I had a boss years ago who used to say, “If you don’t want to know the answer to the question, then don’t ask the question.” At first I thought that was a stupid saying but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

Let’s say for example that you ask your significant other, “In all your relationships, who have you been the closest to?”. They answer with a matter-of-fact honest answer that it was their high school sweetheart, who left them for someone else.

Nothing else has changed, your significant one still acts the same way toward you, but you just heard them say something that you hadn’t heard before. It changes the way you feel inside, doesn’t it? We get so caught up in constantly “doing things” that we forget that most of what we perceive as reality is in fact the part of life that we can’t see, like happiness, jealousy, sadness, joy, anger, and love.

Dealing with these tidbits of information that are unsettling to us can be a challenge. That’s where having a regular routine of sitting quietly and letting the mind relax helps out. When you sit quietly and just watch your thoughts it’s easier to keep thoughts from upsetting you. After practicing this for some time, you’ll see how your mind goes on its own little tangents, coming up with things you don’t want to think about, nonsensical things, and how you perceive and react to this “inner world” is what you have complete control over. It’s what is known as “the mind game”.

When you wake up in the morning, it’s totally up to you to start each day fresh or pick up baggage from the day, weeks, or even years before. Forcing our minds to take a break from thinking is the secret to controlling what we think, and sitting quietly on a regular basis is the method of forcing our minds to take a break and stop controlling our lives.