"Is the World Busy or Is It My Mind?"— A 6 Minute Perspective Shift for Anxiety, Stress and Overthinking

One question. One shift. Six minutes.

When the world feels overwhelming, busy and relentless, it is worth pausing to ask: is the world actually busy? Or is it my mind?

In this short and quietly powerful exercise, I invite you to step back. To see the world from far away. To observe both the world and yourself from a distance so great that the busyness begins to look very different.

From up there, things shift. The noise quietens. The urgency softens. And something becomes clear that is very hard to see from close up.

This is an exercise in a perspective shift. And it takes six minutes.

Use it whenever the world feels like too much. Whenever your mind is running faster than you would like. Whenever you need to remember that you are not your thoughts and the world is not as loud as it seems right now.

Please let me know if you enjoyed this session: sylvia@sylviaingle.com

And if today's exercise has stirred something in you, a curiosity, a longing, a quiet sense that you are ready for more, I would love to support you further.

Visit www.sylviaingle.co.uk to find out how we can work together.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome. One of the very powerful and helpful questions we might ask ourselves in the midst of being stressed, overwhelmed, um, not coping very well in a moment. One of the most helpful questions I find is this is to ask yourself, is the world busy or is it my mind? And simply notice, sit back and notice the world and your mind, and you can interestingly look at the world from many different angles. You can pretend you're on the moon and look at the world, you can be even on another galaxy, and you'll probably find that you cannot even see the world from there, and be an observer of this world, and then examine what's happening in your mind when you are in the midst of this situation. Is your mind completely still or not? And this is a leading question, of course, because when we are dealing with crisis, when we are in a very stressed, overwhelmed, whatever it might be, situation, the mind is nothing but still. So the purpose of this short exercise is to regain seeing our mind as still, and again, we've got to our disposal our wonderful imagination, and we can firstly notice all the things available to us in that moment, starting with sensations in our body, hence the body scan meditation. But in a moment, we can just simply notice one thing, which is quite often noticing the feet, what the sensations are there. So, what are they resting against if we're wearing shoes? Noticing if we can sense that, if we have socks on, noticing the elastic around the ankle, for example, any sensations, just that, and then move from noticing our feet, for example, to just noticing our breathing, and without trying to change in any way in any way, noticing simply the air that we receive and the air that we breathe out, the quality of it, like for example, temperature. Maybe the one that we breathe in is dry and we breathe out moist air or vice versa. Just noticing our saving grace is in noticing what is present. We can then move on to visual noticing, noticing one thing that's close to us. I often like very much doing this exercise, pretend that you are an alien out of space, just landed in your body, and you're looking at your hand as if you've never seen that hand before. It's a very strange sensation. Meditation in and of itself, nearly. When you're just trying to look at something, imagining you've never seen it, that you're seeing it for the first time. Everything changes. Coming back to that question, is my mind busy? And slowly directing our senses to just that one thing, we get ourselves out of that busyness of the mind, and we can be as creative as we want. For example, we can imagine we are on the moon looking down at ourselves doing whatever we're doing at the moment. That is a very strange, in a weird way, in a good way, exercise. You can pretend right now you are sitting on the moon with a big telescope, and you through that telescope zoom in on the town you're in, finding your street and your house and the room you're in right now, watching yourself. There is something beautiful and almost peculiar about this exercise, and very soon we start being that person we're watching, we leave the moon, but the purpose is stay on the moon, go back and do it again and again, and stay stay a little bit longer next time on the moon and watch yourself doing what you're doing. Maybe even if you're in sleeping, trying to sleep, noticing watching yourself from the moon in your bed trying to sleep, coming back to the moon over and over and over, playing with your wonderful imagination.