The mind and its control

I’m on Sark as I type this, the wind howling outside and rain lashing the window, after what was a stunning weekend. Sark is always at its best in spring, the flowers are incredible and it’s quiet, at least compared to the summer.

For me this was my favourite Sark retreat yet, because of its intended intact with only ten students all of whom were keen to do deeper into their practice and their healing and this made such a difference to the group energy. Stocks held us all beautifully, it is a magical spot, and being able to use the Cider Room to practice yoga was amazing, not least because it meant everyone could stay on sight, but because it is a beautiful yoga space.

Retreats always bring stuff up for those of us leading and indeed attending, whether it is overcoming anxiety about the boat, or anxiety about leaving family, or irritation about the room not being just right or annoyance that the food isn’t as tasty as one is anticipating, or the challenges of being in a group environment and all the foibles that we have which might rub each other up the wrong way after a few days spent together, always there is something to learn about ourselves!

I have been learning a lot recently about the nature of the mind’s need to stay in control to appease our underlying fears whether those be around safety, or abandonment, or rejection, or criticism, or whatever theme might weave its way through our lives, often from childhood trauma.

Trauma has a lot to answer for in the way we live our lives and relate to ourselves and others. We have to be careful as we can easily overlook our trauma, assuming that others have suffered more, but trauma doesn’t need to look a certain way, and sometimes it’s the seemingly incongruous stuff, which can traumatise us throughout our lives unless we do the work to heal the root.

I have become increasingly conscious that many of the decisions we may have made during adulthood are in response to trauma and avoiding feeling the feeling that the trauma created in the first place. This can cause the mind to do all sorts of things to avoid those feelings.

At the end of the day, the mind likes to feel that it is in control because then it allows us to feel a sense of safety. The trouble is, when the mind doesn’t feel in control because whatever it does to control is challenged, then we can feel extremely unsettled, and suffer all over again.

For example, there were events in my childhood which caused me to feel unsafe. Each event compounded the one that came before and over time my mind found ways to try to ease my mental (and indeed physical) discomfort. For a good while I felt unsafe going to sleep, not because of my immediate family, but because of a neighbour who liked to spy on me and terrorise me by silent phone calls and being caught wandering around the family home on occasion. I wrote about all this in From Darkness Comes Light so you can read more about the story there.

The point is, that I was scared for the safety of my family, my Mum, my Dad, and my brother, who I loved dearly, we are a close family. I would feel increasing anxiety in my stomach during the evening, not that we knew this was anxiety, we thought it was growing pains, and I developed a fear of being sick. To appease all these fears I started tapping my fingers in an obsessional way along the bed frame, it had to be just so. I also started becoming obsessed about the cleanliness and tidiness of my immediate environment - everything had its place in my bedroom and was colour coded and very today, folded a certain way, hung just so.

Later, in the middle of A-levels and with the fear of going to university and leaving my family ahead, let alone the pressure of A-levels and wanting to go to the university of choice, I developed an eating disorder. This was the ultimate control of my mind really, to completely over ride the needs of my body and determine what I ate and when. I wrote about this in my book too so won’t go on about it here. As you can imagine it wasn’t pleasant, but I see now how it was just my mind trying to bring some semblance of control into my life, to allow me to feel safe.

This because now my mind was constantly busy, thinking about everything being in its place and what I was eating, and so it was consumed by this to the extent that I didn’t feel the feelings in my body so easily. Of course there was a lot of judgement and self criticism too, it is difficult living up to such high expectations for oneself, down to how clothes are folded and how you sign your name on a card - I couldn’t rest easily, couldn’t sleep unless everything was ordered as my mind needed.

At university I discovered that drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis eased the relentless of my mind and caused me not to care quite so much, albeit now I was challenged by the fact I had ‘gone off the rails’ and was behaving in a way that was kind of alien to my soul. Admittedly cannabis was actually helpful from a soulful perspective, as a plant medicine, but of course I wasn’t using it in that capacity, I was experimenting, but also numbing and it was illegal anyway, so that really challenged my ‘good girl’ persona, let alone the damage being done by smoking which concerned me endlessly.

Of course an awful lot has changed over the years and yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda have gifted me healing, transformation and in the process, mental freedom. Yoga of course is all about the mind, about containing it, so that it doesn’t run riot, and so that it is our servant, rather than us being the servant of it. There are levels though and more subtle levels of control at that.

I recently stumbled across more of the mind games, and watched my mind when one of our bags didn’t make it to the place we are staying here on Sark. The bag had our cooker in it for us to cook the boys dinner, and also my organic tea and plant milk, which I really like to drink in the morning, plus Ayurvedic herbs and snacks for the boys etc. The bag not turning up threw my plans and my mind was a touch agitated, not least because we had to find another way to feed the children, and this after having taught yoga when all I wanted to do was lie in a bath, but because I was concerned how I would lead a whole day of yoga and Reiki the next day, without drinking tea!

While on the one hand I was very aware that this was all first world problems and the bag would undoubtably turn up at some point, my mind was agitated to the extent that I dreamt of organic hazelnut milk and I woke a little disgruntled that I didn’t have any Ashwaganda to take, nor any tea to drink. Of course there was tea at the place we were staying, but I don’t really like drinking black tea in bleached teabags because my mind knows that is not all together good for you, or the environment, and it can be harsh on the stomach.

Yet I drank it and survived and as the day unfolded I began to realise that the bag getting lost was actually the universe helping me to see more of my mental patterning and need for control, and the way in which the mind can so easily be thrown off balance. At the end of the day, the mind likes to feel in control because that makes it feel safe, and when the mind isn’t in control it gets completely thrown and we can lose our centre, becoming stressed, anxious and/or irritable; just feeling uneasy if nothing else.

I began to see much more clearly, how the decisions we make, are not necessarily made from a place of heart or flow, but from a place of avoiding the feeling of discomfort of the unknown. And actually this is exactly what spiritual practice gifts us over time - the ability to settle more easily into the unknown and uncertain. Because let’s face it, the future is unknown and uncertain, so the more comfortable we can get with that, the less triggered we are when things don’t go to plan.

We have to remember that the mind knows only what it has experienced in the past. So it will use the past as a reference point. If we have suffered trauma in the past, it will do all it can to avoid further trauma by creating patterns that it feels will help us avoid experiencing those feelings again. So in relationships if we have suffered abandonment or rejection we will do all we can to avoid this happening again, which might cause us to make ourselves invaluable to the other person, mothering them, or over giving to them, somehow making them dependent on us to get their needs met, so that they won’t abandon or reject us.

This might mean that we negate our own needs, and can end up in unhealthy and toxic relationships, or one of co-dependence. It might also mean that we compromise our sense of self. I think it was Gabor Mate in his latest book who wrote about the choice we have as children, to be authentic or to receive the attention of care givers, that often we have to choose between the two, and frequently we give up being ourselves and our authenticity, in our quest to receive attention. We can take this into our future relationships unless we are onto it and realise what is driving our choices sub consciously.

Furthermore, if we have a pattern around feeling unsafe, then we may sub-consciously seek a partner who makes us feel safe, but again, while that need may be met, to appease our mind and the effect of our trauma, we may negate other needs and put up with certain unhealthy behaviours and ways of being, such as allowing outlives to be controlled, which in some strange way makes us feel safe, and yet at the same time can limit our potential.

Often what we think is love is trauma bonding, where we come together with another with similar trauma so we understand each other, but again, unless we are consciously working to heal our past and set ourselves free from the mental patterning that arose from the trauma, then we end up stuck together, almost feeding each other’s trauma and ways of being that are again, not always healthy, whether that be over drinking, taking drugs, over working or obsessionally exercising together etc.

Of course our unresolved trauma and the mental patterning, habits and behaviours, can cause us to do all sorts of things like keep super busy so that we don’t have to feel - and of course this has been normalised in our society so is not seen as a problematic per se, at least not as an avoidance of deeper work. It’s the same with work, if we work excessively, also normalised in our society, then this also keeps the mind busy so that it doesn't need to fret about the unknown and the uncertain.

We can get very good at planning too, and organising, again, trying to make the unknown future known and certain. This too is normalised as a society where we are constantly encouraged to plan ahead, whether that be for Christmas, Easter or the summer holidays, or work meetings or whatever it may be, we can easily schedule our year so that our mind feels more comfortable knowing what is ahead - or what it thinks is ahead, because of course plans change.

The universe you see - especially if we are doing this work - has a habit of throwing in curved balls just to remind us that we are not in control and life is not known and certain. The pandemic was a classic example of this and look how it shocked everyone and caused a huge loss of mental wellness. The vaccine was an attempt to restore order, try and show that us humans are in control, but everything is subject to cause and effect.

It is interesting when we start looking at our lives and enquiring into the underlying reason for our choices, love or fear? So many choose occupations, not necessarily for the love of it, but because of avoiding their fear of say, not having enough money, or not being accepted by friends of family, or being judged differently, or needing to prove one’s worth externally, or needing to keep busy so as to avoid feeling, or being judged for being lazy, or not good enough, or all the other drivers which underlie our decision making.

To choose from the heart, to follow a path of love, is not easy. We can sometimes kid ourselves, as I have done at times, that we are living from the heart, but sometimes that love is conditional on getting a certain need met, and if that need is one of avoiding feeling our fear, then we are coming from a place of fear ultimately, and not love - the mind controls the heart. Loving unconditionally is challenging, as it demands a certain vulnerability, it asks us to let go of trying to control it and just be open to life and our experiences as they unfold without trying to control them or add conditions to them.

This is where yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda take us, to a place of unconditional love, which means we have to keep letting go of the conditions, and the control, and learn to love and accept ourselves and others as they are, making conscious choices, not from fear and avoiding more trauma, but from the heart, taking leaps of faith and consistently stepping into the unknown and the uncertain.

The more we can heal our trauma and understand the effect this had on the mind, the more easily we can start to notice the patterns in our life and do something to let them go, to move from a place of fear to one of love instead. The more we heal and let go of the underlying fear, which causes us to place protection around our heart, to hold an ‘edge’ in our energy field, then the more the heart opens and we feel this wonderful way of love, everything brightens, our spirit lifts and we are lighter energetically, less weighed down by the past.

It is my experience that it is worth going to those shadow places, to set our minds free of our past and future, orientating our mind into the present, progressively identifying and letting go of our mental patterning which keeps us small and limited and feeling falsely safe and expands so much energy in maintaining the status quo. It’s always interesting what these enquiries reveal, helping us to realise how much of our lives are lived unconsciously, driven by fear.

Over time this does shift, yoga, Reiki, Ayurveda all help, to connect us into the heart and essentially set our mind free so that we suffer less, and open to greater love in the process - softening our edges - and it might be this, this softening, this opening, this just being with whatever is arising in the moment and sitting with it as it passes through us, that might just change the world into a more harmonious and loving place to live - this because whatever it on the inside will be reflected on the outside - a chaotic mind creates a chaotic world, a fearful mind creates a fearful world, so love will create more of a loving world, and this will ultimately lead to greater freedom.

Happy wax and delving into the shadows!

Love Emma x