Mind Training

The mind is individual consciousness and the means by which a person feels, perceives, thinks, remembers, desires, and imagines. Throughout the course of life, the mind is responsible for the awareness a person acquires and how they learn to figure things out. While this ongoing process helps shape a person’s beliefs and behavior, there may come times when the mind gets overloaded with too much information, or life presents unimaginable and unfavorable circumstances that were never believed possible, or have never been experienced. When this occurs, the mind may become overactive and full of distracting and harmful ideas that can tailspin into destructive thought patterns and behavior that disrupt normal daily life.

Developing equanimity in your life using mind training is very similar to practicing good oral hygiene. The standard for good oral hygiene involves flossing after every meal, but at least once a day is acceptable. Similarly, mind training typically involves flossing your mind at least once per day. This helps ensure you can clear out negative or distracting thoughts and emotions from your consciousness from day to day, while building the foundation for cultivating a permanent state of equanimity.

Mind training has a very long history of use that goes back thousands of years, with most modern techniques evolving from traditional practices originating in India, China, and Japan. The most popular types of mind training are passive and involve sitting or laying still while maintaining attention or awareness on the present moment using mental focus on a particular sensation, such as breathing, a sound, a visual image, or a repeated word or phrase. Other mind training techniques, such as qigong, taiqi, and some forms of yoga involve physical movement. But typically these active types of mind training also incorporate and emphasize mental focus on breathing, sounds, or visualization.

The following are some of the more common types of passive mind training used to cultivate mental-emotional equanimity:

Transcendental meditation is a form of mind training that is a phenomenal tool for quickly resetting your thoughts and emotions. It is arguably the best mind flossing tool that is available to us in the 21st century.

The basic way it works is that you think of a word that makes no sense to you, one that you will not consciously recognize its meaning, and repeat it over and over again in your mind. What happens is that when your mind repeats a word it doesn’t understand, it stops focusing on other thoughts and emotions, and tries to figure out the meaning of the word being concentrated on. This process essentially erases or nullifies any scattered or fleeting counterproductive thoughts or emotions from the forefront of your consciousness, and resets mental-emotional perception.

It can be any nonsense word you like. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Iggily biggily. Gollygoops. Ittly bittly. These will all work. You can even make up the word. It doesn’t matter so long as your consciousness can’t register its meaning or any thoughts or images. Hindu Sanskrit words tend to work best, and if someone can teach you the exact pronunciation, they tend work even more profoundly.

You can find a lot of information about transcendental mediation words online for free, but you have to make sure you can articulate the word as correctly as possible as it does matter how you say it. Here’s a short list of Sanskrit words to get you started: Aing, Shiring, Hirim, Kiring, Shirim, Kirin, Shiam, Shiama. Just pick any of these words that you resonate with and repeat it until your mind resets.

Mindfulness is another form of mind training that is also a great tool for flossing your mind. By watching your thoughts, you can identify those that are counterproductive and label them as nonsense in your consciousness before they imprint the emotions. This is important because thoughts and emotions can easily manifest into words and actions that then turn into habits, define your character, and become your destiny.

Practicing mindfulness meditation regularly will help slow down your mind and help you begin thinking carefully about the emotions you’re feeling and words you should say, allowing you to begin understanding how these will impact the actions you take in any given situation.

This method is often a bit challenging for beginners, but do not be discouraged to try as it is a very powerful method. The key is to not engage and overanalyze your thoughts and emotions as they arise.

If you’ve never tried it before and want to try it, find a quiet place you can sit for a while without distractions (ie no phone, tv, people, etc). Then you simply turn your attention to your breathing, and deliberately breathe as quietly, slowly and as deeply as possible.

After a few minutes of breathing this way, you’ll very likely become aware of your thoughts. Simply observe the thoughts and let them pass by, refocusing on your beathing until you’re completely immersed with your breath in the present moment.

The use of mantras are a type of mind training that is closely related to transcendental meditation in that they are words or phrases that are repeated to produce profound psychological effects. If you’ve ever chanted during yoga class, or listened to Gregorian monks chanting and felt a profound sense of calm, then this may work really well for you.

The big difference between transcendental meditation and mantras is that with mantras, you usually are consciously aware of what you’re repeating in your mind or singing out loud. That is actually the whole point.

Mantras are positively charged affirmations that force your mind to focus on positive statements that if repeated, over and over again, will erase other thoughts at the front of your consciousness and replace them with what is being concentrated on instead.

There are plenty of free resources out there for using mantras. You can find hours and hours of chanting audio online that you can put on and sing along with, or just have a listen to and follow along with your mind. A favorite is repeating positive affirmations that begin with the words, “I Am”. Insert any positive words or affirmations after these two and repeat them for a few minutes to see just how quickly and easily you can floss your mind of negative mental-emotional debris.

The use of yantras is another great mind training tool for flossing the mind daily. Yantras are special diagrams that have a profound effect on human consciousness. In Sanskrit yantra means “form”, illustrating these complex diagrams are essential forms of nature. They are closely related to the major chakras or energy centers of the body detailed in Hindu mind training practices. 

All yantras are constructed of arrangements of triangles, with the most simple one being the equilateral triangle. Different yantras are used to represent each of the chakras, suggesting these are in essence triangular structures that move information from one state of being into another. This is important to understand because the basic building material of your body, as well as of everything in the universe, is composed of triangles. All microorganisms have crystalline structures made of triangles and the other structures, as do all the stars and planets, and everything in between. In this sense, yantras are similar to machines in that they create a whole different forcefield that you can mentally enter into that normally isn’t there without it.

Focusing on yantras, either in your mind with your eyes closed or staring at them with your eyes open, help nullify negative thoughts and emotions, and realign your mind with elevated and expanded levels of consciousness to help address your situations and possibilities more clearly. There are literally hundreds of images online of various arrangements of yantras that you can download to your computer or phone, or print out. Focusing on the traditional yantras of the Hindu chakra system, in particular the anahata (heart) chakra and its various arrangements, is generally a good starting point.

Mind training practices may have a variety of health benefits and may help people improve the quality of their lives. Development of awareness and mental-emotional equanimity through mind training is widely believed to achieve non-judgmental and non-reactive acceptance of various life experiences, which has been associated with positive psychological and physical health outcomes. Many people from around the world use it to manage anxiety, stress, depression, pain, and symptoms related to withdrawal from nicotine, alcohol, or opioids, as well as to improve mental focus and attention, increase creativity, and expand consciousness.

Mind training has been shown to engage the parasympathetic nervous system and reset the body after a stress response. It can lower heart and respiratory rates, decrease blood pressure, and reduce muscle tension and other physical symptoms of stress. Some studies have shown mind training may lower blood markers such as C-reactive proteins, interleukin 6, and cortisol, which become elevated when the body is under stress.

Modern scientific research has linked mind training with downregulation of the sympathetic nervous system, including decreasing heart rate, normalizing breathing, and lowering blood pressure during times of stress. It has been shown to alter networks in the brain and brainwave activity, and change the body’s production of stress hormones and other chemicals that help minimize pain and regulate the emotions.

Using sensitive brain imaging such as MRIs, mind training appears to increase a person’s ability to utilize the higher order, pre-frontal cortex regions of the brain during a “flight or fight response” and access higher levels of consciousness.  In essence, practicing mind training over a long period of time helps buffer the reactive fear center of the brain so that when a person encounters fear, the more thoughtful response center of the brain that governs awareness, concentration and decision-making can take over.