Mind Stew

Do emotions bubble up from nowhere, making you feel unsettled? Do thoughts and feelings surface when you were least expecting it?

Your mind is a big saucepan full of stew. In this stew there are three ingredients:

the onions of physical sensation,

the carrots of thought and

the potatoes of emotion.

These three ingredients bubble away all the time. We’re often so busy on our phones, reading books, bringing up our children, working, playing etc. that we don't pay much attention to the contents of the stew until we hit a problem.

Then, when life then gets stressful, we want to learn how to relax. We want peace of mind. Or maybe that should be peas of mind.

There's a common misconception that when you settle down to a deep relaxation, you’ll quickly float into a place of bliss, and your mind will become quiet and peaceful.

Another misconception is that when you meditate, your mind soon becomes empty and quiet. When this doesn't happen, people become upset and they throw relaxation and mindfulness into the bin, dismissing them as useless rubbish.

Learning to approach relaxation or stress control in the right way can eventually lead to a quieter and calmer inner landscape. The bad news is that it takes time, skill and patience to get more peas into our stew. We can’t just press a button and get instant calm. We can’t just download an app and obtain peace of mind. Maybe there will be one in the future. Maybe there’ll be a gizmo we can plug in just behind one ear allowing us instant calm, but it hasn’t been invented yet. The good news is, there is a way to achieve inner peace naturally – it just takes time and a certain mental attitude.

So let's take a look at this pot of stew. We've got potatoes, onions and carrots, but very few peas. We can't force the peas to arrive. The truth is, the peas are in there, they just have to be allowed to have a voice. I know, I know, peas can't talk. Just bear with me. This is just a simple way of looking at how the mind works so that we can achieve that wonderful sense of inner calm we all crave.

When we relax or try to meditate, we can often feel like our saucepan is overflowing. We thought we had ten carrots in the pan, but when we actually allow a bit of quiet and we focus on our inner world, the carrots seem to be multiplying, even climbing out of the saucepan to attack us. The potatoes of emotion bubble up to the surface. Often potatoes that we felt we’d dealt with long ago, or scary potatoes from the past, that we don't want to look at, pop up to meet us. Then the onions of physical sensation arise. We get an itchy nose, or our legs start hurting because we've been trying to sit in the lotus position for ten hours. Or we’ve got a health issue which hurts and it seems to hurt more when we go quiet.

The first time you look at the saucepan of your mind, the contents can surprise you and sometimes disturb you.

“We had no idea that we had that many carrots in our pan,” we cry.

“This meditation is making things worse.

"This relaxation is making my mind even busier."

"I don't want these emotions."

"My pain is worse.”

"Our saucepan wasn’t as full as this when we started!”

At this point, it's common for people to give up.

Don't worry, the carrots aren’t breeding; they were there all along. It’s just that you’re getting a proper look at the stew, maybe for the first time.

So how does relaxation really work? How do you achieve peace of mind? The trick is to learn to observe the contents of the stew as they bubble up from the bottom of the pan. Allow them to be, without grabbing for the vegetables you want and pushing away the ones you don’t.

Instead of reacting to emotion potatoes or sensation onions, or getting lost in thought carrots, you learn to observe the vegetables of your experience as they rise up from the depths, bubble around a little bit and sink again. You learn to watch them without getting involved. You don't control which vegetable you observe, and you don't respond to the demands of those vegetables unless there is a threat to your immediate surroundings.

So, for example, if the fire alarm goes off, don't sit there observing it calmly — you need to get up and go.

When dealing with chronic or severe pain, there are different kinds of meditation exercises which can be very helpful. In all of them, the first step is learning to observe.

The simple act of observing the vegetables of the mind, without getting involved, is deeply calming to the nervous system. We can't achieve peas in our mental stew by trying to take control.

By letting go, and simply seeing what’s there, we learn to understand ourselves better and then we can take action to make a more harmonious stew.

When we’re observing our vegetables, we need to be compassionate towards ourselves. If we beat ourselves up every time a carrot of thought arises or we tell ourselves to get a grip every time a potato of emotion pops up, or we berate ourselves for being out of condition every time our knees complain when we sit down, we get caught in a vicious cycle of self-alienation. By staying compassionate and kind, we watch each vegetable as it arises and we watch each vegetable as it sinks back down into the stew. We observe these vegetables with kindness and without getting involved. We do this for a set period of time.

This is important. If we were to go around compassionately observing the world all the time without any sense of judgement or action plan, we’d all turn into a mushy pile of goo. The practice of compassionate self-observation can be done for a few minutes or up to an hour. You can set the alarm on your phone, or you can listen to a podcast or a video which will time the meditation for you. When you’re finished, you go back to your normal life.

Over time, repeated relaxation exercises or mindfulness meditation will reduce our stress levels, increase the amount of peas in our stew and decrease the power that our carrots, potatoes and onions have over us.

So we can learn to relax, but we don't do it by grabbing at relaxation. We do it by letting go and observing what is, without being hard on ourselves. We do this using guided meditations, and slowly, over time, we develop the ability to observe without the knee-jerk reaction that we normally have to thoughts, emotions and sensations.