Episode 03: How to stop believing every thought your mind tells you

So a few years ago, everything around me came crashing down. Everything fell apart, and so did I. And I’m coming from a background of a strong physical yoga practice – my background is Ashtanga. And when everything came down, I just had no energy to step on the mat or sit on a cushion.

So when you’re in that situation, what are you going to do then? This is what I want to talk to you about today.

When I was in that situation, I suffered from severe anxiety. My mind was in overdrive day and night, day and night. The anxiety literally knotted my whole stomach, so I couldn’t eat anymore. Some of you might be able to relate to how that feels.

And energy – there’s just no energy for anything, but you kind of still have to function. And everything that is happening in that moment is just amplified. So the smallest trigger was just blowing up inside me. It felt like I had no grasp on reality anymore. Something triggered me, and my mind came up with like 10 different scenarios that could go wrong, or why this is happening to me.

And I think the first step I did was just putting those scenarios on a paper, because I just couldn’t think clearly anymore. I remember I did like a mind map. So I had the trigger – somebody said something – and then I did little speech bubbles from it, and all those scenarios that my brain came up with, I named them. And I took a big breath and tried to rationalise what is just my brain going, you know, crazy, and what is real. So I started to cross the unreal scenarios off my list and was left with: okay, this is what this is about.

And as we know, or as most of us have experienced, triggers are something that needs to be solved in us. If we don’t solve it, we just react. We go into autopilot.

The other thing is, when your nervous system is so agitated with anxiety, literally what I could only do is yoga nidra. That was the only thing. I could not sit up, I just didn’t have the energy for it. Stepping on a yoga mat, that was way beyond. So I started to do daily yoga nidra, because with yoga nidra you just lay down and you just listen to a different voice than the voice in your head. And it just gave me a little pause, and that pause started to calm my nervous system down. And in order to become clear, our nervous system needs to be calmed down.

The other thing I’ve done is a very simple breathing exercise, with ratio one to two. So you inhale for three breaths and you exhale for six, or four breaths in and eight breaths out. The main thing is you’re not straining your breath, otherwise you agitate your nervous system again. So some days I was like 2 to 4 because I was so agitated, and some days 5 to 10 ratio. But those two simple tools just really, really helped me to calm my nervous system down.

And then, you know, it’s not one day or two days – it was over a few weeks where I just kept working with that. Because from my background, from the yoga background, I just knew there are tools there. And there are tons of tools we know. So we just pick one or two, the easiest one. These were for me in those situations the easiest, because everything else was another obstacle, was another no I can’t, oh it’s too much. So these were my two to go to.

And then over time my nervous system calmed down, and that’s where the actual work started – where you start looking at yourself. Because when your nervous system is running hot, there’s just no chance you can have any clarity about anything that’s happening to you. Because you’re all in your head. All in your head.

And the mind – the mind is literally just there to protect us. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. But this is what the mind does. And the mind bases its experience on your past experience.

For example, uncertainty. You know how uncertainty feels. It’s always very unsettling, because the mind doesn’t like uncertainty. The mind likes to be in control. The mind likes to predict. But it bases its knowledge on your past.

So if you had a bad experience with something somewhere, the mind is not there to dissolve that experience. The mind is there to protect you from another experience like that. And then it creates stories and all kinds of stuff in our head to get out of it. It tries to reason or talk you out of it, just so you don’t have to face the same experience again. But that keeps you always on the surface. Nothing is being solved. If the same situation comes up, you’re being triggered again, the brain starts reasoning or protecting you in some way – but it hasn’t been solved.

And in order to solve it, we need the courage to look at it. And that’s what I started to do. I took all my distractions away. I stopped watching anything on TV, Netflix. I stopped distracting myself in any way. All those patterns I used to have for distraction, I took them all away, and I just dealt with whatever came up.

If you think about when you cut yourself, right, and you’re bleeding somewhere – you don’t postpone it and say, “Oh, you know, I’m going to do it maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week, maybe in a month or a year.” No, you do something for it, right? But when it’s about the mind, when there is a trigger there, we tend to put a blanket on it, push it down. Oh, tomorrow. No, I don’t want to look. No, no. But it’s part of us. So if you ever want to overcome anything, you need to look at it.

So that’s what I did. And no, it was not easy. It was really not easy. It was a lot of emotions. You just go through it. But there are techniques, there are tools for how to get through it. So it’s not just sitting there and feeling overwhelmed.

When your nervous system is calm enough, then you can face those emotions without being absorbed by them. When you’re calm, you can feel the emotions in your body. Anxiety – for me it was in the stomach. Fear can be in the chest or belly. Anger, again, for everyone it’s different. But I started to feel very consciously the sensations of the feeling inside the body. I could, after a while, really locate it: fear, anxiety, anger.

And I started to dissolve those emotions by cutting off the story to it. So I was just sitting or laying down, and just watching the sensation in the body. And that sensation – if I was able to cut off the story, that unwanted feeling disappeared.

If it didn’t disappear, that means I kept feeding the story to the emotion. With more thoughts, with more prediction, with more what does that person think, or why did that person say that to me. That’s the thoughts feeding the emotions. But when I was able to cut the story off, that uncomfortable feeling disappeared. And it doesn’t take long. It takes maybe one or two minutes and it’s gone.

The problem still exists, right? So if the same trigger then comes to me and I have the same thoughts again, you know, the emotion comes back. But I recognise it now, because it’s maybe the third or the fourth and the fifth time, and I recognise: oh wow, there’s a pattern, there’s something I need to look at.

And when I say looking at, I’m not talking about the why. Not what happened in my childhood that I have this now – that’s another story, that’s another identification. Sometimes it’s important to know the stories. But what works for me, and this is also what I’m teaching, is we leave the story away, because we don’t want to have another identification. We work with what’s there.

So for me the anxiety was there. I just work with the anxiety, and not why you have the anxiety, because then I might become that person who is anxious in my brain. That’s an identification.

So instead of I have anxiety or I am anxious, I start changing the language. Anxiety is felt in my body. This is already creating a gap. This is already creating that gap of I’m not identifying with this anymore.

And this is how I started to work with every little trigger that came up. As soon as I felt something, I sat down. Sometimes I had to sit down a bit longer and feel it. Sometimes it worked a bit faster. And in the beginning, yes, it takes courage, but you go through it. And after that, after you went through that, there is so much lightness coming back. And the great thing is you literally dissolved those triggers at the root.

So nowadays, for example, I often have situations where I think, wow, if this person said that to me a couple of years ago I would have been completely triggered. Now I barely even react, or it’s beyond me – it doesn’t touch me anymore.

So after I went through all this myself, coming out on the other side, I started to teach this. And I have people coming to me from all kinds of corners. Some people come to me because of, for example, blood pressure problems. Some people come to me because they just can’t stop thinking. Some people come because they are just overwhelmed with their life, or they just feel like they need to extinguish one fire after the other. Some people come to me because they have this niggling feeling: there is more to life, it can’t be just it. Some people realise they kept themselves small and they’re not living what they really want to. They feel unfree.

And the inner practice, or I call it yoga for the mind, is an ongoing practice. And the main thing is that this practice is part of my daily life. So every little thing that happens to me, every discomfort I feel, or when I have a conversation with someone that irritates me – I immediately sit down, close my eyes quickly, go into the sensation, cut the story off, dissolve it, and it’s gone. And I get on with my day.

It doesn’t work all the time. Sometimes I forget, and then when I’m a bit too much into it, I’m like, oh gosh, no, I forgot. And then I just do it then. Maybe it takes a bit longer, a little bit more effort, but it works. It really, really works. And it worked for many of my students as well.

And it’s not that you have big changes, like you know you have to leave your job or your relationship. It’s nothing dramatic. The changes are actually very subtle, and only in hindsight do you actually realise: oh wow, that has changed, that’s different. Oh, I didn’t notice that I came that far.

It’s very subtle, a subtle progression. But you start liberating yourself. You start calming down. You start knowing your patterns. You start dissolving your patterns. You start becoming free, connected – connected with yourself, connected to something else that’s bigger than you.

I have much more freedom in my head now. I have much more space in my head now. And it’s a journey I wouldn’t want to have missed. It was not an easy journey. But on the other side, you know what? You can tick off a lot of boxes after that journey.

And this is what I teach today, mainly: the inner practice, the yoga for the mind. If you’re interested in that kind of work, if you want to find out more, if you have questions – send me an email. I would love to hear from you.

Thank you for listening.