I am consciously training my mind to behave in ways that are different from …

My goodness, I realised I never completed this page. Dear diario, a long time has passed since my last writing, but my thought goes almost daily to you, and I wish to write much more often than I actually do.

I have been very busy with work, and have also been on holiday. I am still in Southern Italy enjoying my favorite place on Earth, but despite the fact that I am free to write these days, I don’t, cause I am really enjoying not being on the computer. This happens about 2-3 weeks per year, and I love it. Sometimes I wish I had an agricultural or a sea job, where you don’t need to be on the computer all the time.

Anyway, what I wanted to write when I last touched this diary, is that I have started training my mind to behave in ways that are different from what I am used to. I believe that our minds are all engineered by the genes that are transmitted by our family line, and by the behaviours that we develop during our childhood. Habits that occur on a regular basis at home, at school, etc. I am doing a lot of self-analysis, also with the assistance of my psychologist, with whom I relate to see if I am on track with my self-analysis (to avoid that it derails into something not useful to me). Since the habits are well ingrained, and tested over years and years of practice, I need to de-grain them, undo the habit.

So, the training consists of stopping my mind over a behaviour that I would usually have over something, say for instance at breakfast, and turn that behaviour into something that gives me more pleasure over time. Hard to describe right now, because I need to find myself in the moment in order to best describe what I mean. But in a nutshell, here is an example.

I am about to have breakfast; I make sure I clean the whole table before I sit and enjoy what for me amounts to the best meal of the day. I observe myself from the outside, right at the moment when I am starting to clean the whole kitchen; this behavior is forcing me to delay my breakfast, and it will delay everything else I have to do in the morning, including work; so I force myself to clean half the table instead of the entire table, and I force myself to not start cleaning the sink or the kitchen counter. I leave the sponge and I sit down to have breakfast. It is hard at first, because my mind is set to cleaning the whole thing before I allow myself to move to the next action, but in the longer run (a few minutes later in this case) I know that forcing myself to change my behaviour will be rewarding: I can enjoy my breakfast sooner, my mind will give me a break over my OCD, the compulsive behaviour that limits me.

.