How Can We Better Regulate Our State Of Mind?

What lies before us is too difficult. It is too overwhelming. We can’t deal with it. We think to ourselves we want to quit. The self-loathing starts to bubble up from within. We know the familiar feeling. I’m not good enough. I suck. I’m worthless. It is the beginning of despair. We’re weighed down by too much gravity. The weight of the world is on our shoulders and we feel that we deserve it. This is the depressive psychosis.

How the heck do we crawl out of this hell hole?

We are sunk into the fear and everydayness of our lives. There is a crippling terror of failure. There is a crippling fear of boredom. There is a sense of nodding resignation. We no longer embrace the push back. Occasionally, we get these glimpses. Every so often, we find ourselves in these divination where we’re in search of what comes into our awareness. We were on to something, and somehow along the way, we got lost. Now, we’re in despair. We feel flat. We feel anguish.

Our human spirit is destroyed.

I believe this is when we need to be cracked upon. We need to be ripped apart by awe. We need to go through an experience of such jolting intensity where the dots connect and a new Self is revealed. We need to be cracked open, so that the light can get in. It is a moment when we bump up a level and we start to see the big picture. We often describe these moments as epiphanies.

It is the unraveling of an unseen world coming into a view where the evanescent lightning bolt strikes us.

It is the exhilarating neuro-storm of intense pleasure. It is a kind of ecstasy. It is a kind of exorcism. Similar to how Kahlil Gibran describes how our children are not our children — this feeling come through us, but not from us and though they are with us, they belong not to us. Like the mother of a child, we become the vessels as the passing through happens.

We become the medium for which the magic happens.

We can be told multiple times that things will work out, that we will eventually overcome this, that we can shake this off eventually, and that life can be sunny and the storm will pass. We can understand all these broad concepts cognitively, but it won’t heal us from our suffering. What we require is knowledge by acquaintance. We know how the snowglobe works, but we still have this urge to want to shake it and be mesmerized. We know how the musical box works, nonetheless, we still want to wind it up and let ourselves be enchanted by its music.

Our suffering can only end when we do something new that unfolds outside and inside of us.

Maybe this is why we travel. Maybe this is why we mark the map. We are sensitive to our immediate environment, so we steward our awareness a step closer to what we deem as fulfillment, happiness and this illusive sensation of well-being. It is difficult to navigate this route, especially with the self-help section in the bookstore being ridiculously crowded with top 5 tips and tricks to find our bliss. The truth is we all have a direct correlation between the landscapes that surround us and the states of mind they give rise to. We become what we behold. We are the music makers and the dreamers of the dream.

We materialize our imaginations to be outside of our minds, in front of our eyes, to have our consciousness externalised.

These new landscapes jolt us into the now. These novel spaces that we haven’t been to induces a sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness. It is fresh. It is all brand new. We’re trapped in the adult mind where the jadedness that comes from a place that we’ve already been to blinds us to it. We know it. We feel it. It is called hedonic adaptation. We need places where we can see where we’re going doesn’t look dangerous, yet there is a mysterious bent at the end of the route to keep us engaged. These are the places that turn us into a child. We become engrossed in the now.

We are overwhelmed with an ironic simple wow.

Wonder is the precursor to awe. It is in these new places, these places of such perceptual vastness and expansion that all familiar mental models of the world that we’ve assimilated in our brains are obliterated to make way for fresh new experiences right in front of us. In these places, we are hurled back into a childlike reverie. There is an immediate giddiness, an immediate impossibility in the possibility that we are looking at. Our senses will be heightened. Our senses will be arrested. In this moment, we will feel like forever. In this moment, we will feel a tiny spark ready to be ignited.