Monkey Mind

Or even, do I have those abilities?

And then the question every student asks in their first week. How do I know if what I am getting is real, or if I am just making it up?

That question is the one this page is for, and it is why I put it first in this area. Everything else in here, the clairs, psychometry, mediumship, reading people, rests on being able to answer it.

Everyone has the ability

Start with this. Everyone has these abilities. Some have more than others, but we all have the ability to see as a psychic.

Tuning in is a fairly simple process of listening to your inner voice.

Monkey Mind throws a spanner into that.

What Monkey Mind is

Monkey Mind is my name for the noise. The random thoughts. The doubts and the fears. The self questioning, the worries, the anxieties, the second guessing. The running commentary that never stops long enough for you to hear anything else.

Everyone has it. Nobody is short of it.

The trouble is that a psychic message and a Monkey Mind thought can arrive looking very much alike. So two things go wrong, and they go wrong in opposite directions.

Sometimes a real message gets dismissed as your own head.

And sometimes Monkey Mind gets mistaken for a psychic message. You act on it, it turns out to be wrong, and you decide your intuition is no good. Monkey Mind was wearing its clothes.

So people start doubting their intuition and saying it is wrong, when it was never given the chance to be right.

Not every feeling is a sign. Not every event is a sign. You noticing the wind blowing a leaf across the path is not necessarily the universe giving you insight. Sometimes it is just a leaf.

The method: a process of elimination

Here is how you get past it. It is a habit of noticing, and you do it in the middle of your ordinary life.

1. Whenever you get what you think is a psychic message, notice the sensation inside you that came with it. Where in your body was it, and what did it feel like.
2. Keep a memory of that sensation.
3. Follow the message through to the outcome.
4. If it turns out to have been a psychic message, make a mental note to look for that same sensation the next time a message arrives.
5. If it turns out to have been Monkey Mind, make a mental note of that sensation too, and ignore it next time you feel it.

That is all it is.

Monkey Mind feels different to a psychic message. In the beginning the difference is subtle, and you will not trust it. That is fine. For now your job is to collect the evidence.

Very quickly you will learn to recognise a psychic message. You will also very quickly learn to dismiss Monkey Mind. Over time you will stop Monkey Mind from happening in your life, and you will learn to trust the messages that come.

That trust does something of its own. The messages come more often, and they come with more detail. The more you do it, the more it grows.

Your body learns to answer the question before your head gets a vote.

Where the noise lives

In my Sunday post The Mind Switch I wrote about having two minds.

The human mind was built for you, layer by layer, from the day you were born. Every message the world gave you about who you are and what is possible went into it. It is also where Monkey Mind lives.

The human mind is not your enemy. It kept you safe and got you through school, jobs and hard days. It is very good at survival. It just is not you.

The other one is the soul mind, the quiet knowing you arrived with. Little children live from it, before anyone teaches them to doubt it.

I learned very early to keep what I knew to myself, and I kept it there for a very long time.

When the chatter starts up, pause and ask one question.

Who is listening to this?

The moment you notice there is a listener behind the thoughts, you have found the part of you that the real messages come to. The thoughts are the radio. You are the one hearing it, and you can reach over and change the station.

Things that quieten it

Meditation. Half an hour a day is the foundation, and there is no shortcut around it. Monkey Mind quietens when it is given stillness regularly, and the soul mind can only be heard in that quiet. The Thirty Minutes a Day page sets this up.

Asking. Before you meditate, or sit to meet your guides, or try automatic writing, ask your higher self to clear Monkey Mind from your thoughts so you are in the moment. It sounds too simple. Try it.

The Flow. When you are so absorbed in something that hours pass like minutes, there is no room left for Monkey Mind to interrupt you. Notice how that feels, because that is what a quiet head feels like. The Flow page goes further.

Speed. Monkey Mind needs time to get going. One way I give people to practise is to read the people in the cars coming towards you. You only see each face for a few seconds, so there is no time for the doubts to get in.

Making decisions the same way

The same body sense will help you decide things.

When there is no obvious answer, picture each outcome as clearly as you can. Say it is moving house or staying put. Project yourself to a time after you have moved, and look inside at how you feel about it. Then project yourself to a time after you have stayed, and look inside again.

One of them will feel right and the other will not.

That is it.

And when neither feels right, when you do not like either choice and nothing intuitive comes, make no decision. When you are unsure, the best decision is no decision. The universe will give you guidance, some event or conversation that makes the way ahead impossible to miss.

Learning to trust it

We all get intuitive feelings and then talk ourselves out of them. The human in us ignores or overrides the inner voice, and Monkey Mind is the reason.

Your intuition is never wrong. If you ignore it, you will find out later why you should have listened.

What this page gives you is a way to stop guessing which voice is which. Do the elimination for a few months and you will not need me, or anyone else, to tell you whether what you got was real. You will know by the feel of it.

Once that is in place, the Clairs page is the natural next step, because it describes the different ways the real messages arrive.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

Related pages
Reading People