I’ve carried this voice around with me since I was a kid although I don’t remember her as a small child. I think she started bossing me around when I was a pre-teen. I’ve always been competitive and I’m not exactly sure what year my healthy motivation morphed into obsessive perfectionism.

It took years of self work to get her to where she occasionally whispers to me and doesn’t dominate everything I do.

Only after I felt I could keep her quiet enough to fully steer my own journey did I quit corporate America and start working for myself.

After a few years of her in the back seat and me in the front, I finally asked – who are you?

I had to travel to India and study with a spiritual master to find the answer:

She is my mind.

Which is not the same as my brain.

Until I traveled East to study, I used the words “brain” and “mind” interchangeably. I thought they both described the organ in my head used for learning a language and getting to yoga on time.

Now I know, they’re not the same thing at all.

The brain is in fact an organ, like the kidneys or bladder. The mind isn’t tangible – we can’t touch it or see it.

The mind is emotions, feelings, thoughts, imagination and perception.

There are a couple of analogies I like that help explain this: One is a loudspeaker – the speaker attached to the wall is just sitting there until a voice comes through. The brain is the speaker, the mind is the voice.

Another is a powerful horse – the horse (the brain) can run anywhere at any time. The jockey (the mind) can direct the horse.

The mind is energy.

Exactly how the mind and the brain work together has been debated all the way back to Aristotle.

And… I didn’t have to travel to India to learn this. Any neuroscientist could have explained it to me. It just turned out that my path to sanity was going to involve India.

Like a jockey tames a horse, I needed to get control of my mind and either a spiritual master or a neuroscientist could have taught me how to do it.

The knowledge from 2000 years ago and the study from last week both say the same thing:

The fix for the untamed mind is meditation and it’s worked for a bazillion people before it worked for me.

Because it’s January and people are working on new habits and routines, I wanted to bring this up now. If you have a mean voice or there’s something going on that you feel like you can’t control, try 5 minutes of meditation once or twice a day.

Set a timer, sit still in a quiet place and focus on your breath. When your mind wanders, redirect it back to your breath. Do this for 5 minutes.

Every day, keep doing it.

The voice (or your thing) will get dimmer and better things will get brighter.