Conditioning Your Mind!

Once upon a time every week morning, I rode with my older sister to work. It was a convenient arrangement because she also got to drop off my then 19month old niece with Mom, who dropped her off later at the Daycare. Suffice to say, my niece loved this arrangement judging by the following incident:

On a certain week evening, my sister came by the house after having gone on to the Daycare to pick up her daughter. Thinking she was being dropped off, my niece tried getting out of the car. All entreaties – and you know there’s only so much you can say to a child who’s just starting to put her vocal prowess to constructive use – to make her understand fell on deaf ears. She screamed, fought, clung to her Grandma until she was forced home, amidst plenty of tears of course.

Why this illustration, you may ask? Well, I wanted to point out what conditioning does to us. Every single one of us on this planet are being conditioned by our experiences. These experiences in turn, whether or not they are successes or failures, become the fallouts of our conditioning. My niece came to understand in ways words would never have been able to communicate to her (at that age) that she was to expect to be dropped off at Grandma’s every day, and the day that didn’t happen, she complained. Isn’t that a lot of how we act? We grow up believing certain things because of the experiences we have had or seen others pass through and we draw conclusions from them. When things do not go as expected anymore, we complain.

The phrase “Change is the only constant thing” has become a cliché; we know it but do not act it. This is why a lot of us are stuck and getting the same results, however hard we try. We need to learn to question the beliefs we hold sacred: Why do I believe the things I believe? Why do you do the habitual things you do? Why do we all complain ever so much about our country? Conditioning is basically doing the same thing routinely until it gets you. So, what do you do every day like a habit without realizing it?

There is a story of an inquisitive little girl who asked her mother why she always cut off the head of the fish before frying it. Her mother replied that that was how her mother fried fish. So off they went to go ask Grandma and Grandma reiterated Mother’s response. So, off again they went to ask (better believe it – she was still alive) Great-Grandma; who said she fried her fish that way because her frying pan couldn’t accommodate the whole fish! Two whole generations had been conditioned alike; it took the curiosity of the third to find out why things were being done that way.

Ask questions! Challenge the obvious! Free yourself from what might be holding you back; you may not realize its effect until you try to break free. Consider what you listen to, read or watch. Movies, adverts, music lyrics and videos, magazines, novels etc are all conditioning agents. Why buy things we don’t need? Dress the way we do? Or even indulge in habits that have proven to be fatal? We get these things from movies, novels and adverts. Read up on things you do not understand; take responsibility for conditioning your mind. Do not allow anybody else do this for you.

Conditioning is either a conscious or unconscious activity: it’s conscious when you are actively involved in the grooming of your mind, and unconscious when you allow external factors influence your thinking and you do nothing about it. Your mind thus becomes a dumping ground. Refuse to allow that happen. Take charge of your mind.

I started out with the story about my niece because when I was told about it, it set my mind in this direction. Stories abound in which Elephants and even Monkeys have been used to prove the effects of conditioning; I didn’t use any of those deliberately; I just figured a human story would suffice as well.