Get to know your mind and brain E38
April 19, 2022
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Today I want to look a bit closer at the difference between our mind and our brain. I will give you my 2 cents on this and then I introduce you a bit more to ýour mind so you can say help and get to know each other better. How does that sound? Well, let’s begin!
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Our mind is elusive. Our mind is powerful. And our mind is limited. You might ask how these things can all be true together. That´s what we are going to discover today.
Our minds and our thoughts are something that we humans have not yet figured out. We know parts of it but we cannot explain its origin and how it fully works. If we would know already everything there is to know about the mind, we would not have a rise in mental health issues in our world.
But that is not important for us to be able to start using our minds for our wellbeing, our health and for our purpose. Enough people have figured this out in all ages of the human race, it just seems we keep forgetting or maybe until now we have not given our mind enough attention as we have done to our body.
Move our focus to the health of our mind
Our mind is a word to describe various mental activities like thinking, imagining, and remembering. All of these activities are more elusive because we cannot grasp them with our 5 senses. That might be a reason why the human race has tackled knowing everything about the body first – it was just easier. Now we are coming into an age where our mental health becomes more important – it feels like we neglected it for long enough.
On the one side, we are able to treat so many illnesses of the body yet a lot of people are now dying from illnesses caused by our lifestyle. Most of the top 5 illnesses causing death are related to how we live and to the stress levels in our life. And that´s where the mind and our mindset start to play a significant role. We know what stress looks like and how it makes us feel and how it makes our body weaker and sick, but we have not figured out yet how to change our human mindset to avoid us falling ill from stress in the first place.
So this is the perfect time for us all to learn more about our minds. And even if it is elusive, we are able to manage it and apply rules and practices to our lives to make it work more for us than against us.
Difference between the mind and the brain
There is a debate about our mind and our brain which I want to clarify. Our brain is part of our body, an organ, it is something we can see and in some cases, like a doctor even touch. The brain is a significant physical part of our mind. When we have a thought, transmission of impulses is happening between the nerve cells in our brain. Every thought creates a reaction in the brain.
We know that memories are stored in various sections of the brain. We know that our brain receives signals all the time. It’s like a radio receiver and translates all the signals into impulses, chemicals, and anything the body needs to live life. There are people that believe that our mind is the brain and solely physical. But our brain is just the instrument. The thoughts that we are having are not coming from the brain but from our mind. Our mind is non-physical and uses the brain to manage our existence.
For many people, the mind and brain are interchangeable
They use one word or the other to talk about the same thing: the organ in our skull that we use to think. The mind uses the brain, and the brain responds to the mind. The mind also changes the brain. People choose their actions through mental activities —their brains do not force them to do anything.
The brain is the physical organ of the body that is present in the skull inside the head of all animals and humans. This part of the body governs all the activities performed by us like a central processing unit in your computers. It consists of tissues and nerve cells that are very complex with different sections dedicated to carrying out different specific functions. And it is connected to all parts of the body through nerve cells and neurons that transfer the external signals inside of our body.
The brain is also responsible for experiencing different feelings and depositing these feelings as memories in their designated sections. All these experiences collectively develop into a definite identity of a person and are termed the mind. It is not tangible like the brain but creates the thought process and perception ability of a person.
Get to know your mind
Our mind I immensely powerful as it keeps us living our lives. It is divided between the conscious mind, the subconscious and the unconscious mind. Our conscious mind is what we are mostly aware of, the thoughts that we have, and what we are aware of currently happening around us.
The mind that is aware is just a small part of the totality of the mind. It is just 5% of the mind that we are actively using. The rest, so 95% is made up of our subconscious and unconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is running all of our autonomic processes. It makes sure that our heart is beating, it makes sure that you are digesting your food and it makes sure that you keep breathing.
You don’t have to spend much thought on this in your waking hours, right? After a meal, you don’t sit for hours controlling the process of digestion. It just happens. Well, not really. It happens because it is managed by a part of the mind that we are directly in control of. The unconscious stores all repressed thoughts and feelings, it is the history of our past and memories that we are not aware of. Today we want to focus more on our conscious mind because that is the one we can manage better.
What is the analytical mind?
Part of our conscious mind is our analytical mind. This is the mind that we mostly use to live our lives. The analytical mind is doing the thinking, coming to conclusions based on a thinking process and helping us make decisions. It helps us solve problems by thinking through the problem and trying to come up with the right solution. Every analytical mind can look different based on the individual’s nature and nurture. It can vary in how sceptical it is, or how open or closed off to new information or perspectives.
Our analytical mind has its obvious benefits, but it has also limitations. I will explain more soon. Our analytical mind is the one that we have the greatest influence on. It is so much closer to us than the subconscious or unconscious mind which means we are able to change it, transform it and develop it. It´s the gateway to making changes in the subconscious mind.
If you understand your mind better and know how it works, you can start making adjustments, overwriting and changing it to help you live a better life. A huge part of the human race is just not aware of how to influence the mind for our own good – it´s not like we have a subject at school called “Master your Mind”. That´s why we are going to learn it now as adults and start taking advantage of this knowledge by applying it to our lives.
Get to know your conscious analytical mind
So, let´s get to know our analytical or conscious minds a bit better. It helps us make sense of our environment, to chose between options and take the next step in any situation we are in. The analytical mind helps us to go to school and complete it, it helps us to get a job or build a business and decide how we want to live our life.
It wants us to be safe and don’t get hurt. So it alarms us if there is danger and protects the body from being harmed. With all of this goodness that the analytical mind does, it comes with some limitations which are important for you to become aware of.
The first limitation is that it works from a defined amount of information. Remember that I mentioned that we take in information all our lives which gets stored in our memories and our subconscious mind? What that means is that it just uses the data that it has collected over the length of this life.
Sure, there is information specific to our species that gets transferred through DNA. But the data I am talking about is the one that we use to make decisions in everyday life. Not one single person can experience everything there is, or that we so far know of. That means that the data set is limited instead of unlimited.
Your conscious mind likes you to stay in your comfort zone
If you want to experience something completely new or manifest something new into your life, that you never experienced before, your analytical mind can stand in your way. Remember that it wants you to be safe and unharmed. And the unknown is going to be an unsafe and dangerous option for the analytical mind. It´s like an overbearing parent that is scared for you to go out into the big world. It does not mean to, but the mind can keep you from going for your dream, from you taking a leap of faith or taking some uncalculated but exciting risk. Oh, it really does not like risk! It does not like ambiguity! And for sure, it does not like uncertainty!
It wants to stay in its comfort zone and best not take any risks. And generally, this is good, it keeps us alive instead of dying very quickly from taking risks every minute of every day. Just imagine you would drive your car without following any traffic rules or close your eyes when driving a bike. So most of the time, how the analytical mind is structured and works are beneficial for us.
And then there are the times we do want to step out of our comfort zone, take some risks for the first time in our life and experience something wildly different. In these cases, our minds can keep us stuck in one place for a long time and potentially forever and we might never take that step or that risk.
How to overcome the boundaries of our mind
Can you see how your mind can hold you back? To overcome it, all you need to do is be aware of it. If you are in such a situation, you want to step into the role of the observer. That helps you to check in and observe what your thoughts are.
Being aware of these thoughts you can reflect if they are useful and valid, or if they are standing in your way of joy and happiness. If they are holding you back, you have the opportunity to let them go and change your thinking. It might either just need this one intervention or you might need to catch it a few times before it lets go of the old and implements a new way of thinking.
“The good news is it can be done, you can change how your mind is thinking and you can stop it from having thoughts that just don’t serve you anymore.”
A good way to train your mind is to be more open-minded and to keep learning and acquiring new knowledge. Quite often people that are very set in their ways, narrow-minded and don’t ever consider new perspectives or opinions have stopped learning. They might think they know it all already but as I said before, not one conscious mind has experienced it all and therefore knows it all.
Keep learning to expand your mind and horizon
Especially the actual life experience. Lots of people think they know something just because they have read or heard about it, but true knowledge is through experience. Just because you read a book about swimming, does not mean that you are able to swim. You will just know that you can swim if you actually do it and experience the act of swimming. Then the information you absorbed through the book turns into knowing: Yes, I can swim.
People who keep their minds open to new knowledge, new perspectives, and for other opinions have more exciting experiences in their life. That’s for sure! Let new information in, don’t discard it from the outset. Be curious about life and miracles and be eager to learn and experience something new.
Just because we have left school and university does not mean that we should stop to learn. We want to keep learning in our work, we want to keep learning about the world around us. We want to stay with the curve of the development of the human race. If we stop learning, we will fall further back as time goes on.
Get to know the thoughts you are having
If you wish to achieve something in your life that has not come true yet, you can check your thoughts and see if there is something that can use some adjustment. You could write down all of the thoughts that come up on a certain topic. Sit in silence and let it all come up, write it down and keep writing for a while. You might be surprised what comes up.
“Ask yourself: Is there anything that I think is standing in my way? Just by asking this question your analytical mind HAS TO answer this question.”
It might not give you the answer straight away. Be patient, it might show up in a few hours or days. That´s why asking ourselves meaningful questions is so helpful. The mind is constructed to answer every question it gets.
Access new information through meditation
We talked about how important it is to access new information in the physical world. But you can access new information outside of the physical world through meditation. By moving into the meditative state your brain moves into certain brainwaves that switch off the analytical mind.
Your brain is like a radio station that constantly receives information but our analytical mind does stop a lot of that information from coming in, it acts as a filter – as we discussed before, it just likes what it likes. So switching off the analytical mind, stopping our mind from thinking and slowing our brain waves down in meditation, opens our subconscious mind to receive unfiltered information.
And this information is not coming from the physical world
Because you have closed your eyes, you can’t hear anything other than music, you don’t feel your body. So now new information from other sources can come into your brain.
This is information all around us. Information from nature, from the universal energy, from your higher self, from your god. It does not matter what you call it or what you want to believe where this information comes from. When you move into the meditative state and you take your attention away from your environment, your body and your mind, new information comes into you.
“This is good information, this is information of harmony, this is information that can heal your body and your mind, this is information of the divine.”
You might not feel it happening but it happens anyway. The radio antenna in your brain gets activated and you could have sensations. If you do, it means you are receiving new information, and your system is being upgraded biologically, mentally and spiritually. So don’t shy away from new sensations while you meditate. You are receiving information from source.
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