Paul V Mohan

Have you ever played chess? If so, you know the intensity of thinking and anticipation involved. More importantly, you must stay fully aware of the board. You need to observe the exact placement of every piece, grasp immediate threats from your opponent, foresee potential moves and hidden dangers, and anticipate how your opponent might be thinking. 

Imagine if your chess pieces had eyes, if they could see, think, and move across the board on their own. Could they play a better game than you? Of course not. From down on the board, their view is limited.  They lack your vantage point from above; they have only a partial view of the game, unable to see the full board position or grasp the opponent’s true strategy.

When we navigate our own life situations, we too have only a partial view of what is happening. We cannot see the whole board because we are inside the game—living it on the ground level. We cannot see the game as the player standing above; we see it only as the chess piece moving across the board.

But in our real-life situations, what blinds us is not a physical limitation. The barrier to seeing the whole board is our emotional entanglement, triggered fears, deep-seated complexes, and wrong perceptions. A wrong understanding of life, alongside our attachments, judgments, prejudices, and overwhelming sense of self-importance, creates endless hindrances to perceiving a situation as it truly is.

A client of mine, from a traditional merchant family in North India, once reached out to me, exhausted by the constant friction among her family members. Despite her desperate efforts to hold everyone together in harmony, she kept failing. “Individually, every single one of them is a good person,” she told me. “And we all live under the same roof. So why can’t we find peace?”

I listened patiently and offered her a simple shift in perspective. The next time a family debate broke out, rather than getting swept up in it, I asked her to step back mentally. “Observe the scene as if you are standing far above it,” I suggested. “See your family members simply as characters, and the conflict as a play unfolding on a stage below. Most importantly, look at yourself as just another character in that play.”

She practised this diligently. A week later, she called me back, her voice completely changed. She said she finally understood the root of the problem and knew exactly what needed to be done. Before long, she resolved the issues, bringing genuine harmony back to their home.

She found her solution the moment she stepped out of the frame of the game and adopted a true witness mindset. 

Another client once came to me, troubled by his frequent outbursts of anger, which were quietly damaging his closest relationships.

Here again, the witness mindset is the key to clarity. It allows you to step back and uncover the hidden trigger behind your irritation. In my book, The Man Who Harnesses His Mind, I wrote:

“Frequent anger is rarely about the present moment. It is often a symptom of underlying fear, feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem, chronic anxiety, or the silent misery of financial strain.”

When anger rises, let the emotion move through you. If an outburst happens, don’t waste energy on self-condemnation. Instead, once the emotional storm settles, look back at it as a neutral observer. Ask yourself: Was it really the external situation that upset me, or did someone’s words press against an unhealed emotional wound within me?

Address that inner wound, and the anger loses its power over you. But to do that, you must learn to observe your own mind with detachment—cultivating Sakshi Bhavam, the true witness mindset.

(To be continued… )

Image by Ylanite Koppens from pixabay.com. Thanks, Ylanite