At some point in the not too distant future, people will struggle to remember what life with COVID-19 was like.
According to the CDC, about 500 million people became infected with the Spanish flu, around 100 years ago. The death count was at least 50 million people worldwide, with about 675,000 of those deaths happening in the United States. But, until March of this year, most of us were hard-pressed to remember anything about the Spanish flu.
Now, we are in our very own pandemic, and future generations will wonder what it was like for us. We will tell them as we clutch our martini glasses with our manicured nails and wrinkly old lady hands, and say, “Well, darling, first, we panic-shopped, and then we cleaned and organized our houses from top to bottom.”
What I’m hoping follows that statement is a story about how the pandemic forced us to re-examine our relationship with our own consciousness, or lack thereof.
LOOKING INWARD
Friends, this pandemic is offering us the opportunity of a lifetime to analyze our relationship with our own minds. This moment in history is giving us the space and time needed, not just to Marie Kondo our physical closets, but to get our mental house decluttered and organized.
Before coronavirus, we were too busy to even notice our incessant stream of thinking. We barely had time to pee, let alone sit and bear witness to the thoughts that drive our emotions.
Thoughts generate emotions, which very often drive our actions. That formula works backwards, too; the way we act makes us feel things, which in turn makes us think things.
Right now, the social calendars are a hell of a lot more clear. There’s nowhere to go, no one to visit and no plans to make. And here we are alone with our thoughts.
It’s just me, myself, and my mind.
As an authentic communication coach, I help people to become their most powerful selves and to speak from that place of power. Ground zero for that work is mind.
And just to be clear, I am not speaking as someone who is “enlightened.” But I am aware of the fact that the thoughts we think and the stories we tell ourselves determine the way we communicate, function, and show up in this life.
If we think fearful thoughts, we communicate in fear-based ways. If we think generative, loving thoughts, we communicate in generative, loving ways. As simple as this sounds, it’s hard to put into practice. Most of the time, you’re not in control of your thoughts, they are in control of you.
Think about it, who in their right mind would choose to ruminate and loop on the negative stuff? Yet that’s exactly what we all do.
I caught myself the other night looping on the state of my thighs. Yes, my thighs. I have other fish to fry, and berating the shape of my legs isn’t even on the top 20 list of things I need to think about. And yet, without the skill of redirecting my thoughts, looping on my thighs would zap all of my emotional and mental energy, leaving me totally spent and incapable of doing the stuff I actually need to do.
If we don’t cultivate the skill of actively directing our thoughts,
they will lead us to a life we had no intention of living.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say your thoughts become your destiny.
Very few of us have been trained to guide our thoughts to higher ground. But we don’t have to live this way. We have the power to Marie Kondo these minds of ours. We have the power to learn how to guide our thinking so that these glorious brain machines work for our greater good and the good of others, instead of being agents of misery and destruction.
INTERRUPT AND REPLACE
Here’s a piece of Truth with the capital T. Are you ready?
You are not your thoughts. You are the witness of your thoughts.
If that’s too high-concept, think of it this way. If you’re watching a television show, you’re the viewer of the television show. You may get sucked into a story, but you know you can stand up and turn it off. The same goes for thoughts. Our minds, if left unchecked, are being consumed in an endless stressful television show.
But you can decide to turn off the television show in your mind that is stressing you out.
How? By interrupting the flow..
When I catch myself beginning a negative thought pattern, I say out loud,
“I don’t like this show,”
or,
“I am not at peace. I want to be at peace.”
Repeat these phrases until you feel your mind let go of the negative loop, and then replace the loop using one of my favorite five mind tricks:
- Announcing Yourself.
This is shorthand for doing the work that pretty much all great rappers do. They talk about how rad they are. Eminem sings “Slim Shady”, all about how ‘all you other Slim Shadys are just imitating’. Jay-Z has Izzo, where he introduces himself using his nickname Hova, short for Jehovah, meaning God, because Jay-Z figures himself to be the God of rap, and who am I to disagree with that?
Prince has the same kind of vibe in his song called, “My Name Is Prince”. He says, “My name is Prince! And I am FUNKY.” By the time you’re done listening to him, you think, “Yeah, his name is Prince and he is funky, and, I’m going to listen to this whole album, because I am here for it!”
The point is, I love to mentally announce myself when my mind is serving up thoughts of fear, intimidation, or avoidance, because that is what my mind does when I have creative work to do. I will sit down on my meditation pillow and say to myself, “My name is Bronwyn, and I am funky, and I’m about to bring some magic into this world.”
And I do it every single day. Because every day my mind says, “Who am I to do this? Who am I to say this? What if this is lame? What if this isn’t helpful? What if this is a joke? What if I am a joke?” That’s what my mind wants to think. But I interrupt the flow and say, “I don’t like this show.” I announce myself.
Everyone experiences these attacks of self-doubt, but if you don’t have a mantra that lets you punch the ground and blast into the stratosphere, like Neo in the Matrix, you will never have the mental horsepower required to make something satisfying and new.
And if you’re thinking, “Who am I to do that? I’m not the queen or king of anything,” that’s not how this works.
You don’t announce yourself because you have achieved, you achieve because you have announced yourself.
Your fierceness and your worthiness is your birthright. As the Desiderata poem by Max Ehrmann says, “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars.” Claim it and get it done.
That’s one strategy, which works in the face of intimidation, fear, or avoiding thoughts. That’s your prescription.
The second strategy I have is the Five, Four, Three Meditation. You’ve probably heard me talk about this meditation if you’ve listened to this podcast in any depth. This is a meditation that I use when my mind is scattered, unsettled, divided and over-stimulated.
Here’s how it works.
Name five things that you can see, hear, and feel. Now, repeat that same exercise, only now naming four items. What are four things you can see, hear, and feel? Finally, go down to three, and by the time you get done naming those, you’re quiet. It calms you down and brings you back to present, which is ideal.
The only thing better than a positive mind is a present clear mind, which meditation will always deliver you.
The third strategy is what I call the Mister Rogers Meditation. Frankly, I could call it the Dr. Jeb Berkeley meditation, because my beloved therapist first taught it to me. Nevertheless, there’s this wonderful scene in the Mister Rogers movie, “It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” that uses this meditation marvelously. I highly recommend that movie. I like to use this one when I feel pinched, or when I feel there’s not enough time or resources. This one brings me back from the brink.
This starts by closing your eyes and visualizing all of the people who during the course of our life have “loved us into being.”
I feel lit from within when I do that meditation. It has a similar effect as the five, four, three meditation, in which you feel profoundly present. There’s also a level of love, peace, and comfort that comes with it, which feels really good.
The last two are used when all else fails. My fourth technique is exercise. When my mind gets really bad, my first three practices don’t even work. My mind is going at such a rapid pace, or in such a deep dark place that the only thing that will jar it back is moving, and just getting out of your head and into your body.
I find that really hard exercise is the only way to do that, since all my cognition has to go towards it. This could be a hard run or, my personal favorite, the Tracy Anderson Method. The moves are so complicated that my brain has to go there and leave the repetitive loops. It really helps, but even sometimes, that doesn’t fully fix it.
In that case, I will turn to the fifth and final technique, sleeping. No matter what time it is, sleep always helps an over-stimulated brain. It reminds me of another great line from the Desiderata poem that says, “Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.”
Things always look different after a good sleep, and, sometimes, our negative repetitive minds are because we’re not sleeping well. If you can’t get a good night’s sleep, you need to nap. I’m not kidding. Give yourself the space and compassion to sleep, because you’re not going to solve any dire issues unless you’ve had a little pick me up, trust me on that.
Those are my five tricks for interrupt and replace. As the saying goes, necessity breeds invention. I’ve come up with these things because I had to, and you’re going to need to come up with things because you have to. You’re left alone with your thoughts right now, right?
MY TURNING POINT
I developed these practices about seven years ago, because of the situation with my father. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go back and listen to the Sandwich Generation episode from Season 1.
But, suffice it to say that the dynamic between him and I before his death in 2018 was so difficult. It nearly consumed my every waking hour, and some of my sleeping ones too. I was raising three small kids, trying to grow my business, trying to keep my marriage alive, while also managing my father’s massively declining health and collapsing personal life. Divorce, bankruptcy, illness, you name it, he had it. He was devastated and mortified, and I was devastated and furious. It was a mess.
I was furious because all of us could see this coming, but he couldn’t. He just kept making bad choices after bad choices. It was a difficult time. And being the only child, I was the only one there to pick up the pieces. Thank God I had Saul, my husband, as my wingman.
That situation brought me to a level of anguish and mental suffering that was so great, prayer and therapy couldn’t touch it. One day in a haze, I wandered into the new age Universal Connection Bookstore in San Jose. I was staring at their bookshelf and the owner said to me, “Can I help you find something?” I responded, with my dead voice, “I’m dealing with a situation so heinous therapy and prayer aren’t helping. Do you have some kind of magic or Voodoo shit that you can give me?”
The woman turned to the man working the register, Paul Miller, and introduced us. Paul said, “I don’t know about Voodoo or magic, but I can teach you how to meditate.” So we began, and once a week I would meet with Paul to train my mind. He gave me the basic set of tools that allowed me to cope and rearrange my relationship with reality.
More often, the tools allowed me to calm down from the rage, despair, and hopelessness I felt. That situation taught me how to return to peace over and over again.
Sometimes, we’re locked in a situation that isn’t going to change any time soon. It just isn’t. So what can we do?
Rearrange our mind.
One day, seven years later, my father died. When I think about how painful those last years were with him, part of me really blesses them. My father taught me how to cope at the most extreme levels with the things I feared the most. Teaching me how to cope and create peace is probably the greatest lesson the man ever gave me, and it was born of suffering.
You may be finding your experience of shelter in place to be colossally painful, and the suffering can seem bottomless. You can use this suffering to break patterns and find power reserves you didn’t even know you had. Treat this time as something precious and it will not have been wasted.
If you can examine your thoughts like Marie Kondo examines a pile of knick-knacks, you will emerge from this pandemic an ass-kicking creation. But in order to kick ass, you have to clean the house, because your name may not be Prince, but you are funky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And if there’s someone you love, who needs to hear this, share this episode with them. It might make a difference.
I’ll see you soon.
