How to Train Your Mind to Obey You Instantly | Miyamoto Musashi

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:01]What is the first step forward from that place?

[00:00:04]The moment you can answer that question, your fear has lost its most important weapon, paralysis.

[00:00:10]There is a concept in Musashi's teaching that is often mistranslated and deeply misunderstood.

[00:00:16]He called it mushin.

[00:00:18]It is sometimes translated as empty mind, which sounds like meditation, which sounds passive, which completely misses the point.

[00:00:26]Mushin is not an empty mind.

[00:00:29]It is an unattached mind.

[00:00:31]A mind that can observe its own thoughts without being ruled by them.

[00:00:35]A mind that sees fear arise and does not immediately obey it.

[00:00:40]A mind that sees desire arise and can choose whether to follow it or let it pass.

[00:00:45]This is radical.

[00:00:47]Because most people live inside a constant hostage negotiation with their own thoughts.

[00:00:53]Their mind says, "I am afraid." And they immediately become afraid.

[00:00:57]Their mind says, "This will not work."

[00:00:59]And they immediately believe it will not work.

[00:01:02]Their mind says, "You are not enough."

[00:01:03]And they carry that verdict into every room they enter.

[00:01:07]They do not choose their thoughts.

[00:01:09]Their thoughts choose them.

[00:01:11]And a man whose thoughts rule him is not free. He is enslaved by the most intimate captor possible.

[00:01:18]Mushin is the practice of creating distance between you and your own mental events.

[00:01:23]Not suppressing them.

[00:01:25]Not fighting them.

[00:01:27]Not pretending they are not there.

[00:01:29]But watching them the way you might watch clouds move across the sky.

[00:01:33]You do not grab a cloud and try to hold it in place.

[00:01:37]You do not scream at it for existing.

[00:01:40]You simply notice it and then notice what comes after it.

[00:01:44]The Stoics called this practice the observer stance.

[00:01:48]Marcus Aurelius, who is not a monk and not a philosopher sitting on a hilltop, but the emperor of the most powerful empire on Earth, a man with every reason to let his thoughts run wild with ego, with rage, with fear, with the weight of millions of lives depending on his decisions, wrote in his private journal that he returned to this practice every single morning.

[00:02:08]He did not write those words for anyone to read.

[00:02:11]They were found after his death.

[00:02:14]Which means that this practice of watching his own mind, of creating that crucial distance between impulse and response, was so central to how he survived the pressure of his life that he returned to it constantly, privately, without applause or audience.

[00:02:28]That is the mark of genuine mental training.

[00:02:31]It is not what you perform when people are watching.

[00:02:34]It is what you return to when