Of everything I learned from my guru, this was the most profound teaching about the mind: the mind is a vast space with many different areas, and awareness is a glowing ball of light traveling through it. Wherever awareness goes, that area of the mind lights up, and you become conscious of it.
Picture the mind as a mansion with a hundred rooms. One room is anger. One room is happiness. One is jealousy. You walk in as pure awareness, climb the stairs, open a door, step into the angry room, and close the door behind you — and you are in rage. Step out, walk down the hallway, enter another room, and you are in happiness.
Most people say, “I am angry.” What they should be saying is, “I am in a place in the mind called anger. I chose to be here, and just as easily I can remove myself and move to another area of the mind.”
“Once you realize that you are not the mind, rather awareness moving within the mind, you have a choice every day — to choose where you want to go, or allow the people and things around you to dictate where you go.”
This is the practice: control awareness. Your awareness is perpetually moving within your mind all day, regardless of what is happening in your family or your business. If you can control where it goes, you control how you react and respond to everything. I treat my whole day as my mental gym. When something drags my ball of light toward a room I do not want to be in — a delayed flight, a difficult conversation — I grab it with my willpower and bring it back.
In this teaching
- The analogy at the heart of my work: awareness as a ball of light, the mind as a mansion of rooms.
- Why you are not the mind — and why that distinction gives you a choice in every moment.
- How to use the whole day as a mental gym for moving awareness deliberately.
Watch the conversation above. Then, the next time a person or event starts steering your awareness, notice the room you are being led into — and decide whether you want to enter.
