This is a Guest Post by Yvan Byeagee. He is one of my personal favorite teachers of trading psychology. His website is at TradingComposure.com.

Breaking Free From The Mind Movie For An Outstanding Trading Performance

You are not your mind!

This is the message I want to shout from the rooftops: You are not your mind!

Don’t believe me just try this small exercise. Sit comfortably, close your eyes, let your breath settle (you’re not controlling it), and turn your attention within for just a moment.

Witness your mind’s inner narrative, songs playing in your mind, images, etc.

The fact that you can observe your mind, and think about it objectively, shows there is a mind, and then an observer of mind.

YOU are that observer! You are the consciousness making the observation.

Now, notice whether the you who is doing the observing is actually feeling sad, happy, angry, frustrated, [insert any other state here].

If you’ve really tapped into this observation mode, what you’ve certainly noticed is that the you that is doing the observing is actually peaceful. Nothing gets to it.

Pure consciousness is not angry, happy, sad, frustrated, it doesn’t even feel physical pain. It’s not colored/ affected by anything. It’s just a witness.

The thinking, the emotions, the sensations, all these conditions appear on top of the observer they’re superimposed. And it’s the thinking (the stream of thought) and its associated emotions that you commonly take to be you.

But it’s not true.

Thoughts and emotions pop in and out of existence. They’re arising and passing conditions, arising and passing out of other *impersonal* conditions. Due to their fleeing and impersonal nature, they’re insubstantial at their very core.

So, tell me how can such fleeing, ever-changing, and impersonal conditions be that static entity you call I?

They’re just NOT!

This capacity to detach yourself from your mind is something a serious trader should be able to do at will.

Got it?

I’m sure you do.

And I’m not asking you to believe me. In fact, don’t believe me. Do the exercise wholehearted and see for yourself if it rings true.

This idea is so central to meditation, and yet so foreign to our everyday experience that I have to explain it via a different analogy.

The Mind Movie

Suppose you go to the theater to watch a movie. You’re there, sitting comfortably and the opening credits suddenly appear on the screen.

You’re getting ready for what’s about to show up, analyzing the music, then comes the first scene, and you’re evaluating the actors.

If the movie is especially good, you quickly forget that you’re watching it. You get lost in it because it’s captivating you to such an extent.

Does this ever happen to you?

I’m sure it does.

Here’s the thing. Your mind is like that movie. Just as in the movie theater where there is you watching a movie, in your head, there is you watching your mind.

And like a great piece of cinema, most of the time, most of us are completely absorbed in the movie playing in our heads the thoughts and the emotions, they’re all being served up in a constant stream.

The mind, however, is anything BUT an ordinary movie. It’s an Oculus Rift 3D IMAX full-on Dolby Digital epic motion directly beaming into your head. And it’s been playing since birth.

No wonder we’re not even seeing that we’re watching a movie. We’re so accustomed to it!

It’s a lifetime of habit, and no one’s ever told us, man, you’re watching a movie.

Instead, we’re told implicitly or not: This is reality.

On top of that, what makes it so difficult for us to pull ourselves out of the mind movie is that it never ends the movie keeps on playing and it’ll keep doing that until the end of our lives.

So, before we can break free from the mind movie, we must learn to see that there is a mind movie, to begin with, and that most of the time we’re lost in it. The movie can’t be stopped, unfortunately, but, with the former understanding, comes the capacity to choose which part of the movie we want to watch.

We can say I’m not going to watch that movie today, or m gonna choose which part I wanna watch. This is the first step to mastery of mind. And this mastery of mind — the ability to disengage from our own mind movie is the basis for tremendous success in life.

 Seeing through the illusion

Sometimes the movie can be a feel-good family comedy: funny memories, pleasant thoughts, hopeful dreams. In these times, the adage Your mind is your best friend makes perfect sense.

But other times, the movie is depressingly sad — thoughts of despair, depression, hopelessness, pain. In these times, it’s easy to see how the mind can, in fact, be your worst enemy.

It can be difficult to reason with habitual thought patterns. They seem to just appear out of nowhere. That’s the way the mind movie works. Remember, it’s always playing, and most of the time the movie is so intense that it captures us fully.

But there is a way around that. In the Trading Psychology Mastery Course, we learn to see how you can begin to detach yourself from the mind movie.

Imagine what awaits you if you can willfully choose which part of the movie you want to watch?

Imagine what this means in terms of your capacity to trade effectively?

I’ll let you think of that. And in the meantime, I’ll let you know that you get 25% off if you get the Trading Psychology Mastery Course and The Trading For A Living bundle. Those are two ground-breaking trading psychology courses that will help you master the inner game of trading.

If you have any questions, I can be reached here Trading Composure or here @yvanbyeajee.