Welcome to the Learning Languages and Society with Gabby podcast, where it's all about the fascinating world of languages and culture. Let's rock.
Hi everybody. My name is Gabby, and today I wanna talk about something slightly different in the face of the current events that are sadly hitting our world so hard. I wanna talk about how meditation and insight practices can greatly improve our mental health and make us scope better with this horrible reality. Okay?
Now, first of all, let's start with the general notion that our minds do not improve with age. We're gonna talk about meditation here. We believe, for some reason, that our minds just stay the same all the time. And that is a wrong notion. We do, however, believe that we can learn new things. So you can go to school in adulthood, you get to college when you're older. And we believe for some reason that we can learn new things just based simply studying and learning, basically doing the same learning process we did when we were younger.
But for some reason, we seem to think that our minds stay the same way. That is your mind as such does not improve with age and that's just, that's just wrong. That's a wrong notion.
I wanna also point to the fact that we believe that our physical bodies are different from our physical minds for some reason. So while you could vastly improve your physical health by, for example, running, jogging, cycling, working out at the gym and well for some reason we think that our minds cannot undergo the same type of process and that's wrong. They do. They can improve, our minds can indeed improve. There are no secrets here, right? We now know that our minds can improve and, simply put, meditation is the way to go in order to improve the health of our minds.
So the concept of mental training is barely entertained generally speaking. But there are things we can do to improve our mental cognition, right? So mental growth is indeed possible. So, as I said, one of the things we can do, and probably the most important thing we can do is try to understand why meditation should help us in that way.
And I wanna point to the fact that meditation has a lot to do with how we perceive the world as well, and, and how that is a hundred percent correlated to how we see, for example, the terrible events that have taken place in Israel and Gaza over the past few days. Okay? So I wanna address that, with the help of meditation, try to see if we can discover new ways to cope with this reality and to understand why these things take place.
Okay? I wanna ask you a question.
When was the last time you had a good conversation with yourself? Or when did we learn to have better conversations with ourselves? Why do many conversations we have with ourselves entail some negative thinking to it? Why is that? Is that like a function of the mind? Or why does that take place? So when did we learn to stop negative thinking from bothering us and from ruining our lives? Well, I guess we never did because for some reason, this is not part of the curriculum anywhere in the academic world. So it's just vastly assumed that people keep their mental health in about the same state as when they were younger and through adulthood and old age.
But there's nothing further from the truth there. It is never too late to understand how your mind actually works. And meditation is the key to understand how it works and how to go with it, and how to, how to truly understand why your mind does what it does.
And that's just, that's not just an interesting fact. It is something that could vastly improve our lives. So at what age did we learn how to have good conversations with ourselves? When did we realize that the very structure of our thinking is in fact, based on an illusion that has created so much suffering for us?
Okay, we could have bad conversations with ourselves, but we could also have collective bad conversations with ourselves as a community. So there are groups of people in the world that could have a bad conversation with themselves and believe for some reason that the others are the enemy. So, nothing further from the truth. Okay?
Now, why do we allow this to happen? Why do we allow our mental health to be living in this kind of a bubble of negative repeated thoughts that cycle back and forth in our minds?
And why do we allow that to happen? Why do we not realize that it's pretty much the recipe for a mental prison? We wouldn't seem to know how to stop that. We seem not to be able to give an answer to that. So I wanna refer to the fact that the fact that a lot of people are basically clueless and unaware of this fact doesn't make it any less of a problem, okay? So we need to realize that most of the world's problems and wars, chaos is borne of a lack of insight into our mental world.
And purposeless suffering in the world is just a product of us believing into the lies that our minds punish us with. So the secret is to stop that from happening. People, we can stop that from happening.
We can do it. Meditation isn't just a tool to improve cognition so that you can learn new languages or learn new skills in general more easily. But it is really a tool to unlock yourself from, um, break free from the prison of your mental life and to help you realize that consciousness is not what you think it is. Uh, it kind of makes us wake you up from this dream, okay?
It helps you realize that the cleaner and clearer your mind is, the more sense you will make, and the better you will see the whole picture. So the better you will see the world. So with meditation, you can decide for how long you can stay angry or sad or unhappy or feel regretful. So it is not like you get angry and then you stay angry. And then every once in a while you have those angry thoughts coming back to you about something that might have happened, an event, a conversation that didn't go well with your sister or maybe your boss, or maybe a coworker or anything like that.
So meditation does help kind of like clear out the horizon and make you understand there was something that just happened, but you can start again. You can begin again, and you can make things right again. So those thoughts do not condition the rest of your life, and they shouldn't condition the rest of your life, right?
So meditation helps us modulate the way we treat ourselves in our minds. It makes us aware of what is actually really happening because a lot of this negative thinking takes place without us knowing exactly that it is actually taking place. We are unaware. We're not conscious of the fact that these things are taking place in our minds. So it does make us aware that this negative thinking is happening and it makes us aware of the fact that we need to stop it. So it doesn't cut mental noise in general because your mind generates this sort of chattering all the time.
It makes us aware of when our consciousness or our inner thoughts or inner speech goes astray, so we kind of realize that something's happening. It's like mindfulness makes you understand that there has to be an alarm that that goes off every time those negative thoughts start, you know, becoming more continuous and make you understand when it is the right time to stop them, right? So that you don't believe them, and you don't go into the cycle of negative thinking.
Now, that is in regards to what happens to the mental life of an individual. But this sadly can happen to the mental lives of many individuals that form a community. So you do, you can indeed be part of a community that has negative thoughts about the others. Most of it is just mental noise.
And you need to understand that is wrong. So meditation prevents us from being too emotionally or psychologically involved in the havoc of the world, okay? So it makes you sort of stop and say: not because I'm part of this group or part of this community, which is just a concept, really, I am meant to believe one thing or the other. And I don't think, and you shouldn't think that just because you happen to be from a certain country or nationality or an ethnic group, you're supposed to think one way or the other about the others, right? So it does actually help you cut with the mental mental noise associated to those feelings. And it is clearly the antidote for organized hatred and ideologically driven aggression and war because you no longer believe the lies of separation of self and the rest of the world, you simply realize you are one with it. You are one with the world. So there is no concept of self. There is no you there, there is just the world and that separation that they instill in people. You realize that is just basically ideologically driven and you shouldn't buy into it.
So just a few thoughts about the current events which have really saddened me and I think have saddened a lot of people and might mark the beginning of a new unhappy era for all of us.
So my thinking or my thoughts about this is that world leaders should understand that taking control over the lives of our minds is the first step to stop the world from collapsing because any hatred, aggression, or any aggression that is motivated by hatred or by ideology is first thought or conceived as a thought. So first of all, it becomes a thought, and then from then it proceeds to be materialized into an action and into something. So the better hold we have of our thoughts and our mental lives as a community and as individuals, the better we will be able to cope with these thoughts and understand that war is not the solution. War is never the solution. Alright? Anyway, guys stay tuned for more and thank you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. Bye-bye.
