Why Doesn’t the Mind Listen?
Have you ever felt an overwhelming urge to approach street food vendors while a weaker voice in your head tells you to resist? Usually, we end up following the dominant voice. But why is the well-meaning voice so weak? What makes it weak? It’s us. Just as we need nutritious food to build our bodies and maintain health, our minds need nutritious input too. Unfortunately, we often feed the wrong mindset because it’s comfortable and familiar.
Our minds have a natural tendency to seek comfort, a trait we develop from birth. However, to succeed, we must train our minds to step out of the comfort zone. We know that success lies beyond it, but we often struggle to apply this knowledge to our mental habits.
Imagine you’re in a room with a bucket covered by a wooden plate. The owner of the house has strictly forbidden you from looking inside. If the owner leaves for half an hour, many of us would be tempted to peek inside. If we do, we reinforce a habit in our minds: breaking rules when told not to. Over time, our minds get trained to defy rules.
In the Ramayana, what did Sita do? She crossed the Lakshman Rekha, a boundary meant to protect her. A demon’s influence lies just outside that line. It’s us who choose to cross it, not the demon who pulls us over. Ravana couldn’t cross that line on his own. So, it’s crucial to recognize and respect our own Lakshman Rekha, regardless of how tempting the outside circumstances might seem.
Our minds are like complex coding systems. Whatever we code into them, they will follow those instructions. It’s time to reprogram our minds with good habits. We need to overwrite old, destructive patterns with new, constructive ones. It’s time to become the coder of our own minds. It’s time to be a new Sita who doesn’t cross the Lakshman Rekha.
We need to believe that we can’t grow rice in April. Once the time is gone, we will lose the opportunity. Although we can direct our minds in the right direction, by then we might have lost too many things. Not everything is reversible.
Bindesh Kumar Jha
