What is a healthy mind?
What is a healthy mind?
One that feels happy all the time? Nah, that's too inflexible. One that has a lot of blood flow to all the areas? Probably.
One that is flexible, able to make connections within itself and with other people?
One that is able to move from one emotion to the next without fear of getting stuck in one of them for too long, or of feeling any of them too deeply.
How can one train oneself to have a healthy mind?
Feeling is how you start.
Making progress over the fear of oneself. What if there was no need to be afraid of yourself? If you didn't have to fear your own thoughts, or your feelings, what would that change for you?
Can we do that, and also not develop a fear of fear?
Richness in life is to delight in feeling and be open to sensory engagement. A healthy mind doesn't put too much pressure on any one thing to be the source of joy, or money, or pleasure.
A healthy mind has emotional awareness and flexibility. It goes up and down and is able to come back again.
A healthy mind has interests that drive it forward in some direction. It expands when it takes in information and when it creates new ideas, assembled from within itself.
A healthy mind knows the spectrum between peace and intensity. Calm and stress are both regular visitors in a healthy mind. There's even a term for healthy stress - eustress.
Most of health is reliant on the idea of a pump. Pressure, release. Up, slow, down, bounce. Muscles contract, and they relax again.
Both sides have their beneficial meanings. Each side is dependent on the other end of the spectrum.
And a healthy mind is able to exist without fear of experiencing itself, much, or at least on the road to accepting more of its capacity.
It's an amazing thing the ways in which humans will avoid fully feeling, which ends up getting them stuck in some middle, half-numb and certainly dissatisfied.
People will live in a house they don't like, for example. They may complain about it all the time but they never move. Or they may talk about all the things they like about it but you kind of know they're lying. What they're doing is stopping themselves from fully feeling what they feel about the house.
Why do they do that?
They're afraid of what they'll think or feel if they do. They might worry they will feel like they're a failure, for example.
They also won't let themselves entertain what it is to have a house that they really love. That has all the things that they really want inside of it, in a neighborhood they really want. They'll be afraid of feeling bad if they let themselves imagine that. So they also don't fully feel in that direction.
So their conversations are mostly involved in small talk and avoidant subjects that don't really get anywhere meaty unless they're about another person. As long as no one in the room is having deeper feelings the conversation is safe.
They end up missing out on depth in life. And they can, for the rest of their lives, if that's what they want.
The funny thing is that if you let yourself feel really deeply and really fully you don't actually know what is going to happen. Things shift in directions you didn't know they would. Often they feel totally resolved without you having to do anything else. You just feel lighter because you finished the emotional arc. It's similar to how I can help someone release a tight muscle by asking them to squeeze it harder. Completing the contraction can let it release.
A healthy mind is one that is open to and capable of feeling what it is capable of feeling.
Everything can be trained, including this.
Healthy mind is part of the coaching focus I enjoy the most.
Come learn how to train your mind, body, and thoughts for health in an online group session on August 6 at 12pm EST. Presale opens tomorrow morning with a 20 dollar discount good for 48 hours. The link will be in the Sunday newsletter. I will post the newsletters here as well, but the newsletter signup is here.
Sam