The mastery of our mind.

A skill that serves us well in ensuring we remain calm, make clear-eyed decisions without rushing and don’t cause ourselves unnecessary stress, anxiety, or worry. A skill that aids us in realizing, seeing, and paying attention to all that is going well, celebrating it, helping us to cultivate more of it, and, as a result, elevating the enjoyment of our days.

Back in 2022 author Joseph Nguyen wrote Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering because he, after trying everything he had read about the mind and all of the optimization approaches, the suffering continued. He knew there had to be a better approach to ending the suffering that his mind would run him in circles creating, and he then he came across the concept taught at the core fo Buddhism – remembering to stop throwing the second dart.

We talked about this concept in this podcast episode (#327), as a part of exploring the book Buddha’s Brain, and it was the concept that prompted Joseph Nguyen to come up with the tools that he teaches in his book.

The book is short (192 pages), and gets directly to the teachings he wants to share. Namely, to separate your thought (noun) from thinking (verb). When we can recognize when we begin thinking about our thought, that is how we gain back control of our mind. It is a skill that meditation helps us to become better adept at putting into practice. As he explains, it is the thinking, and exactly what we think about the thought that causes the suffering.

He goes on to share tools and ideas for starting and concluding the day well, both helpful exercises to set our mind in the right direction before we step into our day and before we begin trying to go to sleep. I especially appreciated his idea of beginning the day with an Activation Ritual. A type of ritual explored in this post because as he reminds, how we begin the day sets the tone for the entire day, and we really can give ourselves a boost and increase the likelihood that we will handle well anything that we meet once we step out into the world. For example, instead of reaching for your phone when you first wake up, begin the day by reading a passage in a daily meditations book, or turn on gentle music, or listen to birdsong heard from the garden through the open window.

I had been wanting to read this book for a while, as I mentioned above, it was originally published in 2022, and it was so well received (more than 17K positive reviews), that they issued an expanded version in 2024. And finally, last month, I purchased the audiobook, and listened to during a road trip. In under four hours you will have ‘read’ the book, and if you are like me, you will rewind it countless times as I found many of his approaches helpful and wanted to make sure I understood them. Needless to say, I now want a hold-in-my-hand copy so that I can annotate and bookmark specific pages and points he shares.

Choosing this book as the Petit Plaisir for episode #437 seemed to dovetail well with what we were talking about in that episode – how to be a secure person, because it all begins with being the director of our thoughts, and trusting our thoughts, ultimately trusting ourselves to make decisions that are best for us.

I hope you too find the book a valuable resource. Its clarity, succinct style, and personal approach, as the author speaks from a place of authenticity, having written the book as something he, too, needed in his life, make for a book that you will read through with ease, only slowing down to absorb what is being shared.

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