Daily practices to keep a good Mental Hygiene

Gabriella Wright is a british actor and model who -alongside Deepak Chopra, PhD. and Poonacha Machaiah- founded Never alone, an initiative to incubate a new vision for emotional and mental health.

Maybe, as you know, I’m an actor. Being an actor, you have to go beyond what you see. You have to dive into the study of human behavior. Sometimes, you have to play characters who are so far from you. So, already, that’s a fertile mind.

Being sensitive and being vulnerable is part of being an artist. It’s the process: we’re exposing our inner shadows, that we don’t often know how to define.

Unfortunately, two and a half years ago now, my little sister, Paulette Wright, who I love so deeply, passed away by suicide.

It struck me to the court to see that I was not able to see it. That was a major inner crisis that I had to face alongside my family crisis. So being the eldest, what do we do? We dive into what is the why and the why has many different answers. And there is not one answer, but one of the interior drive is sincrodestiny.

Sincrodestiny is something incredible, because you’re in your pool or your mud, and then you wake up and say “how can I actually change and contribute to giving tools of mental health awareness?”

I wasn’t even aware that mental health was an issue, because we think that people who have mental health issues on the broader spectrum have to be institutionalized, have to be isolated with specialists. Whereas actually more so than ever before thanks to this pandemic, we need to broaden this awareness. It happens to us.

Daily intentions for emotional health

I have developed meditation as something that is my number one tool. And when I say meditation, it’s really going into the science of listening. Vulnerable doesn’t mean that you have to hide away from it. It’s really being kind. Meditation allows you to listen and really take the thought.

Every morning I wake up, I meditate. Sometimes I use mantras, but also I create intentions. I have these four intentions that are important for the day. However they come out, they will come out and manifest the way. The intention is: “may I be free from suffering?”, “may my loved ones be free from suffering?”, “If I have hurt someone, I hope that their pain will be submerged in happiness”.

These are little intentions. Then how do you carry yourself through the day? I need a joyful, energetic body, so I make that intention: “I embody a joyful and energetic body”.

I create these intentions that are inner commitments. You make these commitments after your meditation because it embeds it in this mental space.

We all have this mental space. How do we engage in the mental space? The fact that we do not take care of ourselves comes from the fact that we don’t engage in the mental space. We don’t even realize that it exists. Then we become swayed by the world’s politics. All these social geopolitical, human tragedies that we see constantly.

That’s why the beginning of the day is so important, is to just engage like you hook onto the mental space. That mental space is a mental hygiene. We wash our teeth. How do we cleanse our minds?

Access your mental space

If you close your eyes just for a second. Focus on the breath and just see how all of a sudden your body is more alive than when your eyes open. That mental space is not only the sensations in your body, but it’s the quality of the listening. We’re tapping into our sensations.

We’re going into the space that holds the thoughts. All of a sudden you open your eyes, and there’s the world outside of you. There’s the world that we call, I would say, the everyday reality. And yet when you close your eyes, you create a deeper listening to this space that is within and around the everyday reality. So that’s the first way to connect to your mental space.

A solution for emotional liberation

The sensation of agitation often is connected to the body. So you will locate it. Generally, agitation comes in the chest area. Your heartbeat is slightly faster. The temperature of your body is slightly hotter. When you close your eyes and you identify where that is, you start expanding the awareness. Expanding the awareness of your mental space dilutes the symptoms on your body, in your being, of this agitation.

The thing where we get attached, which is why it’s important, is through storytelling. That’s why we need to liberate from our stories, because if I’m giving meaning to this sensation that occurred from an event, generally these sensations and irritations and aggravations happen from an event that happened in the past. But the story takes the event on the past and brings it into our body in the present moment. The story meaning: “it’s my fault that I caused pain” or “that person did that to me and I feel like this, this is what’s happening now”. So I’m bringing the power of the story.

When you merge minds together, when you merge different sectors of society, when you merge different people who have their techniques, who have their ways of alleviating suffering, whatever it is to be free from suffering from mental space, from physical unwellness to the power of belonging. Everyone has something because we are all unique and we are all different forms of the expression of life.