4. MIND (Mistaken Identification with a Nagging Demon)

It was now clear that the problems I was having living in the present moment didn’t come from any external circumstances. Rather, my difficulty staying present stemmed from the childhood belief patterns currently stored in my mind. So I titled the next busic MIND. I put it in all caps to remind myself of the old acronym that says M.I.N.D. stands for: Mistaken Identification with a Nagging Demon. 

And then I panicked. “Who’s going to sing a song about the mind?” Fortunately, that fear was very short-lived. I soon discovered that I wasn’t the only one tormented by my own mind; musicians were, too. And the good news about musicians is that they write about what they are feeling. So I created this fourth busic playlist, MIND, with the belief that I needed to uncover how my own mind was getting in the way of present-moment living.

If you’ve come this far, you know I’m into meditating. So I’ll own up and say I have maintained a daily meditation routine for over ten years. Like most people, I had to try a lot of different approaches to meditation before a daily routine stuck. But I had become interested in mindfulness very early in the game. It was the 1980’s, and a major educational publisher had hired me to find out what strategies good readers use that poorer readers do not.

One of the concepts I stumbled across was called comprehension monitoring. In comprehension monitoring, good readers think about what they are thinking and assess their own level of understanding. And the research showed that you could teach kids to use the strategy of monitoring their own comprehension and thus improve their reading ability.

The simple parallel I came to make was:

• Good readers are more aware of what is going on in their heads while they are reading.
• Healthy individuals are more aware of what is going on in their heads while they are living.

Therefore, my game plan became:

• UNCOVER – Recognize what thoughts were consistently in my mind.
• ASSESS – Evaluate how well or poorly those beliefs were serving my current needs and wants.
• MODIFY – Change those beliefs that were getting in my way of living in the present.

While comprehension monitoring had initially convinced me of the power of what is known as mind-ful-ness, another concept fully cemented my confidence in the power of becoming aware of one’s thoughts and beliefs – the placebo effect.  

The placebo effect is defined as a positive therapeutic effect claimed by a patient after receiving a pill believed by him or her to be an active drug – when in fact, the pill had delivered no active ingredients whatsoever. The particular experiment that I found so conclusive is now referred to as the Mind Over Milkshake study. 

Dr. Alia Crum, a clinical psychologist at Yale, created two milkshake for the subjects to drink. One milkshake was labeled “Sweet Indulgence,” and the label showed it to be loaded with sugar and fat and to contain 620 calories. The other milkshake was called “Sensishake,” and the label showed it to be a healthy, diet drink containing only 140 calories. In reality, both drinks were identical and contained 380 calories.

Half the subjects got “Sweet Indulgence” and half got “Sensishake.” Dr. Crum measured the ghrelin levels in the subjects, before and after drinking their shakes. Ghrelin is thought of as the hunger hormone. When ghrelin levels are high, you feel hungry, which signals the body that it’s time to eat. When ghrelin levels are low, you feel full so you are less likely to eat.

However, what Dr. Crum found was that the ghrelin levels dropped three times more in those people who drank the supposedly indulgent shake than in the people who thought they were drinking the healthy shake. If you believed you were drinking the indulgent shake, your body responded as if you had consumed many more calories than you actually had.

Thus, our beliefs about the food we are eating can impact our body’s response more than the actual nutritional content of the food. Dr. Crum says, “Our beliefs matter in virtually every domain, in everything we do. How much is a mystery, but I don’t think we’ve given enough credit to the role of our beliefs in determining our physiology, our reality.”

This study convinced me of the power of the beliefs in my mind and the need to ascertain how those beliefs were helping or hindering my attempts to live in the present. As a result, I became ever more aware and observant of the thoughts running through my head.

I soon began to see how crazy-making many of these thoughts were. (I’ll tell you the stupidest one I ever caught in my newfound web of awareness, but you have to promise not to laugh.) I once caught my ego-mind using the strategy of verbally repeating the color and shape of a particular puzzle piece in order to find it among all the pieces. The only problem was that I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep and said puzzle was in the other room. 

It was as if my conditioned ego-mind believed that unless it was doing something productive to show I wasn’t inferior (aka proving), it felt unsafe. Likewise, by watching my thoughts, I became aware that in many social situations, I was constantly on guard, listening for the next positive comment I could insert (aka pleasing). It was these habitual, and supposedly beneficial patterns, that never allowed me to relax into the present moment.

Since I had read, like most of you, lots of pop psychology, I was aware that my vigilant concern for safety stemmed from my amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for emotional reactions and survival instincts. The problem was that those reactions and instincts are based primarily, as they have to be, on fear-driven memories. Thus, while I wanted desperately to let go of my childhood memories of disability and rejection, my conditioned ego-mind kept those memories alive by maintaining those behaviors it deemed familiar and successful, and therefore, safe. 

Somehow, (though I couldn’t see how since my whole self-concept as a capable and considerate person was built on it) I had to let go of the need to prove myself and to please others. Only with mindfulness would I be able to step ahead of my ego-mind’s ingrained patterns. Without awareness, my mind would inevitably continue to think in it’s old, fear-based terms. 

The songs in this MIND busic did exactly what they were intended to. They helped me remember to keep watch on the thoughts in my head. And with increased mindfulness practice, I became even more determined to step ahead of my ego-mind’s conditioned fears. As Michael Singer said, “The day you decide that you are more interested in being aware of your thoughts than you are in the thoughts themselves – that is the day you will find your way out.”