I’m thinking about a project I’ve been working on. I’m not actually working on it, I’m just thinking about it. It’s been frustrating me. I feel frustrated. Or I’m thinking about a conversation I may have soon that could be difficult. I’m not actually having the conversation, I’m just thinking about it, mulling it over, feeling nervous.
Different scenarios float through my mind about how the project is going, or how the conversation might go. I feel my mood shift, depending on where my thinking takes me.
Here’s the thing: My thoughts are happening. But what I’m thinking about isn’t happening at all. I’m actually sitting at my desk typing. That’s all.
My thinking mind, however, can have me feeling like something is happening, or may happen, when nothing is actually happening. And none of those scenarios actually happen the way I think about them in advance, and so don’t prepare me any more than if I’d never had them in the first place. But the thoughts take up energy, nonetheless, and can often distract me from what’s in front of me.
The thinking mind wanders in time and space - a conversation from yesterday, a drive across town tomorrow, a concert in 1996, etc. It seems random at times. And it’s easy to get caught up in it.
We can’t really put a stop to this. But Mindfulness practice helps us see it for what it is.
Our thoughts are real, but they’re not true.
“The thought is not the thing,” says Mei Elliott, a California-based meditation teacher.
Truth is, sometimes I notice my thoughts are drifting me out of the moment. Sometimes I don’t. But I’m getting better at recognizing when my thoughts are creating or amplifying a difficult mood, and saying “I don’t want to do that.” It takes practice.
The more we practice the more frequently we notice we’re in a thought stream that isn’t serving us. We can stop ourselves and take these moments as an opportunity for self compassion.
Our experience is in two parts; There’s what happens. And there’s what we tell ourselves about what happens. These are separate, though I don’t think most people know that. We can change our internal narrative any time.
I was at a meditation retreat in the woods in the middle of nowhere. I was meditating on a wooden deck, deep in the woods just after the rain. The forest offered that lush feeling of deep woods after the rain. It smelled sweet, I could hear the drops falling from the trees. I was having trouble focusing, feeling distracted. I heard this thought: “You’re doing it wrong, you’re screwing this up.” WHAT?! What can I possibly be screwing up? I’m literally just sitting here in the woods to sit here in the woods! But there’s the thought stream: “You should be better at this, you’re not very good at this, blah, blah, blah.”
I quickly saw that this is just something my mind does, and it’s not based in reality. The idea that I’m screwing up is one of my default settings. We all have what one friend calls our top five negative defaults.
That’s what the thinking mind does. It just bubbles up thoughts to the surface like soda water. During a 30-minute meditation, my mind will bubble up with things I need to get done, conversations from yesterday, something that may or may not happen, or some odd music from when I worked in pop radio in the 1970s, I’m not meditating right. It’s random and endless.
There’s a popular metaphor in Buddhism about the two arrows. The first arrow is the wound. Maybe I screwed up at work, or someone is mad at me, I’m hurt somehow, or I can’t focus in my meditation. There’s generally nothing I can do about that. Life happens. The second arrow is the self-inflicted wound. That’s where I start thinking I’m bad, or screwed up, or a failure, whatever.
We create narratives around our experience. The narrative is not the experience. It’s just the way we’ve learned to narrate our experience. We can change the narrative any time.
In her book, The Key: And the Name of the Key is Willingness, Zen teacher Cheri Huber writes: “The ways you think you are, not the ways you really are, are the bars of your own personal prison…Just because you think something is so (that you are bad, selfish, ugly, perfect, brilliant, superior, inadequate) doesn’t mean it’s so. It only means that you think it’s so.”
And the thinking part of the mind would have us believe it’s all of who we are, simply by being the loudest part of the mind. But it’s not, any more than your squeaky brakes are your whole car, just because they’re loud. It’s actually a small part of our vast overall consciousness.
We can step back and ask ourselves, who’s having these thoughts.
Mindfulness practice helps us see when our thought stream is taking us off the rails. We can pause, remind ourselves at any time, that what we’re thinking isn’t actually happening, take a few deep breaths and refocus on the things of the moment in front of us.
This is especially helpful if we’re experiencing difficult emotions. You can pause whatever thought train that’s telling you you’re not okay, and remind yourself you’re doing the best you can, this is just a difficult passage.
I felt angry a couple of days ago. There’s nothing wrong with anger, it’s just uncomfortable. I noticed my thought train was amplifying my feelings, tossing scenarios that made me feel less centered, telling me I shouldn’t be angry, etc. When I noticed this, I took a few deep breaths and changed my thinking, reminding myself that I’m okay, just upset about something that happened.
This is an opportunity for self compassion. Mindfulness practice helps us notice when we’re being discompassionate with ourselves and direct our thinking to reminding us that we’re okay, we’re doing the best we can and it’s just hard sometimes.
Buddha said, “With our thoughts we make the world.” Make a kinder, gentler world for yourself.