June 2012 - Taming Your Drunken Monkey - Part 4 of 5

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Do you know what your biggest obstacle is to achieving your goals and dreams? It’s called your Drunken Monkey, or you might call it your conscious mind. So how’s your Drunken Monkey doing? I’m going to be sharing some life changing ideas on what has been preventing you from having what you want and the positive action steps you can begin taking today.

This is part 4 on this important topic. I began writing about your Drunken Monkey and had intended to write a short summary, but I soon realized that I could not do it justice in just a few parts. Rather than share how many parts this special report will ultimately be, I will keep sharing additional pieces through the next couple of months or so. In the end you can download all the earlier links and enjoy re-reading or sharing this with your friends and family. If you missed the other three parts and you want to read the entire article series you can click on these links:

Part 1: Click Here
Part 2: Click Here
Part 3: Click Here

Do note that you will get more benefit from reading the entire article series
beginning with part 1.

Throughout this entire series we’ve been discussing all the ways your conscious mind, which acts more like a Drunken Monkey, can stop you dead in your tracks from achieving your dreams and desires. If you picture or imagine a real drunken monkey in your mind you might get images of a monkey out of control, wrecking havoc, screeching, behaving badly, swinging from place to place, oblivious to others, driven by its need and desires to do what it wants and guess what? I’ll bet if you honestly listen to some of the thoughts your conscious mind is saying, you will agree with me that most of the time, your conscious mind is out of control. What do I mean by out of control? Here’s just a few examples. Every time you want to try something new or achieve a new goal, your conscious mind chimes in with thoughts such as: “Who do you think you are to achieve that”? “You don’t have what it takes”. “You’re not smart enough”. If you’re trying to lose weight it might say: “Oh, you’ve tried to lose weight before and you know it’s not going to work this time either”. “Why try, it’s just too hard”. Etc. That’s what I mean by the Drunken Monkey.

I want to give you a whole new way of looking at your conscious mind. Please do note I’m not saying your conscious mind is useless, quite the contrary. You use our conscious mind to think things through, to learn, to analyze, to plan and to do your daily tasks. However, I’m not speaking about the obvious useful aspects, but the very nature of your conscious mind itself which is “SURVIVAL”. Your conscious mind has one primary intent and that is to keep you alive. How does it do this? Every time you set out to try something new or set some goals, it reaches into its arsenal of tools to throw every negative and fearful thought your way about why you shouldn’t even try. Sound familiar?

We’ve all heard that we should think positive, but we wonder why that doesn’t really work in the long run. This is because you cannot sustain positive thinking 24/7. The moment you stop focusing on positive thoughts, your conscious mind immediately defaults back to its primal setting of negative fear based thoughts. This doesn’t mean that thinking positive and optimistically aren’t beneficial because they are. It’s just not sustainable 24/7. In fact, you often don’t even realize when you’ve slipped back to listening to your Drunken Monkey because it’s so habitual to do so.

So how can you overcome the Drunken Monkey inside your head? There’s really only one way, and that is to begin to understand that you are not your thoughts and that your Monkey Mind for the most part will flat out lie in an attempt to protect you and survive. In the process it will stop you dead in your tracks before you even begin something.

Now, before I continue I want to be clear. Thoughts are hugely important! Your thoughts (good ones and bad ones) both create and destroy your life and your dreams. What we’re talking about here is a way of detaching from the negative chatter which seems automatic and never ending.

Here’s a new idea you may have never thought about before and it may challenge you a bit, but stick with me here. You are not your mind! Your mind is simply energy moving through brain cells. You are simply the one observing it.

The problem is, most people get caught up in believing they are that Drunken Monkey, that they are those negative thoughts, but you are not. Think of it this way, you are simply the one observing your thoughts. Just as you are not your body, you simply live in your body. Now this might sound a bit too esoteric to some of you, but in reality, our bodies and our brains are nothing more than “energy”. We are made up of trillions of fast traveling atoms so densely packed that we appear solid. But, who is the one observing all these thought processes? When I say: “We are nothing more than….”, I’m not undermining who we are. In truth, you are more powerful and amazing than you ever imagined and you can learn to just notice the incessant mind chatter without getting caught up by it. Your Drunken Monkey is just part of your body, but it is not ultimately you in the highest sense of who you really are. Your body and mind are running independently from you. You are just along for the ride. Your Drunken Monkey truly has a mind of its own. It does what it wants as it wants.

If you don’t believe me try this. If you think: “Focus on a beautiful red rose” your Drunken Monkey will then start free associating with other kinds of flowers you like, the time your boyfriend gave you some flowers, or when you gave someone else flowers, or how you never liked that person anyway, then on to how difficult it is to grow flowers, to how much you hate the bugs that infest your flowers, or how expensive it is to buy the tools necessary to grow great flowers, to why you can’t grow them because you don’t have enough knowledge, to how no one ever gives you flowers, and on and on it goes.

Can you begin to see that your Drunken Monkey is not working for you? You mind is simply a part of your body and it is programmed to survive and it will do anything it needs to do to keep you alive, including spitting out negative chatter. The good news is because your mind and body are programmed to survive, you don’t have to worry about survival. Your body has that part handled.

You already intuitively know that you are more than and greater than your mind and body. You can tell by how you speak. For example, you don’t say, “I foot”, you say, “My foot”, as though you possess your foot. Here’s a tricky one. You don’t say, “I mind”, either. You say, “My mind”, as though you possess your mind. Yet, how often do you decide you want to achieve a goal or a dream and your Drunken Monkey talks you right out of it? The truth is, for more most of us this happens all the time. So, do you really possess your mind?

Your Monkey Mind is also great at offering up opinions as a way to survive and control you. It makes things up. For example: You want to talk with your boss about an issue and right away it states, “You don’t really want to go in and talk to your boss, he won’t listen any way; why try?” Think about how often your Drunken Monkey has opinions about life, about others, or even about you. The fact is opinions are the source of all your suffering and there are many reasons. First you may commonly believe those opinions as though they’re true. Some of these opinions also came from childhood, from people like your mother or your father. You don’t even know they’re not your opinions, your Monkey Mind just took it on and believed it and so do you. This limits you from experiencing the greatness of who you are along with your dreams and goals. Secondly, these opinions may prevent you from knowing how amazing others are, people who could turn out to be hugely influential and helpful in your life. Think about the times you had all kinds of negative opinions about someone you barely knew and then if you took the time to get to know them, you were pleasantly surprised.

Once you see your Drunken Monkey for what it is, you will no longer shape your life around it. You will no longer be limited by its desire to control you with fear, anger, doubt and frustration. Instead you can discover whole new levels of joy and freedom from your Monkey Mind. From this new platform of awareness you can begin to experience your natural powerful unlimited self and allow your life to be guided and inspired, not manipulated.

Begin noticing that most likely every aspect of your being, including the choices you make, the things you do are all about survival. It’s true, your mind and body are designed to keep you alive the best it can. I hate to break it to you, but the truth is you aren’t going to survive. We will all ultimately die. We cannot run away from this destined truth. What you think happens after we die is up to you to decide. You’ve heard me talk about who is ultimately doing the observing and who you ultimately are, so this may give you a hint of my personal view without going into great detail here.

Chances are, if you compare yourself to others, or even take a second to look at how the rest of the world lives, you are very fortunate. You are enjoying many luxury items such as computers, kitchen conveniences and appliances, shelter, clothes, transportation, abundant food and much more.

The fact is, all your suffering, heartache, pain, frustration and anger are self-induced and even more importantly, are a misperception. This is how the Drunken Monkey tries to control you in its attempt to help you survive, which you won’t ultimately do any way.

• Fact: Suffering repels opportunities and thwarts creativity.
• Fact: Suffering stops action
• Fact: Suffering blocks money
• Fact: Suffering is an obstacle to good health and happiness

As you journey through life towards true power and realization, and as you digest these words you may become aware of how much you have been “just surviving”, when all the while you have been pretending you were living.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and will spend some time seriously contemplating these ideas and concepts and begin looking at your Drunken Monkey in a whole new way. You are simply the observer. If you’d like to accelerate releasing the obstacles of negative emotions or limiting beliefs, consider a session or two of hypnosis. Change your mind, change your life!

Please be watching for part 5 in my July 2012 newsletter.

(Note: I want to thank and credit Matthew Ferry, Inspired Action Coach, for his great work in this area, and with whom I’ve studied with, which includes the ideas and concepts for this multiple part series.)

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