Top 7 Amazing Ways to Tour Your Mind

Several years ago the floating trophy on the dieting circuit was held by The Zone Diet conceived by Dr. Barry Sears. The Zone intrigued me, not so much because I was interested in losing weight, but because it adopted a rigorously scientific approach to achieving optimum physical performance. In particular, it bucked the trend of dumbing down the instructions to make it user-friendly, and instead required the prospective dieter to bring out the measuring tape and start fiddling around with mathematical formulas and ratios.

Was the public put off? Well, you’d know the answer by taking a look at the New York Times bestseller list. It occurred to me some time later that if so many people were enticed to put all that effort into preserving their physical health, surely they would want to work just as hard at preserving their metaphysical health – at controlling their intake of all the media imagery and commercial hype invading the modern mind. So I developed The Soul Diet. Dieting for the soul or the mind would also entail a structured, pragmatic plan to make our inner selves function smoothly and cleanly without being sidetracked by “spiritual junk food.”

It took a lot of work but The Soul Diet is finally here. It's a diet consisting of seven weeks of meticulous record-keeping which ultimately emerges as a map of the mind called the Satellite Map (because you can see yourself as a unit in one glance). The record-keeping is preceeded by a two-week Media Fast to free up the mind from influence. And then the 7 weeks of work begin in the following areas:

1. Order and Fitness:
   
   Recognizing that internal order begins with external order and at the same time recognizing that one can have an unhealthy obsession with order and fitness at the expense of other important things.
   
   
2. Anger Control:
   
   Identifying root causes of our anger so that we can understand it more clearly.
   
   
3. Speech Control:
   
   Discerning the difference between healthy and unhealthy speech and just how much it affects us and others around us.
   
   
4. The Giving Factor:
   
   Recognizing to what extent our egos determine our motivations, and understanding the vastness of altruistic application.
   
   
5. Intimacy:
   
   Zeroing in on a core understanding of the most confounding physical urge so that we can better navigate our relationships.
   
   
6. Goal Control:
   
   Understanding that goal-setting must follow only after completing all these steps so that we don’t set goals that compromise our principles and the principles of those around us.
   
   
7. The Happy Factor:
   
   Making a clear distinction between external superficial happiness, which is only temporal, and inner happiness which takes a lot of work but is infinite.

Rabbi Yitzchak Goldman serves as speaker and outreach coordinator for the Seattle Kollel, an institute for the promotion of Jewish learning and experience. He is the author of two allegorical novels (Targum/ Feldheim); has taught many adult and youth groups and has been the featured speaker at events across the Northwest. The Soul Diet is his latest work and can be viewed at http://www.souldiet.com