Session 1: The Mind
Positive Affirmation: My mind is a gift that was given to me for my use. The quality of my life is determined by the choices I make, not the thoughts in my mind.
Seamus: In this chapter of the book, you deal with the mind. You start things off by describing three types of thoughts: untrue, unreal, and other people’s thoughts. Can you expand on that a little bit for us, Ned?
Ned: Yes. I’m going to back up a little bit here first. We have thousands of thoughts every day. It’s suggested that the average person has 60,000 to 100,000 thoughts per day. Out of the thoughts that you’re having daily, there is a portion of those thoughts that are not real, not true, and not yours.
This was something I learned during my time with the Ishaya monks. Thoughts drop into your mind. We have no control over what thoughts come to us. Can you tell me what your next thought’s going to be?
Seamus: No.
Ned: You could decide what you’re going to think about. For example, you could say “I’m going to think about drums for five minutes and twenty seconds,” and do that. We can time it down to the second, but in the next millisecond we don’t know what thought is going to drop into our mind.
I will break it down for you. There are thoughts that are not yours. This is the one I had a problem with. When the Ishayas told me, “Some of your thoughts are not yours,” the first thought that came to me was, “There can’t be anyone else thinking in my head.” But when I started to observe my thoughts and take inventory of them, I noticed that I had a lot of thoughts that were things my parents had said to me. There were things in my mind that my friends had said, and there were thoughts that my brother had said to me. My mind was full of other people’s words, words that were not my own.
Then there was a portion of my thoughts that were not true. My mind would have random thoughts dropping into it. For example, while I’m sitting here with you, my mind could suddenly say, “I don’t think Seamus likes me.” I noticed that random stuff just pops into my mind. Just because a thought drops into you doesn’t make it true.
Sometimes when we back up from them, we realize that some thoughts are assumptions not based in any logic or truth. A portion of those 100,000 thoughts coming to us every day are untrue.
Then there are the thoughts that are not real. I categorize these thoughts as the thoughts we are having about the past or future. If the thoughts dropping into your mind are not about what’s unfolding now, I label them unreal, because it’s not happening now.
Those are the three types of thoughts that I categorize in my book.
I also say that the thoughts dropping into your mind are not you. You are not your thoughts.
Seamus: I’m not my thoughts? If I’m not my thoughts, then who am I? Where do thoughts come from. in that case?
Ned: I’ll throw this back at you. If you couldn’t think, would you die? Would you cease to exist?
Seamus: No. I’d still be here, wouldn’t I?
Ned: We tend to think that who we are is found in the collection of thoughts that are dropping into our mind. We are a soul. We are not a collection of thoughts. Thoughts are just energy moving. What makes a thought come alive is the attention and the energy that we put into it. Let’s say you have a thought drop in your mind, like “Let’s ask Ned if he wants to do a podcast.” You could have let that thought go, but since you didn’t, that thought has taken on its own life. Now we’re sitting here and we’re recording a podcast.
A thought has as much life as we give it. It’s not who we are. However, we tend to wrap our identity around the thoughts that are dropping into our mind. Who we are is a soul. The truth of our being resides beneath our thoughts.
“I remember the old man who said he had had a great many troubles in his life, but the worst of them never happened.”
– James A. Garfield
Seamus: I see. Let’s talk about untrue thoughts for a minute. Let’s say I’m self-conscious socially and whenever I’m in a crowd of people, I feel that I stand out in a bad way because maybe something happened to me years ago that was embarrassing. Then from there on out, I feel like those thoughts stick to me a little bit. Every time I’m in a social situation, I’m always thinking that all eyes are on me.
How do we shake off past experiences so they don’t influence us?
Ned: It starts with noticing. If you have an awareness of your tendency to have certain thoughts, you can choose to not think about them when they arise. Our awareness is the start of how we change our relationship to that thought. We tend to place all our attention on our mind. We get kind of stuck there. When we pull back from our thoughts a little bit and watch the mind, that’s how we start to change our relationship with our thoughts.
Seamus: What do you mean by watching your thoughts?
Ned: It’s the difference between playing baseball or watching baseball. When you’re playing it, you’re in it.
Seamus: How do you watch your thoughts?
Ned: You pull back. If you’re watching baseball, you sit back in the stands. Your attention is not in your head. You’re just watching the mind like it’s a movie. That changes your position to your thoughts. It’s the difference between playing a game of baseball and watching a game.
Seamus: With that knowledge, let’s assume that people begin to watch their thoughts. How can you be so sure that you’re actually watching them and not dwelling on them? I see that as being kind of a fine line before you start investing in them, versus just watching them.
Ned: Dwelling on them would be your response to the thought. Watching the thought is not a response. Watching your thoughts is the ability to not talk back to the thoughts that are coming into your mind. You would be having a commentary with your thoughts if you were dwelling on them. If you’re simply watching your thoughts, they keep moving. Thoughts don’t stop and stay suspended in you. They come in and they keep moving until they move out of you. What holds the thought in place is your commentary. When you talk to your thoughts, they stay active in you.
Seamus: You don’t want to take ownership of the thought? You just want to say, “That’s going through my head, but I’m not going to engage with that.”
Ned: That’s right. You do that silently. You learn how to pull back and watch. I do mentoring with people in the community. It’s one of the first things I do when people come in to see me. I ask them to watch their thoughts and start taking inventory. It’s a critical step toward changing your relationship with your thoughts. Getting away from the thoughts that are self-defeating starts with understanding what’s happening in your mind. There are a lot of subconscious thoughts going on.
I want to ask readers to take inventory of their thoughts. Have a pen and paper handy for the next week and chart your thoughts. See what’s happening in your mind.
Seamus: You say we have thousands of thoughts every single day, and that sixty to eighty percent of them are the same thoughts you had yesterday. Is this true for every single person who takes inventory of their thoughts?
Ned: If you were to move away from your town and go back twenty years later, you’d probably find the same people telling the same stories, in the same spots, doing the same things day in, day out. This information—that sixty to eighty percent of our thoughts are the same day in, day out—was taken from a university study, I believe. The mind is literally on repeat and we don’t realize it.
In a healthy relationship with your mind, you learn how to pull back and not be affected by your thoughts, not to continuously think about the same things. The mind’s going to do what it’s going to do. It’s going to keep dropping the same thoughts on you. What keeps those thoughts alive is you grabbing on to them and thinking about them.
Seamus: Many of the thoughts that enter your mind provoke a feeling. Certain things will make people feel uncomfortable, certain things will make you feel sad, happy, angry—you name it. What if my feelings suddenly become overwhelming? How do I stop that?
Ned: It takes practice. We start out with understanding what’s in the mind, and then we look at our relationship with the thoughts that are coming to us. Notice, when certain thoughts arise, that we have a relationship with them. The practice is to stop ourselves from thinking about every thought that comes to mind.
If we practice this in our good times, it can be more of an automatic response in times of struggle. When you are having a dreadful day, you will already have this practice in place. For example, if you were tying a tarp up in the middle of a hurricane this would not be the time to learn how to tie knots. You want to practice this in your everyday life.
Seamus: In other words, we need to start putting this into motion before we have an experience that provokes thoughts that are potentially quite dangerous to us.
Ned: That’s right. If our feelings become overwhelming, this may be a warning that our relationship with our thoughts is out of balance. It could be a sign there’s something we need to heal in ourselves, or that we’re out of balance in that area of our life. Generally, the thoughts that become overwhelming to me are the parts of me that I wasn’t willing to look at or the parts of me that needed some love and healing.
Seamus: I want to ask how you identify what those things are. Could it be traumas, severe embarrassment, an abusive relationship with family, or any of those types of things that happened when you’re young? Especially when we’re more vulnerable in adolescence and we don’t really have ourselves emotionally together yet. Things have a way of penetrating us deeply. How do we find what those things are?
Ned: They’re triggers. This is a topic that we’re going to go into a little bit deeper as we get further into this dialogue. There are triggers that are signalling a wound from the past to come forward. They bring up the past in us. If you feel insecure and something threatens you or makes you feel insignificant, you may jump on that right away and attack me, or in your mind you might start having an overwhelming number of thoughts. You’re being triggered in that moment.
Once we start to back up from the mind and understand what’s happening in it, then we can start to see these triggers more clearly. Then, we can trace them back to the events that are surrounding the circumstances of what we’re being triggered by.
“Your true self is found under the voice in your head. It is by going deeper into yourself that you discover a greater depth to your existence.”
Seamus: That’s really fascinating to me. Now, in the preface we were talking about tattooing as being this thing that made you feel good. You often talk about this “zone.” All my musician friends understand what that means. You, in fact, describe it as the silence. You describe it a few ways in the book, but it all embraces the same result.
Is being in the silence or zone a temporary distraction? If you practice letting go of your mind, it can temporarily relieve you of a lot of stress. Talk to me more about the silence. Tell me about what that is and how it impacts us.
Ned: First off, the silence is more than a distraction. It takes us into the totality of all that is, for within the silence, we find the source of who and what we are. When we come to the silence, we often we just dip our toe into it; we have mini experiences that can be peaceful. This is what happened to me when I was tattooing: I was dipping my toe into the silence. I was beginning to have experiences with this place within myself.
A lot of people try meditation and just barely dip their toe in it and then conclude that it’s nothing. We find the pure essence of the divine in us through entering the silence.
Thomas Troward is one of my favourite authors. He was an author from the New Thought movement. Here’s something he once said.
“If we approach the ocean with a small cup and only leave with a small cup of water, we then cannot say that the ocean was not bountiful, that the ocean held back from giving to us. What we need to do is approach the ocean with a bigger cup.”
The thing about the silence: as you dive deeper and deeper into yourself, you realize that the silence is a vast ocean inside of us.
Seamus: You and I are both creative. I’m musician and I do this podcast, and you’re a tattoo artist and author as well. That is an opportunity for you to experience the zone or the silence. Now, what I question is if there are people in the world who don’t consider themselves to be creative but who may be trying to relate to this conversation. How do they find the silence? Maybe they don’t have an outlet. Can you find the silence in everyday activity?
Ned: They have as much access to the silence as we do. A phrase that my old teacher used to say all the time: “The silence is as close as your next breath.” The silence in you never leaves. It’s part of us that we can learn how to relax into.
There are many ways to go into the silence, any task that we do repetitively can drive us into singular or one-pointed focus. When we become one-pointed, we become focused on only one thing. By sharpening our focus on one thing, we stop all the chatter in the mind, making it easier to slip into the silent space found inside us. You don’t have to be an artist to do that. It can happen while washing dishes—suddenly, the silence arises. You could be out for a walk and the silence in you could spring forth. It’s a matter of taking our attention and placing it inward, toward the heart, going a little bit deeper in ourselves and removing the attention that we place on our mind.
Seamus: Are you suggesting that it is more important to identify what the silence is rather than what you must do to achieve it? Am I understanding that correctly?
Ned: It doesn’t matter what route we take to go into the silence. There’s no one single way to go into that silent place in ourselves. You focus your attention inward toward your heart, which in turn leads you into your soul.
Seamus: It’s just being more present, being more present in the moment. Will that achieve that result too?
Ned: Yes, it helps.
Seamus: Something else that you talk about in the book that I find interesting is how your mind has a way of organizing your life in a linear fashion—say, A to B, to C. But you’re suggesting that life moves more like A to R, to H to Q. Life itself is non-sequential. Your mind likes to predict outcomes, and then we in turn start to create expectations. I want to a quote a sentence from the book: “Anger is unfulfilled expectations.”
What kind practices can be employed to eliminate expectations from our lives, so we can allow our life to unfold?
Ned: The quote you pulled out of the book, “Anger is unfulfilled expectations,” has an interesting story. I used to do hands-on healing work for a chiropractic doctor from Stratford. He was friends with the doctor who gave me the books in the story I told in the introduction of this book.
He was an older gentleman; his name was John Dunfield. He used to come once a week to see me. He was an interesting guy, to say the least.
This story takes place during one of John’s visits with me. So, John walks in and I’m pissed. I knew right away he would have a good sense of where I was at. John was a very observant kind of guy. I said, “John, I’m really angry today. Just give me a second to check myself here.”
He says to me, “What did you expect?”
I’m like, “What do you mean?”
He says, “What did you expect? You’re angry, right?”
I said, “Yes, I’m angry. I’m pissed off.”
“Well, what did you expect?” he says again. “You must have expected something to go a certain way and when it didn’t you got angry. Is this the grounds for your anger?”
I said, “Yes. It’s like you know what happened. How did you know that?”
He said, “That’s the problem with anger. It’s unfulfilled expectation.”
That quote has come to me so many times over the years and has become a wonderful tool and reminder for me. How that relates to what you said a few seconds ago, the mind assembles things in a linear fashion. We tend to think life is rolling out A to B to C, but life is actually happening in a nonlinear way, A to P to Q to R.
Because the mind tracks events this way, it tends to predetermine outcomes based on the past or the assumptions of the mind. It likes to predetermine what’s going to happen in the next ten yards of life.
We eliminate this by staying in the moment and letting go of the mind. If we could do that, a great deal of our expectations would naturally dissolve, and we could more easily allow life to unfold the way it’s going to. The thing is, we can’t force life to fit into the narrowness of our mind. Life is such a vast, complex equation. We try to squeeze that vast equation to fit that narrow view of our thoughts and ideas as to how we think it should unfold.
“Life is very seldom going to meet your expectations.”
It’s not going to fit into your predetermined outcomes. When we try to force it into that, that’s the grounds for a great deal of our upsets in life.
Seamus: If we have a lifetime of thinking this way, and this is the way we are developing as people, how long does it take to change this line of processing? How challenging could it be for someone to switch their way of thinking, to let their life unfold, put their mind down? That seems like quite a tremendous task—to put the mind down and let things unfold. How long did it take you to develop that ability?
Ned: I’m still working on it. It’s a concept until it becomes a practice. Then it starts to become your response. Eventually, when we keep setting the mind down and allowing the moment to present what’s actually here, we start to catch and understand the sacredness of what’s going on around us. That’s something that the mind can’t perceive—the vastness of this moment. Again, this a preview of what we’re going to talk about in session five. We’re going to go really deep into the topic of the vastness of this moment and how this moment expands from now to eternity, backwards and forwards.
Seamus: How long would it take me to master this? In the length of time that you’ve been practising this, how much of an improvement have you noticed with your ability to witness the moment, and how much peace have you been receiving from just this one practice?
Ned: I do not know how long it will take you to master this. This had been a life long practice for me. It’s been a valuable tool. There have been times that I’ve been more and less willing to do so. I think that has a lot to do with it. My awakening is not yours, and your awakening won’t mirror mine. Maybe you’re a faster learner than me, but my awakening has had a lot of sideways movement. We tend to track sideways more than we ever go forward.
Our mind wants to make a mark in the sand and say, “How fast can we get to the next mark?” It’s not about that. The path that we’re on is not about getting to the next place. It’s about practising being able to stay in this moment and to enjoy where we’re at.
Seamus: I feel what you’re saying is valuable for our readers to understand. I’m speaking to the readers here. Your awakening will be different than mine and mine will be different than yours. We should not be looking at another’s progression, how they’re doing with something. We need to focus on ourselves.
Ned: That’s right. If I weighed my experience against yours, that would not be the least bit purposeful.
Seamus: Now, there’s something else that you talked about in the book. You talk about the seven rooms of the mind.
Ned: Yes. I had so much fun writing this portion of the book. I talk about the dysfunctional rooms in your mind. The mind is made up of many rooms. What fills the rooms of your mind is unique to your life and your own experiences. The thing with the rooms of the mind is they tend to steal our attention. By decluttering these rooms in your mind, you can start to have a lot more mental freedom.
I broke down the major rooms that exist in my mind. That list of rooms is the money room, the self-image room, the lemming room, the sex addiction pleasure room, the relationship room, the fear room, the guilt and suffering room. That’s seven different rooms that I think a lot of people have. Like the first room, the money room. A lot of people have a place in their head where they go and stress about money.
In that room, they tend to ruminate on how much money they’re going to have in the future, or they ruminate on how much money they don’t have now, or how much money they need right now. It’s a very real thing. It can be stressful. It’s a place that we go.
Seamus: Moving back to what we were just discussing, that anger is unfulfilled expectations. What if your expectations in the money room is that you’re going to get a raise? If you do these certain actions, if you get approval from your boss and you’re doing a great job, and maybe you’re told you are going to get a raise and it doesn’t happen. We’re going to get to this in the next section, but you desire something, and money is going to provide it, but you can’t afford it because something came up. Maybe your tax return.
I’ve seen this on Facebook where people will say, “I thought I was going to get money back, but it turns out I owe. Now this thing that I really wanted, that I’ve been thinking about and expecting, is not going to happen.” Their entire world shuts down for a bit.
Ned: That takes us back to the beginning of this talk. The problem is that we, as a society, put a great deal of emphasis on our peace and our happiness coming from an external object. Money will tie into this because, generally, it takes money to obtain the things that we want. We think that external things are going to make us happy. I think that’s why I put the money room first. It’s generally one that affects us greatly.
Seamus: To conclude this session, there’s a quote within this chapter that says, “Your mind is the barrier to your freedom.” That’s quite a statement. I mean, the depth of that is very significant. What I want to know is how can people get out of their minds and begin using their hearts to experience their lives?
Ned: First off, I should credit the source of that quote. That quote came from my meditation teacher when I was with the Ishaya monks. That’s something that he said many times to us.
What it means, if I’m trapped in my mind, I’m not resting deeper into my soul. It’s a great reminder to drop our thoughts. How do we experience getting out of our mind? It’s a matter of practice. We must be willing to practice doing it. It’s not such a complex equation. What makes it difficult is that we’re not taught to set our thoughts down.
Growing up we’re taught we need to be good thinkers. Thinking is important. Being a critical thinker is important. But can you look back into your past and remember a time when you were given specific instructions on how to stop thinking?
Seamus: That’s not necessarily true, if I’m honest. Even today, my wife sometimes will say, “You’re overthinking that.”
Ned: I’m talking about your formative years. When you were laying down the foundation of your mind, were you ever taught how to stop thinking for periods of time?
Seamus: Well, no.
Ned: Later in life we may get told, “Stop thinking. Get out of your head for a while.” When we’re overrun by our thoughts and thinking, we may get a reminder from someone who loves us. I didn’t know the importance of learning how to set my mind down. How we achieve this is by starting to practice letting go of our thoughts. One of the ways that I began to let go of my thoughts is that I started to watch my mind and get to know what thoughts were on repeat. Once we understand what’s going on in our mind, we can be aware of the thoughts that draw us deeper into the maze of our mind. Then we can set down those thoughts before we get lost in them.
Your mind is simply a tool. Use it, and set it down when it is not needed. Allow this to become a practice, because what is waiting for you beneath your mind is peace.