Ah, spring – the time of year when birds mate, trees bud, and people clean. The tradition of spring cleaning has its roots in our agricultural past. Over the cold winter months, smaller livestock were kept indoors for warmth and safety. Spring’s higher temperatures meant that the livestock could once again be placed outside, and the house, as you might imagine, needed deep cleaning (and a lot of fresh air). While most of us don’t have livestock today, we still celebrate spring as an opportunity for cleansing and renewal. This year, in addition to cleaning your living space, why not go a step further and “spring clean” your mind?
The importance of mental spring cleaning is easy to overlook, because the residue – from old relationships, childhood traumas, and unfulfilled ambitions – is invisible. And yet as pressing as the physical objects in our lives may feel, what’s really pressing – depressing,
in fact – are the mental objects in our subconscious minds. Even if we don’t consider our issues heavy, the smallest amount of stress or self-judgment is unnecessary and weighs down our experience of life.
“But doesn’t time heal all wounds?” you might ask. Time heals physical wounds, but when it comes to psychological ones, time does very little. Just look at the people you know who are carrying pain or resentment from decades ago. Time may distract us or give our experience a protective veneer of rationalization, but it doesn’t heal us. True healing comes from one thing, and that’s insight.
Of course, if enough time passes, we often stumble across an insight – we may realize, for example, that the person who did that terrible thing to us years ago wasn’t really evil, or that the significant other you couldn’t live without wasn’t so significant. This is the “Citizen Kane” approach to self-realization – the insight bubbles up, but slowly and accidentally, without full awareness. Once you see that it is insight (not time) that drives psychological transformation, you have a very powerful ingredient in your mental spray bottle. Insight, in fact, is the wonder solvent of the mind – able to not only heal all wounds, but also dissolve stress, melt anxiety, and break down even the stickiest judgments of yourself and others.
Take, for example, the commonly held belief that “I’ll be happier when I have more money.” The first thing to realize is that what we really want is peace and happiness, not money. Money is just a means. We think that when we have money (or a partner, more sex, a better house, a leaner body, etc.), then we’ll be happier. But what’s making us unhappy now isn’t the lack of these things, but the beliefs themselves. After all, some people have plenty of money and are miserable, and others have almost no money (like children) and are living very happily. Happiness and unhappiness are functions of our belief system, not of our material circumstances.
Consequently, when we see through our stressful beliefs using insight, we experience greater peace even though our material reality hasn’t changed. And as a result, instead of being weighed down by stress and frustration, we have greater energy, clarity, and joy to find new jobs, exercise, meet people, and change our world.
So how do we have insights into the issues we experience as stressful? Seeing through a belief means deeply realizing it to be false (no one holds on to a belief that they don’t think is true). “I need more money.” “I want to lose weight.” “My partner should treat me better.” Can you see how these beliefs are false? By identifying and questioning the mistaken assumptions that give stressful beliefs their power, we open ourselves up to deeper levels of insight and freedom. Even though we don’t sweat, it’s a real workout. Most of us aren’t used to stretching the mental muscles that make insight practical and effective.
Of course, we can continue living amidst the mental clutter in our lives just as we can the physical, and the truth is most people will never know. But we’ll know. Those of us ready to question our negative beliefs will find that the benefits of mental spring cleaning go far beyond a tidy living space. Through insight, we find ourselves with a lighter heart, a quieter mind, and a deeper appreciation of the gift of life – with or without livestock.
Andy Bernstein is the founder of Mental Yoga, a non-physical process that combines the deep-mind journey of meditation with the easy-to-follow format of an exercise program. mentalyoga.com
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