“Don’t Walk in My Head with Your Dirty Feet”

“Don't walk in my head with your dirty feet.”
― Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving & Learning

I just finished reading Living, Loving, & Learning by Leo Buscaglia, who was a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. I enjoyed the book very much, and I think it would greatly benefit society if we could all read it and apply the teachings inside.

In the book, Leo Buscaglia tells the story of traveling to Japan and meeting with his “marvelous Japanese teacher” in a garden of giant bamboo. Buscaglia had learned many things in his travels and search for wisdom, and so he was excitedly sharing all of this with his teacher. He kept going on and on, wanting to impress his teacher with all that he knew.

Suddenly, the normally very peaceful teacher struck Buscaglia in the mouth, and he said:

“Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.”

I have had the experience of the Japanese teacher many, many times, where I felt like someone was introducing unhelpful and unnecessary, and perhaps even hurtful thoughts to me. And sometimes, these people go on and on. And I can’t really get away, not tactfully, anyway. I may feel stuck, at the mercy of this person’s wandering and untrained mind.

Different ways that people may walk in my head with their dirty feet are if they go on and on in a way that is angry, hateful, bitter, negative, boastful, worried, obnoxious, overly dramatic, self-obsessed, and so on.

In my life, my mind does sometimes experience negativity, and I may discuss that and introduce it to the world at times, but either I aim to keep it concise and be done with it, or I aim to teach others how to overcome those negative thoughts and experiences. Of course, no one is perfect, but I feel that this is better than rambling on with negativity and introducing it to others around me without any purpose behind it.

Of course, even if someone does “walk in my head with their dirty feet,” I would not strike them because of that. But I suppose the teacher in the story above wanted to make the emphatic point that if Buscaglia thought he knew so much, he should know better than to brag and ramble, especially when they were surrounded by beautiful scenery and a peaceful environment. And the teacher himself must know more than the student in this case, so perhaps Buscaglia should have been open and listening, rather than imposing his own thoughts.

This month I’ve been thinking of how we often let people walk in our head with their dirty feet. I think we invite it in. On the ride to my wife’s workplace, I often turn on the radio. And either it’s music that I don’t even like, or it’s about car crashes that have clogged the roadways, or some other bad news about how things are getting worse. Otherwise, if I get on social media or check the news, I seem to be inviting people or ideas into my head as well, often with their dirty feet.

Lately, instead of dealing with the radio, we sometimes ride our bikes together (with no radios), or I turn off the radio, and we either talk or sit in silence. It’s not so bad.

I’m making an effort to be more at ease with the silence. It seems most of us find the silence undesirable and prefer to have an endless chatter in the background, whether it may come from the TV, social media, or even the people we surround ourselves with. The reality is that often, these are not providing us with helpful and positive messages. They are the dirty feet of today. Ultimately, we tend to invite it in because we find the silence unbearable.

We seem to prefer dirty feet in our heads, over the silence. But it should be the other way around.

The silence may remind us of our own feet, which are often dirtier than anything else. By this, I mean that in silence, our mind wanders negatively, self-destructively, perhaps. This is especially true for the untrained mind (I discuss how we can train our mind in many ways in this post.). And so, in efforts to avoid our own feet or untrained thoughts in all their dirtiness, we tend to invite others to walk in our heads with their own dirtiness.

Books are a great resource for me because if they introduce ideas that I think have a dirtiness, where they are unnecessary, hurtful, irrational, wrong, or charged with negative emotions, I can close the book and move on.  

If I’m online and start reading negative comments on a social media page, I sometimes feel compelled to keep going and keep inviting more of these dirty feet into my mind. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but it happens. Once I get started, it’s hard to quit. I find it’s best to avoid it altogether.

Instead of getting sucked into all the unnecessary negativity, I believe it is important to stay positive.

And none of this even accounts for the advertisements that find us everywhere we go. They instill fear, worry, anxiety, depression, whereas they claim to be fixing these things.

Sometimes on the radio, I hear something like this in an overly concerned tone. “Have you been suffering from A and B symptoms? (Imagine any common symptom such as headaches or stomachaches.) Then they claim that it could be more serious than you think. Then they go on about how they can save you from your chronic illness with a particular medication they are selling.

Talk about “dirty feet.”

One day when that happened, I told my wife – “I really have to change the station at this point. There is plenty to worry about in this world, without me needing to think that a minor and common symptom could be a chronic and serious illness. Obviously, if we feel unwell, we see a doctor. I do not need a commercial to make me worried about my health.”

As another example, often politicians focus on all the ways that the “other party” is ruining the world, which provides us with a stampede of dirty feet. I often hear of the idea that either this party or that party, or this country or that country, or these people or those people, or this idea or the other idea, or this belief or the other are ruining the world. This is on such a regular occurrence that it seems normal. Certainly, these are dirty feet that have invaded our minds.

So, how can we wash our feet, metaphorically speaking? How can we wash ourselves of this emotional pain, harm, and negativity that we tend to spread onto others?

Maybe it’s a phrase worth stating more often – “Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.” Maybe that can help us to stay cleaner and teach people to be more cautious with the thoughts and words that they choose to share.

I’m retraining myself to say things in my mind like, “It’s no big deal.”

Sometimes I have this sense of urgency of needing to check my emails over and over because someone might send me a message. And I need to remember, “It’s no big deal.”

Do I really need an inbox of 20-30 messages per day? It’s like dust building up in my home. Now, I find that I respond less often. I mark more messages as spam if they are indeed spam. I unsubscribe from lists more often if I don’t really care about the messages. I used to get back to people on the same day. Now, I tend to take 4-5 days or sometimes more. It’s not because I don’t have the time. It’s because nothing is that urgent. The vast majority of the time, nothing is “that big of a deal.”

The world somehow finds the way to keep orbiting the sun, regardless of what we do.

I can’t think of a single email I’ve received in the last 5 years where it truly needed to be answered within 24 hours. Sure, in some cases, not answering quickly enough could have cost me a bit of money or inconvenienced someone, but it would never have led to some great catastrophe. It would never have really mattered in the grand scheme.

Even in the few times, someone may have contacted me about a dire problem in their life, often people resolve those problems on their own, or new problems arise and they forget about the old ones. I wouldn’t be so egocentric as to think that someone truly needed my advice at a particular moment to save them. I may have helped, but I imagine their lives would have continued without me. If nothing else, they would have found someone else to give them advice if they truly needed it at that moment.

Today, think of how you can wash your feet and how you can keep them clean.

It may be as simple as holding back a bit and questioning whether you really need to state everything on your mind. Will some of those things add needless worry, fear, desperation, or sadness to the people around you?

To make a true, long-lasting change, it may help to meditate, self-reflect, or otherwise look to make a positive change in your life. These can be changes that you work on implementing gradually if that is easier for you.

And also, think of how you can keep other people’s dirty feet out of your head.

Can you leave an environment, or if this often happens with someone, can you tactfully tell him that he is not helping with his comments? And perhaps, he is making things worse.

Today, let’s keep our feet clean so that we do not dirty the minds of the people around us. And let’s encourage others to keep their feet clean, so they do not dirty our minds.

Build Up Your Mental Fortress

We all have a mental fortress that we are in charge of and operates to help us in times of difficulties and duress. I am not speaking of the mind itself, but rather the mechanisms which protect the mind from harm and falseness.

Just as a computer has a firewall to protect it from viruses and invaders, you have a mental firewall, or what I will call the mental fortress. Many of us have not given any thought to this, and so the mechanism runs on autopilot. We resort to old habits that have seemed to work for us in the past. Sometimes those old habits work in a way, but they may not always work well, or sometimes they cause us extra problems rather than truly helping us.

Your mental fortress kicks in any time someone offends you, you feel embarrassed, someone lies to you, you lie to yourself, you are going through a traumatic period, and if you are afraid, anxious, or sad or hurt emotionally in some way.

The mental fortress may tell you to get away from people who cause you emotional suffering. Or it may tell you to respond angrily or possibly even with physical force or to argue with whoever is hurting you. It may tell you that your goal is to harm them more deeply, whoever it was that tried to hurt you.

You may begin to see that there are productive and counterproductive parts of this mental fortress. Many of us go all our lives without thinking of any of this. Something happens, and we react. But it is important to proact – to have a set of actions or steps that you can take in advance, to avoid inviting problems and suffering into your life.

A computer anti-virus system may find vulnerable ports that are liable to be hacked and used maliciously and protect them or seal them so that they cannot be so easily infiltrated. Just the same, you should consider your greatest vulnerabilities and look for ways to mentally protect yourself from being hacked or controlled or falling into emotional turmoil every time one of these vulnerabilities is accessed. What we mean when we say people are “pushing our buttons” is just this – we mean that they have discovered our weak points and purposely probed them to get us to malfunction, to get us to react childishly and yell and scream, or to get us to feel scared and become easily manipulated.

Just as your immune system has many working parts to help protect you against infection, your mental fortress has many working parts to protect your mind against becoming contaminated.

Some of these components may involve our self-talk (how we talk to ourselves in our own minds). It may be our support network – feeling that we have people who can help us in times of need can make us mentally stronger. Other features may be our mental toolkit for approaching or solving problems – feeling that you can handle difficult problems can make you feel more mentally at ease. One type of problem-solving that is especially useful will be knowing how to think creatively, to generate possible solutions for difficult scenarios that we find ourselves in. For many people, a component of the mental fortress may be physical exercise to help get your mind clear and in balance. For others, it may involve religious beliefs or spiritual practices to help you feel that you are connected to something greater and that you are not so vulnerable and weak. Just the feeling that we are protected can help to shield us from harm and keep our mental fortress strong.

One of the greatest tools of the mental fortress will be our self-talk, as we can have some control over this. A young child needs a parent or some outside stimulus to help manage his feelings if he is scared or worried. However, as adults, we begin to learn to manage our own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Nonetheless, adults still struggle greatly with preventing their emotions from running out of control.

Many individuals now suffer from depressive thinking, which can involve depressing loops of negative self-talk. Similarly, many individuals suffer from anxiety, which can involve anxious loops of self-talk.

One basic mental tool to combat this will be to have positive, calm, reasonable self-talk scripts that we have planned for difficult situations. Such positive or neutral scripts can help cancel out the mental loops that keep us stuck in anxious or depressive or other harmful thought loops.

It is important to keep these written, as, during a stressful period, such positive scripts may be difficult to recall.

Here are examples of some of the scripts we may create and have ready to use when needed:

• I am happy with everything and everyone I have in my life at this moment. I should not dwell on what is wrong but instead, think of what is going right.

• I am in pain, but I have the power to think of something else to make myself feel better (e.g., my cat, my spouse’s smile, or a favorite memory).

• I do not need to listen to my own mind – sometimes, it lies to me, and I can choose to observe the beauty in nature, talk to supportive family and friends, or engage in physical exercise to help calm my stressed mind.

• I am at peace at this moment – nothing can hurt me or take my peace from me.

• Love is all around me. I feel the love of everyone who has ever loved me, and I love them back.

• I should stop assuming things will go badly and instead assume they will go well. This will help me to find ways to improve my life.

• I am in control of what I think. I can take my mind to a better place.

• Whatever this experience is that I’m going through, it is only temporary.

• I love my mind and body in full. Even if sometimes my mind or body works against me, I love that every moment I am alive is a true miracle.

• God is watching over me. Even in moments when I feel lost, troubled, and hopeless, God is always there for me.

These are just some examples. We all need to take some time to find positive scripts that we can use in times of great worry, anxiety, depression, or whenever it is that we feel we are losing control of our own minds.

Of course, feel free to use the ones I have proposed for yourself or adapt them in any way you find useful.

The idea is not to brainwash ourselves with false positivity. I aim to be truthful in everything I do, as I do not think lying to ourselves or others is beneficial. The idea, rather, is to counteract the negative forces of the mind with something positive so that for a moment, we can see that our negative train of thought is often incorrect. Often, there is something positive we can focus on to make ourselves feel better and more in control.

Keep in mind that I am not a mental health professional. My background is in psychology, with an emphasis in industrial-organizational and cognitive domains, but not specifically in the clinical or therapeutic domains. To any individuals with mental health concerns, I recommend seeking professional help.

My general point here is that even if you are usually mentally healthy and free from mental disorders, you should take some time to build up your mental fortress.

A large problem of modern society is that we wait for severe illness to take hold of us before becoming interested in our mental stability. Our mental health and general health experts usually know how to deal with specific illnesses, but we should take care of ourselves and build up our mental fortresses to help avoid falling into mental illness or severe mental turmoil.

The core function of your mental fortress will be to stop negative and harmful forces from coming into and affecting your life, yet being open and adaptable to receiving positive and beneficial influences into your life. A mental fortress that allows everything into your life, all the good and bad, is not functioning well. Likewise, a mental fortress that allows nothing into your life, neither the good nor the bad, is not functioning well either.

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If you have a deeper interest in building up your mental strength and resilience for dealing with life and hardships, I recommend a couple of books:

365 Quotes to Live Your Life By

7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By