I hope our attempt to define happiness is going well for all our interested readers.
We continue this week to explore this interesting issue and we start by saying that the worst folly and crime the mind commits is passing its unconscious messages to the body through emotions because the body does not filter them, but believes them to be true.
If a person thinks that their organisation is planning to fire them, they feel a certain way and the body picks that up as having happened already (Joe Dispenza).
What a disaster! This is for the unconscious person who is living a script their experience has written for them without their chosen participation.
This means that the same principle applies to the person with a tethered mind. They can consciously think good, happy, and pure thoughts and register them on the body through emotions and this tightens their truth and happiness.
Proponents of the grounding practice of setting intentions and affirmations use this principle when they set intentions by making it a solemn moment of feeling their intention and naturally when they feel it, their body believes it and they are set to see it come to fruition.
The low of attraction comes into play here as one moves around with a body that carries belief and remember the body’s belief system is not about tomorrow but now. This is the power of now. (Eckhart Tolle).
This principle applies to the process of learning certain body skills as driving a car, because as we know, once the body takes over from the mind, it becomes real and there is no more forgetting. The body remembers more and holds tightly what the mind may forget. Yes, it does start with the mind but the whole story is finalised and sealed in the body.
- Happiness is impossible with an untethered mind
- Feelings are legitimate part of ownership and productivity
- Re-imaging the workplace: Mental fitness in the workplace
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What is desirable therefore for one to realise real happiness is a tethered mind and not one that flies all over the place.
A tethered mind becomes a tool one can use for their own happiness. It is a tool that needs to be used by you or it will be used unconsciously by your story or what can also be called the ego.
I avoid such technical words to make sure I do not lose you in the process but ultimately that is what it is, the ego.
The ego is your terrified story that thinks about survival and is impossible to please. When there is peace and happiness, the ego is suffocated and wants some drama to be relevant and to breathe.
If you allow the ego, that is to say, your survival and afraid story to get hold of your mind, then you might as well forget about happiness, peace and a lot of other good attributes of equanimity.
As humans, all that we have created is just a manifestation of our mins. So, the most important part of creating what you want, is to first manifest it within the mindscape because what is powerfully established in the mindscape is bound to find manifestation. (Sadguru).
People who have that understanding do not leave their happiness to chance, opinion, or subjectivity because they know they have the tools to manufacture happiness and enjoy it.
They know that if they leave it to chance, survival instincts will take over and there will be disaster, the disaster of manufacturing sadness, anxiety and od course poor performance in the workplace and many other arears of performance.
We are psychosomatic beings and our happiness or lack of it, hinges on that scientific truth.
Anyone who wants to experience true, sustainable, and lasting happiness should understand this, embrace it, and begin to seek to know about working practices to assist them to enter that ‘promised land’ flowing with happiness, and for our purposes in the workplace, flowing with happiness and productivity.
I have an interesting acronym for those who live at the level of uncontrollable sadness and anxiety with untethered minds. I call them T.E.A people. Yes, I know it sounds like something one can sip and drink and I guess it’s inspired by the helplessness of tea in a cup that one sips and has at their will. T stands for Thought, E for Emotions and A for Action.
Have you acted badly and wondered afterwards what really happened and why you just acted the way you did? Well, I have, and regretted but I have sought to understand that weakness and sort of come to this conclusion that when the mind is untethered, it does its own thing as the starting point, and produces feelings that activate action.
For the untethered mind, all this is unconscious or rather, we are not in control of most of the time, although many will argue that they are in total control.
A thought that someone is being mean to you can just come to you because of their actions or words to you, and it is bound to create feelings of anger or resentment and action might manifest in different ways that may include an actual confrontation, an altercation or avoidance of that person.
All this is a TEA moment starting with just a thought coming out of a mind that is not under the use of its owner. A lot of regrettable actions start this way and what makes things worse is that even no action is not even no action because of the principle we shared earlier that we are psychosomatic organisms whose single thought triggers unbelievable activity in the body and energy.
A human being can lose their ‘happiness’ just by meeting the Managing Director along the corridors and being ignored when they greet him or her. That could trigger a plethora of thoughts that could get that person sick immediately.
The managing director might be busy thinking about a business deal they are about to close when the employee greets him or her but to the employee, that marks the end of their stay in the company. They are hated by the MD and are just about to be fired.
The MD thinks they do not dress well, and that they are not adding any value to the company. So why should the MD keep them? Oh Lord, they are fired! And remember when the mind thinks you are fired, and passes the message to the body via the emotion, then you are already fired. Gone! And all this time, all this is not true. What is true is that this person is sad, and very unhappy.
What is also true is that a terrible biochemical process has been triggered and hormones are cascading down the system, hormones of stress such as cortisol.
What is also true is that this person is at their lowest in terms of clarity of thought and performance and so their work is affected. Just an hour or so later, they meet the MD again and this time it is the MD himself who greets her, with a smile.
Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery and mental fitness. He works for a Zimbabwean company as human capital executive, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for several blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management. He can be contacted on bhekilizweb.bn@gmail.com
