Mushin no shin - 無心の心

“Hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.”

—Neil Gaiman

Yesterday we had a wonderful Talks Night (tm) at Makers Academy! If you haven’t ever been to a Makers Academy Talks Night and you happen to be a student at our academy, you definitely should!

In a Makers Academy Talks Night you will learn a lot of things that you possibly didn’t know about, like how to produce music, how to save money by batch-cooking, Venezuela, Singapore, women in tech, … you name it It is a really great evening and the kudos really go to all the students, but specially to those who had the courage to stand in front of everyone giving a talk!

I wanted to write a little about this concept, I have been talking about a little for the last five years or so, as I gave a talk about it during our Makers Academy Talks Night yesterday; Mushin no shin.

Your brain does many things to cope, specially when under perceived stress conditions (learning in a bootcamp counts as such), it might default to fear (or rather anxiety), anger or ego. These are all natural emotions that we all experience in our lifetimes (sometimes even multiple times a day). The problem with all of them is that they will not help you in those situations that require your full attention.

Your mind is troubled and there is a lot of chatter that does not allow you to react to the situation at hand as you are to busy inside your emotional state. Mushin no shin, or the mind that is no mind is a state in which your mind is not fixed or busy with thought or emotion, but rather open to everything. It is an ideal mind state in which you can absorb knowledge at incredible speed.

It is a difficult state of mind to achieve and to keep, but as everything we do, it’s not about how easy it is, but how much we invest in it for our own sake.