The Three Minds—
by Donna Quesada: In my tradition of Kundalini Yoga, we think of the mind not as one part, but rather as three parts: The Negative Mind, Positive Mind and Neutral Mind. The Negative Mind is the strongest, which is just to say that it is our “go-to.” It is the default setting. Said differently, The Negative Mind is our automatic reflex most of the time. And it takes deliberate intent and practice to switch gears.
Why is it that most of our thoughts tend to be automatically negative? Psychologists call it the “negativity bias,”which reflects our tendency to always be on the lookout for danger. It’s a survival mechanism. But for thousands of years, Yogis have been hip to this tendency and have devised techniques to counterbalance it.
The negative thoughts are driven by fear. We are on guard lest trouble falls upon us. It is important to cultivate an awareness of this tendency because most of the time the fear thoughts are out of proportion with any real threat. In other words, we catastrophize, imagining the worst, only to realize later that the things we were worried about never happened.
Working on our thoughts in any capacity is called a practice (not an accomplishment) because it’s like a muscle… if we don’t catch ourselves, we’ll slip back into the old tendency! Here is an example of one of my own negative thoughts as of late…
What if my house never sells?
The Practice (Pratipaksha Bhavana)—
Pick one of your own negative thoughts if you’d like, and first, just sit comfortably with it. Acknowledge it. This alone diminishes its power. You are seeing it for what it is. Just an emission. Nothing more than static discharge.
Just focus on the here and now for a few minutes. Use an anchor to hold yourself in presence, such as the sound of the birds outside, the sunlight illuminating your room, or the flow of your own breath.
This is mindfulness. In Yoga, it is part of The Neutral Mind, which is ultimately where we want to live, most of the time. But it’s important to be able to cultivate the ability to quickly switch gears when worries get the best of us.
So, we go further…
Now ask: Is this thought serving me? And by that, I mean, is it uplifting your spirit? Is it inspiring? Does it rouse creative problem solving? Is it encouraging? Most importantly, is it TRUE? Probably not!
If it is none of those things, we now “turn on” the positive mind. In Yogic philosophy, this is called Pratipaksha Bhavana.
A positive “replacement” thought might look something like this:
This has been a slow month everywhere, but it’ll likely sell when the market picks up.
And if it’s too difficult or unrealistic to be specific, then go “general” with something like this:
The universe always takes care of me.
or:
Things always work themselves out in the end… there is no need to stress about it.
Why don’t we go directly to the positive, while skipping the Neutral? Because there would be too much inner resistance. It’s too easy to doubt the positive messages… We tend to dig our heels into the ground with our reluctance to envision a more positive outcome.
It’s like trying to shift into forward motion from reverse, in a car. It’s better for the car to stop and go to neutral first. Exercising the positive reflex not only brings calmness to our inner world, but enlarges our perspective of the outer world. It shows us more realistic possibilities and reveals a more accurate and complete portrait of reality.
