Tag: Mindfulness

Working with Negative thoughts, Part 1

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All of us, from time to time, worry about things. One thing worry does is increase negative thoughts and talking to ourselves. It tends to be anticipatory, referring to threatening things which we come to believe may happen in the future. These thoughts and self-talk have a significant impact upon our mood, making it more difficult for us to be content in our lives at this moment.

There are a number of ways that we can deal with negative thoughts. One very common one is to identify the thoughts and replace them with more constructive or realistic ones. For example, when a person feels bad after a failed job interview and thinks that they will never, ever,  get a job, the overgeneralizing thought is named and a more constructive one – such as “It did not go well this time, but I will prepare better for the next interview”  – is focused on.

The approach that mindfulness takes is slightly different. It simply starts with noticing that all sorts of thoughts are continually arising and passing through the mind. We do this by taking a short period – say two minutes – to sit quietly and calm the mind, not thinking of anything in particular, and just being aware of our breath coming in and going out, say,  at the nostrils. What could be easier? However, what we very quickly notice is that this is not that easy just to be aware of the breath, that we start thinking very quickly.

This is a really important insight along the way towards becoming mindful and in dealing with negative thoughts. We simply notice that it is in the nature of the mind to continually generate thoughts and that they arise and pass away all the time. Some teachers have compared this aspect of the mind to a waterfall, with thoughts thundering or rushing by. There is nothing wrong with this, so we just accept it with gentleness and non-judgment, while returning our attention to the breath.

This is the first step in developing the practical skill of mindfulness. We will move on to the second step in the next, related, post. However, for the moment we just practice this, noticing how the mind wanders and gets distracted.

Mindfulness, seeing clearly, means awakening to the happiness of the uncomplicated moment. We complicate moments. Hardly anything happens without the mind spinning it up into an elaborate production. It’s the elaboration that makes life more difficult than it needs to be.

Sylvia Boorstein

When Procrastination Strikes

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“My son, every day work on only as much ground as your body takes up in space lying down, and your work will progress gradually, and you will not lose heart”

When he heard this, the young man acted accordingly, and within a short time the field was cleared and cultivated. Do the same, work step by step and you will not lose heart.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

These 4th Century sayings have a lot of wisdom in them for our life today. In this one the young man gets discouraged because the field is hard to plough. He does not have the strength and feels unmotivated, paralysed. He does not know where to start and as a consequence leaves everything just lying around. We are like this when we have to face a difficult or long task, or indeed a difficult person.

The old man gives the best advice. Do not consider the whole field, just do as much ground as you would sleep on in the night. That can be done easily. And so the young man begins, slowly, but soon the whole field gets done.

Each day we can  have a mountain of tasks ahead of us. And if we get tired or stressed they seem even greater. The advice is to start at one place and work slowly, not considering the whole of the task. If we look at the whole day and the extent of work to be done, we can get discouraged and make no progress. Just do one thing after another, step by step….we can all do that without being overwhelmed.

It is the same with our inner life. If we get frightened by our faults or difficulties and think that we will never change, we will never get started. We give up on ourselves. It is enough to do a little piece of work each day, such as a short session of meditation, and not concern ourselves with the whole field. This way progress happens, without us even noticing it.

The Wrong Trousers

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Sometimes we get little reminders that our way of seeing the world is not always completely objective. We see the world not as it actually is, but as we are.

I recently bought some clothes, thinking that they looked nice. Shortly afterwards I was informed that the colour did not suit me and that they were a strange choice. For a moment I took refuge in the fact that maybe I have better taste, that I have an interesting dress sense, and anyway I don’t have too much interest in criteria like colour. I had a certain notion of how these clothes were right. Normally when our judgment is questioned we need to rationalize and reduce some dissonance between our “good judgment” and others’ opinions. However, I soon admitted to myself that others are probably more objective and that I was more than likely wrong.

I know that in most things, I see through my own subjective filters, so it is likely the same for my dress sense. We think we see something as it is. But really it is we see it through our own conditioning and history, and often through the story which is dominant in our life at that moment. Indeed, most thinking is not pure thought, but is rather a self-focused emotional activity. A similar process applies to the words we use. Something may be said to us with the best of intentions but we hear it through the emotional place we are standing. Or similarly, a simple email or text message which we send can be understood completely differently by the person receiving it, because of where they are at, and as a result they move to an interpretation which was never intended.

Practice is essentially clarifying our vision. We learn to sit still, to befriend ourselves. We return to sit each day in order to see through our mental processes, with all their noise; and to increasingly enter into reality as-it-actually-is. We see that we can hardly take a breath without a thought or opinion or judgment going through our head. We see that we prefer to relate to life through our thoughts and frequently our fears. Our natural calm mind is often clouded by the limited self-image created by habitual, obsessive, neuronal patterns. Practice works on this, allowing us let go of the fears that drive our thoughts, getting closer to the moment as it is. We observe the mind in order to not get lost in it. We learn to relate simply with the thoughts, feelings and experiences that arise as we sit. Slowly we get to see the world more objectively. To see things as they are, not as I want them to be.

Swimming

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Some things are best learned early, but I never learned how to swim as a child. It is not easy; the secret is to relax and let go. I don’t know if I will ever swim like a fish but am  pleased with being able to keep my head under the water or move forward across the pool. For me it would be such a freedom to float on the water and not be afraid.

Learning to swim contains a lot of lessons which can be applied to practice and to life. In many ways we can approach our practice as if we are there to correct or fix something. We often start from the deep-down assumption that there is something wrong with us, that we need to change or get away from. So we seek out personal development programmes or practice in order to change ourselves, to get away from what we are not at ease with. Or we can seek outside ourselves, in work, projects or relationships, for something that will complete us.

What swimming teaches is that somethings go better when we just relax and let go. We can stop striving. We can release the need to ‘control’ everything in our lives. When we tense up and try to fix things, we create a whole new set of problems. Often when we are stressed out, we attract more stress into our lives. We end up trying to make ourselves different than how we actually are. Freedom starts with accepting ourselves and letting go, trusting that the water, or that life. will actually support us. We can let go of our fears.

Sometimes, in order to let go we must “unlearn” many of the things we have spent our entire life learning and which have been reinforced in relationships and life’s experiences. From an early age, we have been conditioned to worry about our family, our relationships, our jobs, our security, and everything else in our lives that we want to improve. We are taught to compete and to overcome our anxiety by doing better and striving harder. Ironically, when we stop the worry, stress, and fear, we allow our natural rhythm to flow into us and we drop into our deep inner resources. The greatest truth we learn from practice is that we are already perfect, just as we are. Nothing needs to be added to us in this moment. We can just float and let go.

Balance 1: Make time

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The question in an age of rapid transit and conference calls and triple shift work days is balance. And the answer is balance too.

But what is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does nt mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.

Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

Not everything goes to plan 2: Don’t get alarmed

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We have two kinds of fears. One is a fear that whatever is going on is going to go on forever. It’s just not true – nothing goes on forever. The other is the fear that, even if it doesn’t go on forever, the pain of whatever is happening will be so terrible we won’t be able to stand it. There is a gut level of truth about this fear. It would be ridiculous to pretend that in our lives, in these physical bodies, which can hurt very much, and in relationships that can hurt very much, there aren’t some very, very painful times. Even so, I think we underestimate ourselves.  Terrible as times may be, I believe we can stand them.

Because we become frightened as soon as a difficult mind state blows into the mind, we start to fight with it. We try to change it, or we try to get rid of it. The frenzy of the struggle makes the mind state even more unpleasant.

The familiar image is a children’s cartoon character, like Daffy Duck, walking along freely and suddenly stepping into toffee. In a hasty, awkward attempt to extricate himself, he might fall forward and backward and eventually be totally stuck in the toffee. The best solution would be the nonalarmed recognition, ‘This is toffee. I didn’t see it as I stepped into it, but I felt it after I got stuck. It’s just toffee. The whole world is not made out of toffee. What would be a wise thing for me to do now?’

Sylvia Boorstein, It’s Easier Than You Think