WEEKLY VLOG #5:
3 REASONS WHY I CAN‘T CALM DOWN
Transcript
Hello and welcome! Dear wonderful people!
I am Totally Zen Tadeja from Andromeda Yoga Atelier. Every Thursday I am going to answer a real-time question we might all be struggling with considering yoga, mental health, and well-being. If you have a question post it in the comments down below.
The vlog is specially dedicated to people who are:
- Tired
- Tired of being tired and
- Tired of explaining how tired they are to everyone else.
You can substitute the word tired with exhausted, feeling blue, stuck, busy… Whatever pops in your head. USE THAT!
And today’s vlog question is:
Why I can‘t calm down?
Two weeks ago at my weekly yoga biz accountability meeting with my wonderful accountability partner Hedvika, I pitched her the idea for this vlog. She thought it was quite a comical contrast between being tired and yet not being able to calm down at the same time and she was right. If you ever sat in silence for long periods and had nothing to do you might have noticed that your mind is full of chatter. In Buddhist philosophy, this kind of mind is often described as the monkey mind and this monkey mind is sometimes really hard to calm down.
Here are my three reasons why:
- rumination,
-
being busy all the time,
-
and not saying say “no” often enough.
1. Rumination
A lot of times our thoughts, especially the negative ones, become so automated that we don‘t notice them anymore. You can imagine as if our brain is hard-wired on this Debby Downer auto-pilot. What we do notice is that at the end of the day we feel drained, tired, or moody without even knowing why. This type of thinking is called rumination. Rumination is a deep or considered thought about something. Sometimes thinking about everything is an advantage and it might keep us from hurting ourselves and others. But if you have already bought the curtains, a carpet, and a sofa for that comfy but very limiting space in your head, it might be also holding you back. I know thinking about everything makes you feel like you are at least doing something but it takes an incredible amount of energy to keep this process going. …and you are not really, really doing anything. You could be using this energy for doing yoga, for example, or whatever brings you joy in your life.
2. Being busy all the time
Rumination is only one type of compulsive behavior we might use to maintain the feeling that we are useful, doing at least something to solve a problem, or that we are enough. Is your calendar packed with activities 24/7? Even if they are hobbies or just meeting friends? Doing something, no matter what, always gave me validation and it was an external source of feel-good emotions for me, just like a high. The problem was, that the thoughts I was avoiding through packing my calendar full with tasks, would pop up at worst times like 5 minutes before bedtime. Before I started yoga I started meditating and meditation is precisely the time for your brain to do nothing and this time is essential for your brain, to rest, to create, to regenerate, and to be happy, so you can be happy.
3. Not saying “no” often enough
At this point, you might say that all that has been said is wonderful but you just can‘t meditate or shut all the obsessive thoughts down. The good news is, you shouldn‘t. You should let your mind do the work for you on its own. After a while of maybe doing yoga where you are focusing on the poses, the breath, the balance, and many more factors, your mind will figure it out for itself. Or you can maybe just take a short walk. What is important is that you don’t fight your mind, think about inviting it to just maybe see the world from another viewpoint. Where you have to set boundaries is with things, thoughts, people, relationships, events, spaces, etc. that are not contributing to your well-being. It is crucial to draw the line and just decide you want a better, more happier life for yourself and you deserve it and you are more than capable to handle the change.
To conclude, our minds are these beautiful, complex, intricate places. They have our best interest at heart and want to protect us, but sometimes they can just make us cray cray! So my advice is to just let the mind go a little cray cray at first, accept it, and then just slowly send the critical thoughts away on a train to the crazy town. But keep please, please keep the good one! At all cost!
With that thought I bow the head to the heart; may the wisdom of the body and the wisdom of the mind unite together to support our collective healing and evolution.
