Not too many years ago, I had the issue that physical sickness would lead to an inevitable mental and spiritual sickness shortly after. I would have a heady cold for a few days, then I would spend weeks trying to regain composure in my personal life.

I don't know of anyone out there has had similar symptoms, but this is no longer a problem for me. Here is my observations on the cause and cure for me.

The monkey mind and the inner child are the same.

This means that kind of self-indulgence that we sometimes allow is the process of feeding the monkey mind, which inevitably takes over and prevents our intellect from easily regaining control.

Doing whatever the monkey mind wants and allowing it to take over is letting the inner-child do anything they wish to do completely unchecked. The two are invariably linked, the monkey mind and the mind of the inner-child are the same thing.

"We are the easiest person to fool."

We know what sort of state a child would get themselves in if they are left to do whatever they wanted all of the time. They would spend all day eating cake, they wouldn't leave the park, they wouldn't go to bed, they wouldn't wash, and the list of inadvisable habits and actions goes on. This is exactly what used to happen to me.

Letting my monkey mind go on unchecked was what always lead to the spiritual and mental decay of my "self". In my head were battles between what the child wanted right now, and what the intellect was telling it to do. The child had taken some control of who I was.

There was a belief I held that because I was sick and my illness prevented me from being able to think anyway, that indulging in habits like gaming or watching TV was fine for a period. Fundamentally this is acceptable. But one has to be aware of the consequences, and I was not.

What has changed since.

Once I realised I was dealing with a child, this isn't even figurative, it is literally a child. I started treating my "self" in this state like I would an actual child.

Children naturally search for short-term happiness and pleasure, as is the same with our core monkey mind. It comes up with arbitrary measures of happiness and will not let you rest whilst its demands go unheeded. Additionally, it has no true compassion, it appears to have no hardware for the placing of others on a level of consideration with which it treats itself.

My method

Now when I am dealing with this child.

• I am actively more compassionate, I practice self love towards this inner child.
• I don't giving in to the requirements of short term happiness

Not giving into the immediate requirements often results in a type of tantrum and I will have to drive at its unhappiness on purpose, something like a timeout in a sense. Of course as an adult a timeout is actually called meditation. Serious practitioners are very effective at completely switching off the default mode network, but this personally takes me 5-10 minutes, and sometimes I don't succeed at all. Regardless of how this goes though, active compassion and love tends to resolve the tantrum within a couple of minutes. Even without expertise, the timeout has the desired effect.

Now that I realise who I am during the times when I go off of the rails is in some ways a literal child that needs self-love, it has taken my spiritual recovery time from a couple of weeks to a couple of hours.

^Credit

If you liked this post, my previous post talks about how to use ego death to increase self-compassion. My next post I’m planning is my personal experiences with taking my first step over the edge and transcending the self for the first time.

Thanks for reading!

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