Introspection is an acquired taste, like dark chocolate or bitter gourd. It doesn’t come naturally to anyone. Our biological systems are designed to look outward, never inward. This is an inherent flaw in our mental composition — a glitch in our evolving cerebral software. A glitch, which has to be corrected with a lot of care,
attention and love. Make no mistake, this is perhaps the most important move we will ever make in our lives. What’s the alternative? If we never look inwards and examine why we are behaving in a particular way, we are not very different from a galloping herd of energetic buffaloes that will follow its impulsive leader all the way down the cliff.
On the other hand, if we do learn to watch our emotions
as they arise, we gain true power over the mind. If you have power over yourself, you will rise to be an achiever in any field you choose — including love.
Let’s talk about love. Ask yourself, how many times have you fallen prey to impulse, allowed the cruder parts of yourself to have its way? How many times have you become your worst enemy — taking months to build a relationship, then wrecking it in a few minutes?
Deep inside the growling engines of your mind, there are forces unknown to you that gather in strength and fury and unleash themselves upon you at a most inopportune moment. Your principal enemies are two — anger and jealousy. In truth, they are a part of one giant brooding emotion — fear. They have a tendency to incubate inside and feed off the energies of love. Anger arises from a skewed notion of self-importance. You assume a certain status, hold certain expectations from the loved one. When these are fulfilled you feel happy, when they are set aside anger begins to build. If you acquire the ability to introspect, you can observe anger as it takes a foothold inside and begins to gain strength. At this stage, you are stronger than your anger. You can uproot it if you like. You can examine the causes and reflect on them. You can consider the situation with your rational mind. You can gently discuss what is bothering you with your loved one, or you can understand that it’s coming from an irrational sense of self-importance, shrug, laugh and keep loving. Regardless of what you do, there is a calmness and control to your thoughts and actions. There is also a beautifully happy feeling that you could uproot a monster that could have wrecked your relationship.
Jealousy comes from possessiveness. It’s another way of expressing fear — that you will lose your mate to a competitor. Jealousy takes hold because we have the desperate need to hold on to our possessions, which include our loved ones. It’s a most difficult emotion to oust from your mind. But if you catch it as it first rises, you could probably talk yourself out of it — by accepting the worst-case scenario. You would need the strength to say, “Despite my best efforts, if I still lose her/him, I will accept it as fate. I have faith in myself that I will find love whenever I need.”
If you can really say that, wow, you are a truly great person. But you still need to catch the emotion of jealousy in its infancy, as it begins to rise. At this stage you are stronger than your jealousy. But if you wait even for a day, your jealousy will become far stronger and you will become a helpless toy in its hands. It will throw up vicious mental scenarios, one after the other in rapid succession and boil your mental molecules in its acid reflux. You will come out snarling and enraged like a wild beast and prove Darwin’s theory all over again that man indeed descended from the apes, and still retains all their charms and social etiquettes.
Learn to introspect, friends. Spend a few moments each day in inner silence and watch yourself thinking, feeling, emoting. That’s all you really need to do. Gain the ability to watch yourself. A natural-born wisdom will spontaneously rise to your rescue whenever you need it. I assure you it will be time well spent, and you will enjoy the rest of your teens with no regrets whatsoever.
The author is a film director