A mind as clean as a whistle
Clean as a whistle — pure mind — monkey mind
Monkey Mind
If you’re like me, you have a busy monkey mind. I can overthink as well as you, although now I’m better because I work on myself, and I know that a clear mind is paramount to me being who I am.
A distraction as clean as a whistle
Let me explain with an example. I’m working on my website by making it neater so Google loves it more and more. I’ll be working away, and an email will come through with a bit of sound, which is clean as a whistle. This interrupts my train of thought and allows my monkey mind to step in, so I look at the email. Of course, as soon as I do this, I admonish myself, but it’s too late. My monkey mind took over my still mind.
We all do this, whether looking at our phone, working on our computer, listening to the radio, or watching TV; we live in a busy ‘do it now world. And we love distractions!
But I know a clear, quiet mind is my essential ‘being’. That sound of an email coming through comes to me as clean as a whistle, and it gets in my way. If we examine that sound for what it is, all we hear is the sound, and we react to it with a thought. Then we do something, like read the email, look at Facebook etc.
You can create a clean mind.
We don’t need to react like this because we can change ourselves with some practice. 
Think about the sound. It’s there, and then it’s done; it’s gone. A bird outside, for example. There’s the tweet, and then it’s gone until the following tweet happens. Your reaction to thoughts is the same. You hear a tweet, you become distracted, and your thought goes to that distraction rather than what you were thinking about before the sound of the tweet.
Distractions make a monkey’s mind.
I used to be able to have background music playing as I worked on my computer. However, I find it distracting because it takes my mind off my thoughts. When that happens, I find the music frustrating. I don’t want frustration, I like that only thought, and frustration dampens it.
We can’t give up our thoughts; that’s impossible. But what you can do is work towards the way humans were 300,000 years ago. Humans then just existed; they didn’t have all the distractions we have now; they just lived. They followed the days and seasons and had no reason to overthink anything because there was nothing to overthink.
Action Plan for a clean mind
Everyone is after a quick fix; that’s how we got into this mess. Your monkey mind very successfully wants you to grab the next quick fix. But, unfortunately, that is not going to happen.
You’re going to have to put something in place to help yourself, and I have an idea of what you can do.
Tomorrow morning set your alarm for 10 minutes before you usually get up. At the alarm time, hop out of bed and go to a quiet place and sit. Sit quietly, with no phone, just the ambient sounds around you. Now listen. Listen to the sound of that car, the clean-as-a-whistle sound of that bird, and whatever other sounds are out there. Do nothing else except breathe and maybe scratch an itch.
Make a habit of this by doing it every day because it’s that simple and a precursor to meditation.
After a couple of weeks, you’ll find you hear more, and you notice your monkey mind is becoming a clean mind.
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