Martha wakes up in the morning and finds that it is eight o’ clock. She had planned to get up at six and work on the project that she must show to her boss today. Martha knows that her work has slowed down ever since cracks began to develop between James and her. The more she thinks about their almost-broken marriage the more she holds herself responsible for the fiasco. As a child she was taught by her mother to correct herself rather than find fault with others. Even when she had once been given a lower grade by her teacher than she deserved, her mother had told her, “This should only mean that you must work harder still”. With a mental make-up that takes the burden of the blame on herself, she thinks that it is she who failed to handle her relationship with her husband.

Martha is in her mid-thirties. With her husband gone from her life, she must hold on to her job. Had she got up at six as planned, she would now be half way through her project and would be working fully engrossed. The late start sets off a chain of thoughts. Her battered mind is like a stretch of bruised skin that begins to radiate ripples of pain from a mere touch. While she prepares her breakfast, a sense of failure and incompetence colours her thoughts. Getting up late has acted in her case as a trigger of negative emotions that have become a part of her thinking.

Garbage of the Mind:

Martha’s is a typical case of how garbage accumulates in the mind unless it is cleared from time to time. Life in today’s society creates physical and mental stresses. Physical stress gets relieved after a good sleep, but mental stress keeps accumulating like the refuse in a garbage can. If you do not clear the garbage can, the different items of the refuse begin to get stuck to form chains. Over a period of time, as you think more and more about the negative experiences, the chains of garbage become longer and longer, such that when you touch a part of the garbage, the whole set of chains comes into motion.

We can understand this negative working of the mind by taking another analogy. Let us say that emotionally charged memories and thoughts that arise from them are charged particles or radicals. These radicals tend to form links with other similar radicals and form chains that we may call “affective chains”. Finally, if we aid the formation of these chains by long spells of rumination about negative experiences, the chains tend to become so long that their ends extend to those recesses of our mind about which we are not fully aware. The result is that every thought or incident that is even slightly negative activates the whole affective chain.

Let us understand this with Martha’s example. Why does the prospect of admitting to the boss that she woke up late and could not complete the job disturb Martha so much? Let us suppose that just as she is entering the room, she comes to know that the boss has been fired and will no longer be her boss, will she still feel the same nervousness? Obviously not! It is quite clear, then, that the nervousness is not associated with the boss as an individual but with a complex of many other factors that come and meet in the position he is occupying. Martha’s apprehension that she has proved herself to be a sluggard sets into vibration a long affective chain of past memories of self-appraisal as a person with less than the expected capabilities. The prospect of being undervalued as a professional sets into vibration another chain that leads to thoughts of insecurity about her job and financial security. Thus, while Martha thinks that she is reacting to her present situation, her mind is in fact echoing with the resonance of an affective chain of past experiences, producing a disturbing noise in the mind.

Preventing Accumulation of the Garbage:

In today’s life style negative experiences keep impacting our mind. From failure to meet deadlines to inability to attend a friend’s marriage to a bitter letter from a daughter who has married a boy against our wishes, there are any number of incidents that keep pounding our mind and causing stress. These are all the garbage of the mind. If we take some time, just five minutes every now and then, to clear this garbage, the mind will remain healthy, and negative affective chains will not be formed.

Negative experiences may affect our thinking for a short period, but if we know how to clear the dust before it settles down, we can prevent the mind becoming the bruised piece of skin that revives its pain at the slightest touch. There are people who regain their joviality very fast after a negative occurrence. People have even lived happily in a prison after being convicted for an offence they never committed.

Even in case of those who have not been battered by very negative experiences, the irritants of daily life keep building up tensions. The laptop may take time to boot up when you are in a hurry to finish a job. The lock may get stuck when you are leaving for an urgent meeting. The briefcase opens accidentally and the files get scattered when you are trying to force the lock into submission. Such irritants make the nuts and bolts of our body tighter than they should be. If we periodically undertake garbage-clearing, the negative effects of such irritants on our body and mind can be avoided.

What is Garbage-clearing?

In olden days, the car engine would sometimes heat up and the car-driver would stop the vehicle till the temperature of the engine came back to normal. This is what essentially garbage-clearing is. When your mind has swung too much from the midpoint, you bring its operations to a halt for some time to bring it to the midpoint again. Five minutes of cooling down prepares us for another spell of gradual heating.

First step for garbage-clearing is that you should sit down comfortably and close your eyes. Tell your body and mind to relax. Within a few weeks, your body will listen to this cue-word and your muscles will begin to get relaxed. As you keep trying to relax the mind, certain feelings of disturbance will keep appearing. These are the ripples in the affective chains I mentioned earlier. Some thought or memory comes and sends a ripple along the affective chain. This ripple causes tension in the muscles and, may be, even butterflies in the stomach. But as you keep telling yourself to relax, the affective chains begin to break. This may take days, weeks or months, depending upon how effectively you are able to do the garbage-clearing and how strong and long-standing are the affective chains.

Cerebralisation of Problems:

Emotionally charged memories and thoughts that are connected with the problems faced by us lead to the secretion of adrenalin and the consequent mobilization syndrome. During garbage-clearing we should try to cerebralise these thoughts and memories. That is to say, we should denude them of their emotional content. We should restrict their operation to the mind and not allow them to affect our body. It may appear to be difficult or even impossible, but it is not. What is involved is again the same type of de-sensitisation which is used for breaking the affective chains. Every time you think of a problem and it produces a feeling of nervousness with symptoms like palpitation of the heart or tensing up of muscles, tell yourself, “This is a problem to be handled by the brain. I will think with the brain and find a solution. I will not let the other parts of my body react to it. I will cerebralise the problem.”

In this way, you must gradually take away the emotional content from the thoughts about the problem. It is possible to do so although it may take a few days or weeks. Once you learn to cerebralise negative thoughts, you will be able to handle them better. Without denying the existence of the problem, you will be able to restrict them to your brain and not allow them to descend into your body. You will not be denying the existence of unpleasant thoughts, you will be simply reducing their sphere of operation.

Conclusion:

Mind is like the ocean. Thoughts and experiences in it tend to form links, especially when negative thoughts of the present find an echo in negative experiences of the past of a similar nature. An experience of the present which provokes feelings of guilt and self-negation tends to activate experiences of the past with similar tenor. We should prevent formation of such negative affective chains of links between the present and the past by practicing garbage-clearing for short intervals, say 3-5 minutes, once every 3 or 4 hours. Such garbage-clearing will also help bring the mind back to its optimum level of relaxation and prevent wasteful expenditure of energy.

It may take a few days or even weeks before you begin to derive full benefit from this practice, but once you have fully mastered it you will feel your body and mind becoming relaxed at the command of your word.