaning so much is that there is such a wonderful feeling that can come through me when I'm tidying up and I feel really happy about my environment. I can have lots of thoughts that kind of, you know, generate some really nice feelings inside, and that's what I wanted to have all the time. I wanted to understand how I could do that. So instead of trying to do something about all my negative thinking and all of the stuff that was causing me distress, I decided to just stop doing everything. And that was probably the most important decision that I've ever made in my life. No, no kidding. I started to see by kind of testing it out and experimenting that the less I did to manage my thinking or try to change my thinking, the better I started to feel. And it was really hard at first because I was so conditioned to try to do something about my feelings and try to stop the negativity or stop the fear or whatever anxiety that was going through me. So at first it took a little bit of, I wouldn't say discipline, but just a willingness to feel whatever I was feeling and not worry about it, not feel like I had to do something to change it. And the less I did, the less I tried to make myself feel better, or try to push negative thoughts out of my mind, which I really wasn't able to do, the better I started to feel. And I don't think it was a coincidence because now from the understanding that I'm speaking from today, I can see very clearly that I have, and you have, a system at work inside that is always tilting us towards a feeling of well-being and health. And the less we do to interfere with that, the better we can feel. So over time, I started to see that the less I did, the less I tried to manage whatever was going up, going on up in my mind, the more relaxed I started to feel, the more comfortable and confident I started to feel about myself and my life and everything that I was just experiencing every day. And if you had told me that the answer was something as simple as that, as simple as stopping everything I was doing, I don't think I would have believed you. It might have just been the right time for me to hear that message. I'm not really sure. But it's all part of what I teach people now, which is generally called the 3 principles. And in this understanding of these principles that explain what's going on in the human experience, within that is an understanding that just like the body can heal itself if there's— if you have a cut So can our emotions. There's nothing we have to do in order for that to happen. That system works perfectly on its own. So when I'm talking about spring cleaning the mind, what I'm talking about is dropping everything we've been doing, just stopping all of that. Stop trying to change our mindset because it's really impossible to do that with any permanent success. Stop trying to manage our negativity. Stop trying to think more positively. Um, just allow whatever feelings we have to come through. Recognize that they're not harmful in and of themselves. And see that we can have whatever experience we're having right then. And be perfectly fine. Even if it's an uncomfortable experience, we're still fine underneath that. That was a huge realization, and when I really think about this idea of cleaning and spring cleaning, it was almost like somebody just whisked all of the dust bunnies out of my head when I realized that I could stop trying to fix myself. There was nothing that I needed to fix, nothing that I needed to manage, nothing that I needed to change. I could sit with a feeling. I knew it was coming from a thought I was having in that moment, and that was all there was to it. I used to see my feelings as representing something important, you know, that I had to listen to them, that they were trying to tell me something about my life, or that they were giving me some kind of signal or message. And the way it is now, I see the truth, which is my feelings just reflect whatever my thinking is in that moment. They're nothing to be afraid of. They're certainly nothing I have to fix or worry about. The end result of this for me, although this journey is forever, is that it really has freed up a lot of headspace. When you talk about spring cleaning, if you're not concerned about your feelings, if you're not concerned about whatever thoughts you're having, if you're not consumed with having to try to manage all of that and change all of that, you get a lot more free time. It's like when I clear stuff out of the apartment, because we live in a small place here in New York City, when we clear stuff out, that we've got more room to roam, and it feels like there's more space to create. There's more room for new thought and insight to come in, and it's just been really a miraculous change in my life. It's hard to overestimate how much of a difference it's made for me. So I'll just talk for a couple more minutes, and I see we've got some people watching, so thank you so much for being here. I really would like to emphasize the fact that we work perfectly if we just allow ourselves to work perfectly. It's only really been a recent development in the past— I don't know, I don't know exactly when Freud came about, but it's only been a fairly recent development in human history where we started to feel like we had to intervene in some way if we weren't feeling up to par, whatever that means. And with an understanding of these three principles that I share and a lot of other people teach as well, we can see very clearly that we actually work perfectly fine. There is nothing that needs to be fixed because there's nothing broken in the first place. Just to share a little bit of my own story, for those of you who haven't heard it, I'll share that for a couple of minutes. When I talk about trying to manage my negative thinking and so forth, I had several decades of experience trying to do that because I had been told that I had post-traumatic stress disorder. I was dealing with the symptoms of that for many, many years and had tried pretty much everything to alleviate it, uh, really to no effect whatsoever. I tried every kind of mental trick you could come up with. I tried every technique I could find. I had been looking at different drug treatments to try to help me, and really just nothing was working. And it wasn't until I found these 3 principles that I talk about with people that I started to understand very deeply that if I just stopped struggling, if I just stopped trying to fix myself, that everything would calm down and settle down because there was nothing wrong with me. I was simply listening to some thinking right then that was then leading to some behaviors. And once I saw that I didn't have to manage any of that, life became a lot simpler and a lot better. Thank you for that comment, Diane. Diane, I really appreciate it. That means a lot to me. So getting back to the topic of this talk really briefly about spring cleaning the mind, I'd like to just pose the question to you of What are you doing on a daily basis that you feel is necessary for you to feel better? Are you doing things like trying to corral negative thinking? Are you trying to turn situations into positives that appear like negatives to you? Are you working on your mindset in some way about something like, you know, relationship or money or something like that. I'd like you to just take a few minutes today and consider all of the things that you're trying to do to manage a system that already works perfectly and doesn't need any management. And just in closing, I'd like to point out that all of that is done with the best of intentions. And I know that people who I listened to who were sharing those kinds of ideas with me really wanted to help people, really wanted to help me. They really thought that, you know, by sharing those kinds of ideas that it would be helpful. And so I love all of the people who are trying to be of service in that way. However, most of us are frankly not seeing what we need to be seeing. And what we need to be seeing is what these three principles illustrate, which is the system of mind, consciousness, and thought all works without our interference. The more hands-off we can be, the more we can just be in our life experience, the more we can just feel whatever it is that we feel and enjoy being a human being without trying to fix something that's not broken, the more ease we'll feel, the less stress we'll feel, and the more inspired we can be to give the world what we have to give. So to do some spring cleaning of the mind, I encourage you to just take a look at all the things you're trying to do to create a better experience for yourself, and one by one, stop doing them and see what happens. Thank you for listening and for watching. This has been really exciting for me, and I hope to do many more. So I'd love to hear any comments you have, and please feel free to visit me on my blog at thedailyprinciples.com. Bye now.