Mind Over Matter it's Your Choice

If a person is trying to encourage someone to do something that is very difficult to do you often hear this saying. “It’s just a question of mind over matter”.

We can see many examples of people putting this saying to work on YouTube. I found this example of people walking on hot coal without burning their feet. In the video you can see them walk the burning coals at around 2 minutes 50 seconds into the video

Why are these people able to cross the burning coals without any harmful effects? Because they believe that they can. Of course, it is common sense, they had to believe that.

No one in their right mind would set foot on a bed of burning coals if they didn't believe that. And they did believe they could walk on those hot coals without getting hurt. And as we saw in the video they were right and they did.

Another example of the power of the mind over matter is the Buddhist Inner Fire or Tummo Meditation. Using meditation the mind can enable the body to overcome the harmful effects of the cold.

In this video, this person sits in his shorts in a state of meditation. The temperatures is around -4 degrees Centigrade. After 20 minutes sat immobile, he is seemingly unharmed by the freezing temperature.

Exposure to such freezing temperatures usually would result in hypothermia. Hypothermia in these circumstances would usually set in long before the twenty-minute stage.

I wonder if the man in this video felt the cold as he walked in his shorts and barefoot back to his car. Or did the state of meditation he had been in still sustained him.

This meditation is a good example of how the mind can change and affect the experience of the body.

As with many sage sayings, it is not long before some wag comes along and puts a humorous spin on the saying. In this case, the wag was Mark Twain and his twist on this was his saying “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

Mark Twain's twist on this saying “If you don't mind, it doesn't matter”, is where I want to put the focus of this hub.

Even though the fire walking and overcoming the cold are interesting, these are not going to be my focus. The majority of us are not going to be any better off from knowing more about either in our normal everyday lives.

But, what Mark Twain has hit on is something that is far more important. Not only import but beneficial to ordinary people in their everyday lives. His twist reveals more than what is associate with just the saying, mind over matter.

If we grasp the truth in “If you don't mind, it doesn't matter”, this little phrase can change your life.

If you are British, you will probably know right away, what a minder is. Minder was a very popular British comedy-drama TV series that ran from 1979 until 1994.

In this series, Terry an ex-boxer was Arthur Daley's minder. Arthur Daley was a London wheeler-dealer type character. It was Terry’s job to take care of Arthur and see to it that nothing bad happened to him.

We see examples of this type of minding everyday on the news. Celebrities on the move, often have their bodyguards with them.

The bodyguards are there to fend off the unwanted attention of the media. And also guard against other kinds of troublemaker and so it is their job to mind their clients.
My mum would often say to me, mind the stove for me.

Mjnd in this case meant let me know when that pan of water starts to boil. Or mum would tell me to mind my younger brother.

When we mind something we pay attention to it, we look after it, take care of it and see to its needs.

We are not minding something when we forget about it. My husband for example loves boiled eggs and he often put half a dozen eggs on to boil.

Then he wanders off and forgets that he has put them on. The smell of something burning as the pan runs dry on the cooker is often his reminder that he still has his eggs on.

As you can see, he is not that good at minding his eggs. Fortunately, he has bought himself a timer. Now a loud alarm goes off when his eggs are done, so everyone is minding his eggs now.

Over the years, I have seen people damaged by minding about some of the things that people do and say to them. They feel the pain, hurt and distress from the damage those things inflict. They feel it so much that they are still feeling the effects, years and even decades after the actual event.

I know this from first hand experience. An injustice that I suffered when I was at school, though it was over a minor thing, it affected me badly. For over twenty years I minded and I suffered. You can read about this here if you want to http://goo.gl/x7FDh I minded a lot and as a result I suffered a lot.

Why did the shame and pain of that event last for so long and with such devastating effects, because I minded. I minded it so well I gave what happened a place in my thoughts almost daily. I did this for over twenty years, and the more attention and care that I gave it, the stronger the hold that it had on me grew.

I minded that I had been wrongfully accused. I minded about who had accused me. I minded even more when they did not believe me when I told them that that I had not done it.

I minded so much that I minded it into a full-blown hatred for my accuser. Minding held me captive for over twenty years, and thoughts of this event were never far from my mind.

Lots of things could trigger a remembrance of this event. When that happened the negative feelings that I felt at the time it happened, would flood over me.

Only now I felt those feelings magnified. So instead of my feelings fading with time, they magnified. Because I had minded them so well, I had amplified and increased the way they affected me.

By minding the negative thoughts and feelings I had caused them to grow. My minding had increased them and I had increased the power that they had in me.

I minded the negative thoughts by thinking about them. I minded by thinking about what I could have done differently. I minded by thinking about what I should have said. I minded by thinking about what they had done to me. I played often with all these negative, hurtful thoughts.

I also day dreamed about situations where I had power over the teacher. My minding produced a host of negative feelings in me. Which in turn helped me to feed these thoughts, and of course, as a result I ended minding even more.

The event that started this off, was so trivial. Everyone else forgot about it five minutes after it happened. I was the only one that minded this event. So I ended up being the only person that it harmed, and what made it worse is that I had done all this harm to myself.

My hatred of the teacher never harmed or touched him; he was oblivious of what going off on the inside of me. I only hurt myself by hating this man. The self-inflicted harm caused by my minding affected the people closest to me. It affected them because they had to live with a person whose hatred had screwed her up.

I read somewhere, that hatred is like taking poison in the hope that it will kill the other person. From my experience of hating someone for years, I can say that this is a very good description of hatred.

This is exactly what we are doing when we have hatred in our hearts towards some one.

I know that I was on a daily dose of this poison. And like all poisons it didn’t do me any good nor did I feel good all the while I was taking it.

The first thing is to stop taking the poison. So, in this case you have to stop minding what people have done or said to you that is up setting you.

It is important to know that you are the one that decides what you let into your head. Your mind is yours and yours alone unless you give it over to someone or something else.

When some one insults you or lies about you or is spiteful to you, they have given you an opportunity to get upset. But, because you have an opportunity, does not mean you have to accept it.

You do not have to take what they have said or done into your head and mind it. You mind something when you are constantly going over what they did and said in your mind. You mind when you allow this thinking to make you feel angry, upset, hurt, ashamed, or vengeful.

All these negative feelings are from the same family of poison as hatred. And they will all damage you and not the person who has done this to you.

Your feelings are lying to you. Whatever they did to you, not matter how wrong or unforgivable it seems they did not make you get anything. Even though it may not feel like it, it wasn’t them that made you upset. It was you, you are the one that got angry, or mad, or sad, they did not make you.

They may well have intended to make you. They may have wanted to make you, any one of those things. But the truth is that they couldn’t make you. Though I know when it is happening and even afterwards, that is not how it feels.

You May Feel You Have No Choice

Even if you feel like you have no choice in the matter, it does not mean that you don’t have a choice. Feelings are not a reliable source of truth. I will give you a little illustration of the unreliability of feelings.

When I was young, I went to work in the office of a factory that manufactured a very high-end cosmetic brand. I was a working class girl, and at that time, I was very insecure, self-conscious and had no self worth.

My job was in the office where the two big bosses secretaries worked. These two girls were both what I would have called back then, very posh.

They spoke very differently to me. They wore expensive clothes, and they were much better educated than I was. And I felt inferior to them because of these things.
When I first started work, I was petrified that I would say or do something wrong and make myself look daft. So for the first couple of weeks I would just keep my head down and get on with my work, and I hardly said a word.

I would listen to their conversations and even though they tried to encourage me to join in, I could not. I could not, because I felt so intimidated by them.

Some time later, when I got to know both girls I was out socially with one of them. We got to talking about when I first went to work there. I told her what I have just told you, and she burst out laughing when I told her.

I asked her what was so funny about what I had said. She said that I was so quiet and hard working when I first started, that I frightened and intimidated them both.
I never said anything when they talked to one another. But I would look up and look over at them and enjoy listening to what they were saying.

They thought that when I was looking at them it was in disapproval. They thought I was thinking that they should be getting one with their work not of chattering.

It seems that our feelings had deceived us all. Those feelings were not the truth. That first couple of weeks had been much harder for us all because we minded our feelings. Remember feelings are not reliable.