Chapter 9
Going with the Current – Week Six: Accepting the True Nature of Thoughts
In This Chapter
Understanding your thoughts at a deeper level
Disengaging from self-doubt
Treating your mind with love and kindness
Serenity is not freedom from the storm but peace within the storm. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life brings difficult experiences to every single person on the planet – from the lowest pauper to the highest Hollywood celebrity – but as Emerson’s quote implies, the amount you suffer is related to how you think about and respond to those experiences. Handling the events themselves is difficult enough, without compounding your problems by struggling against your own thoughts and emotions as well.
In this chapter you delve deep into the world of your thoughts, as I invite you to see them as mere events occurring in your mental mind (as opposed to the feeling or heartful mind that I describe in Chapter 8). The exploration of this thought-world is often called awareness and it lies apart from thinking. Rather, awareness is more like a container that can hold your cognitive and emotional thinking, allowing you to discover how to explore and understand the patterns and movements of your thoughts, while becoming increasingly aware that thoughts aren’t necessarily the only truth with regard to what light they shed on your experience.
Awareness helps you to observe your thoughts dispassionately, finding out what kind of destructive thinking patterns are causing you problems and how to let go of them. Often such thoughts are the result of a trigger, after which they race away out of control on their own (the negative automatic thoughts, or NATs, that I discuss in Chapter 5). Better awareness allows you not to get tangled up with any particular thought, but to see it as just one of many possibilities.
I also show you how to detect your own most common downward-spirallers (in other words, the thoughts that trigger subsequent thoughts and moods that continuously build on top of each other and pull you down emotionally) and discover how you can look at them from a number of different perspectives, including kindness and compassion.
Getting Your Bearings on the Course
This week I invite you to investigate particularly negative thoughts more deeply. In order to do so, ideally you’ve been practising mindfulness for a few weeks. Specifically, please check that you’re au fait with:
My introduction to thoughts and fears (flip to Chapter 1).
Your regular meditation space and position. Some of this chapter’s meditations are longer and deeper than previously and you need to be comfortable with the basics (check out Chapter 4).
Your preparation for dealing with NATs and observing troublesome thoughts. I describe the former in Chapter 5 and the latter in Chapters 7 and 8.
This chapter isn’t the ideal starting place unless you’re used to mindfulness meditation. I design it to help you tackle deeper issues and build on material in Chapters 4 to 8. Therefore, I suggest that you read these chapters before diving in to this chapter’s longer exercises.
Demystifying Thoughts: They’re Less Peculiar Than You Think
Your automatic, unwanted – but not necessarily negative –thoughts aren’t mystical, fantastical, incomprehensible things. You can, perhaps, see them usefully as ‘hiccups’ in the brain, which is constantly active and vigilant, trying to protect its home: you.
If you’ve been practising the exercises in Chapters 7 and 8, you may be starting to understand that distant and recent experiences of thoughts and feelings on which you ruminate, and that used to appear irresolvable, can be or have already changed. Even if you’re not aware of it, such thoughts and feelings are altered by passing time and any changes occurring during this time. Their intensity and power over you may have already diminished; you may have gained new insights or accepted that this is how a particular event presented itself to you and how it felt for you.
Here, I take a deeper look at what thoughts are (and aren’t), how they can affect you and how to reclaim your mind from unwanted thoughts.
When negative thoughts and emotions constantly cascade through your mind and feel so overwhelming that facing them seems impossible, you can reduce the power they hold over you by watching them as if you were standing behind a waterfall. This lets you see them from a distance and a point of safety because the strong water torrent acts as a barrier and makes it easier for you to simply name them. For example, you can say to yourself, ‘there is sadness/fear/sorrow/guilt/anxiety/stress/frustration/ uncertainty’, and so on. By not owning your thoughts and saying that they simply exist in your awareness, you don’t risk being dragged down by their heavy sentiments, and you avoid being caught up with them. This waterfall technique is extremely useful and effective if you wish to stay concentrating on your chosen focus of attention, such as your breath. When you’re able to look past all your thoughts in this way, you can see that what lies on the other side is the real you: the person who encompasses all your thoughts and moods, who can be self-contained and who can self-determine how things affect you.
Understanding how your thoughts affect your moods (and vice versa)
Thoughts and moods are different but strongly connected. Understanding this fact is useful in itself and for you to apply to your life. Here are a couple of linked examples. Please imagine that:
Scenario 1: You’re feeling quite low because you’ve just been told that 20 people in your department are going to lose their jobs in the near future. Suddenly one co-worker you really get on with rushes by you and doesn’t even say hello. You now feel even worse; obviously that person isn’t among the 20 and knows that you are.
Scenario 2: You’ve been told that you’re going to be promoted and feel chuffed with yourself. Suddenly a co-worker you like rushes by you and doesn’t reply to your hello. You now feel a little sad on her behalf because she has obviously found out that you got the job and she feels upset or envious. You still feel quite happy though and plan to invite the person for a meal to make her feel better.
In both instances you jump to a conclusion and the hypotheses relate to you and your inner story. Although in both events you receive news and shortly after a co-worker ignores you, scenario 1 probably hits you harder, because your negative mood interprets the action of your colleague as proof for your uncertain future. In scenario 2, being ignored may well only slightly touch your mood, because your original state of mind was elevated due to good news. That existing mood even inspires you to do a good deed, because your compassion responds to what you thought to be the person’s disappointment.
When you become more mindful, your ability to see the larger picture increases. You may start thinking of possibilities outside the ‘me, me, me’ box, for example that the person:
Was on her way to an important meeting and was already late
Had a stomach upset and was on her way to the lavatory
Had just experienced a fight with her husband or somebody else and wanted to be alone
A multitude of possibilities exist as to why the person you tried to reach out for did not or could not respond. No doubt you can think of many other reasons that could apply to these scenarios.
Observing negative thinking patterns – such as jumping to conclusions or imagining the worst – that lead you to believe that everyone who ignores you must be against you, is important. Be mindful and aware when such thinking patterns arise in you, and query them. You must be your own protector and, like a scientific investigator, look at all the possibilities before you decide on an answer. Also consider whether you could actually just let it be and be patient with not knowing for now. If the same person keeps acting strangely, maybe then you could decide to find out why.
Distinguishing your thoughts from facts
Thoughts are just thoughts. Different people can differently interpret even thoughts based on facts, because everyone has a different mind and varying abilities to hypothesise.
Consider the following example involving a specific fact – a man abandoning his fiancée at the altar:
A young girl stands at the altar to be married. She smiles at her husband to be, a man who’s 25 years older than her. When the vicar asks whether anybody knows a reason why this couple shouldn’t be married, the man says: ‘I do. I won’t marry this beautiful angel, for if I did she wouldn’t get the life she deserves.’ The woman is devastated and cries; the man leaves the church.
The thoughts and emotions surrounding this event can vary enormously depending on each participant’s point of view. The man believes that his young bride would miss out on all the things that he, as an older man, can no longer do or does not want to do. The fiancée feels rejected, embarrassed and devastated. The vicar is confused and can’t do his job.
What would you think, say or ponder on? Which thoughts or feelings are the correct ones? No single answer applies to this question, because it all depends on how you interpret the fact – how you think and feel about it.
For much more on discerning thoughts from facts, flip to Chapter 5 and the exercises I provide.
When you’re disturbed by negative thoughts or emotions, use the coping breathing space meditation from Chapter 6. It can help you stop ruminating and focusing on negative thinking and sensing, bringing you back to a new focus of your life: just one breath after the other.
Relating to your thoughts in a new way
Please consider for a moment what is meant by being with thoughts. By setting apart the thinker and the thought, and simply being with your thoughts, you enter the space between them, a skill which is called mindfulness of thought. The Austrian poet and philosopher Rainer Maria Rilke put this difficult hypothesis into words:
Be patient [and] try to love the questions themselves . . . Do not now seek the answers . . . because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rejecting thoughts may prevent you from comprehending that the dilemma is not the thought, but the thinker’s attitude towards it. So, if you take the challenge of being with a thought (even a difficult one), that thought can eventually dissolve. The absence of thought that you then have is the awareness of space and silence, or as the Indian speaker, writer and philosopher Krishnamurti explains, ‘freedom from thought’.
When you look at the nature of thoughts, they tend to have a positive or negative flavour. Negative thoughts drag you down. Helpful ones, however, can assist you to become more creative and support you in finding ways to overcome obstacles which you might otherwise try to conquer just by focusing and refocusing on them – probably unsuccessfully, leading you to enter a downwards spiral. Helpful thoughts assist you in unlocking your potential by allowing the more creative and emotionally driven parts of your mind to flourish.
You may not always come up with new answers to problems – but sometimes just understanding the problem, engaging patience and being with the problem is enough. In fact, apparent quick and easy fixes are often not helpful at all. If you always just order fast food whenever you’re hungry, sooner or later you miss out on important nutrients! Your stomach may be full, but your body’s still starving.
Building a new relationship to your thoughts isn’t easy, because you’ve probably followed a particular way of interpreting the world for a long time. The part of the human brain that is used for cognitive processing starts as an empty hard disk, as it were. Humans have a lot fewer instinctive habits imbedded in them than other mammals.
By referring to the brain’s hard disk, I mean all the areas of the brain where human behaviour and memory are stored. While certain elements we use as our minds begin to accumulate information are present at birth, we do not begin life with the ability to use them.
As this and other chapters show, you can relate to your thoughts differently when you no longer believe that they contain complete truth. If you implement the right sort of change, you can improve your wellbeing and liberate yourself from the shackles of negative thoughts, feelings and behaviours (see the sidebar ‘Trying something new’).
Ask yourself what fixed beliefs you have about yourself. Can you perhaps decide to let something go and start afresh? Even if it only works for a few moments, you can build and expand on that. Write down in your diary what thoughts and behaviours you want to shift.
Parting the Waves of Self-Doubt
Looking at your negative or limiting thoughts with the intention of not believing them can be quite challenging. Many of them have been long-term acquaintances and seem so familiar or even comforting, such as the following old friends, roommates and nosy neighbours:
‘Better the devil you know.’
‘I’m not good enough.’
‘I only got this job because there was nobody else.’
‘Just wait until they find out who I really am.’
In this section, you discover a few techniques and meditations that help you attend to or accept difficult thoughts.
Bringing awareness to your thoughts
Wouldn’t it be great to start freeing yourself from unhelpful thoughts? Some Eastern traditions say that you’re truly precious and worthy just because you’re part of universal creation. Imagine how it would feel to believe that you’re really special, wanted and worthy, and what it would be like moment by moment if everything was all right as it is: no worrying, no criticising, no wanting, no blaming – just accepting this moment of your life experience fully as it presents itself. Can you imagine such stillness residing inside you?
Pause for a moment and sense what you’re feeling and thinking when you read these words. Are you in disbelief? Do you think, ‘When am I going to wake up?’ For now just observe your reaction and if possible note it down in your mindfulness diary. Maybe, in addition, you can recall moments of total harmony with life recently or during your childhood.
All the practices that you explore in Chapters 4 to 8 can help you to deeply search and bring awareness to moments where you feel alright. The exercises you connect with in your dedicated meditation space and your everyday awareness exercises point you in the direction of just being, moment to moment. There will without doubt be moments, either during meditation or in everyday life, when you feel inner contentment and peace. Perhaps you can remember a moment where you sat down in a park and just listened to the wind and the birdsong and watched a butterfly land on your arm, for example. When you’re surprised by joy, just because the beauty of a moment is a reality, you see that life offers many such possibilities. If you learn to observe them and pay attention to them when they occur, you’ll see that individual moments of life can be totally precious; nothing is lacking, nothing needs to change.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself about your thoughts, so that you can attend to them productively, with interest and non-judgemental awareness, but while not becoming attached to them (as I describe in Chapter 8):
Am I confusing my thought with an absolute truth?
Am I thinking in all-or-nothing terms?
Am I condemning myself completely because of one thing?
Am I concentrating on my flaws and forgetting my talents?
Am I blaming myself for something that isn’t my fault?
Am I setting unrealistic standards for myself, which can lead to failure?
Am I mind-reading?
Am I expecting myself to be or act perfectly?
Am I overestimating disaster?
Am I having double standards?
Am I jumping to conclusions?
The defining stance to take with your thoughts is that of gentle interest, compassion and curiosity.
Although you may occasionally experience tasters of contentment and stillness that expand into periods where you want for nothing else, where nothing seems missing, expecting this outcome to happen isn’t helpful. But I want you to know that a strong possibility exists of this occurring.
Performing the pebble meditation to consider deeper thoughts
I’ve really benefitted from and am still discovering a lot about my mind and my patterns of thinking by practising the pebble meditation, a practice that can help you explore and understand the many layers of your thoughts through employing the help of visualisation and metaphor.
You may often react to your initial thoughts about a person or event, and therefore act almost instinctively. However, when you take your time and respond from a more reflective stance, your responses are likely to be different from your very first reactions. Think of it as looking at the actors on a stage. The main actors on stage represent your automatic, instinctive thoughts; they are in the foreground and seem louder. In the background, however, are quieter thought-actors that nevertheless play an important role. The pebble meditation is a way to ensure that you can become aware of all these levels of thought that can occur and act from a place of greater insight and awareness.
In the pebble meditation, you imagine sitting on the edge of a metaphorical pond and throwing a pebble into that pond. The pond could be your mind, and the pebble a question or an insight. The pebble slowly floats down to the bottom but it also creates circles on the surface of the pond. These circles stand for the expanding awareness of your mind on the surface level. The deeper the pebble floats down, the more insight and understanding you may discover residing in your mind. When you repeatedly focus on the same question, different answers arise from the depths of knowing (that is, the pebble sinking deeper and deeper into your subconscious) and awareness.
To practice the pebble meditation, kindly sit down in a comfortable position, on the floor or on a chair:
1. Visualise yourself sitting at the edge of a beautiful, clear pond. The sun is shining and you can see some of its rays reflected in the water and feel the warm energy caress your shoulders. Around you are pond grass and water lilies; maybe you hear a frog croaking. Blue and green dragonflies circle around. Allow yourself to see this pond in all its glory and add any image or sound that comes up naturally in your imagination.
2. Imagine yourself picking up a small, flat pebble and throwing it into the water. Watch it float down a little – be still and notice what thoughts, feelings and sensations come up in your experience right now.
3. Allow the pebble to float further down into the water. See whether any of your sensations, images or feelings change by letting it sink deeper. Allow the pebble to settle at the bottom of the pond. Perhaps you can even see where it lies at the bottom of the pond.
4. Consider what you feel, sense or think. Are any messages arising from your deeper consciousness that you need to hear or perhaps bring to your awareness?
5. Sit a little longer and just breathe, moment to moment. Just take care of this experience, this moment.
After you complete this ten-minute meditation, please take time to note down in your mindfulness diary any insight you gained. Even if you can only come up with a few words or pointers, kindly jot them down.
Writing to yourself about your thoughts
This week, write yourself a letter about your thoughts – yes, really write with pen and paper! When you’ve finished your letter, address it to yourself and ask a good friend to send it to you – not immediately, but maybe a few weeks from now. When it arrives, you can read it with interest and notice what arises as an insight about how your mind works. Please start the process as follows:
1. Prepare a steaming cup of tea or coffee. Really notice when you pick it up how you guide it towards your mouth, how your lips curl around the rim and how you drink and swallow. Each sip is a mindful experience in itself.
2. Sit down to write. Notice your intention to sit, the movement of your body when changing from standing to sitting, and the connections you feel between your body sitting at a table and the surfaces it connects to.
3. Bring awareness to how you pick up the pen. Pay attention to how you hold it, such as the points of pressure in the various areas of the hand and finger connections.
4. Start to write. Allow each word to be a moment of stillness and contemplation.
5. Write about this week’s topic, which is relating to your thoughts. You can write one sentence or one paragraph, as little or as much as you choose. What thoughts are residing in your mind right now? Write them down and reread each one of them before you continue with the next. Doing so lets you see thoughts in a less emotional and overwhelming way. Also, the pause between having the thought and writing it down can give you a moment to reflect on its meaning. Furthermore, you engage both hemispheres of the brain when you write thoughts down (touch, vision, thinking and maybe taste and smell when you drink your beverage). Engaging the whole brain often leads to you gaining a broader perspective, because you’re approaching the activity from both a creative and intellectual perspective simultaneously.
Perhaps ask yourself:
Did this thought just pop into my head automatically?
Does it fit with the facts of the situation it refers to?
Is something there that I can explore further?
How may I have thought about it at another time, in another mood? You do not have to come up with a definitive answer (obviously you can never know what you would have thought); just engage your mind with the idea that you may think of things differently at different times and in different moods.
Approaching difficult thoughts in a longer meditation
This exercise calls for you to expand your sitting exercise (from Chapter 5) to as much as 40 minutes. This is an experiment, and if you really focus on each moment you’re likely to lose the awareness of time. Because you are going to sit for longer, please be sure to sit in a posture that supports your spine and cover yourself with a blanket or shawl.
Can you recall ever reading a fascinating book or magazine, being deeply involved in a meaningful conversation or making love without having a sense of time? The principle in this meditation is total engagement. The invitation to you is to stay with the practice even if you find it difficult because moment by moment this may change. Sitting with difficulties is a way of trusting your own resourcefulness and strengthening your ability to be with whatever comes up. You will harness patience, trust in the practice of mindfulness and realise that everything changes at last.
You may have a particular difficulty that you decide to work with before the start of this meditation. I invite you, however, to be open to the possibility that an unexpected visitor may arise at the point of the meditation where you open up to the difficulty. Kindly do not fight this but go with the flow. It may be valuable to observe the difficulty that arises out of nowhere.
The point of this exercise is to discover that you don’t have to resist difficulties. What you resist often persists, so you take a different approach. Invite the difficult: a thought, a memory, a physical or emotional pain and be with it instead of running and hiding. Then observe what changes in response to being open and accepting towards this difficulty.
This meditation shows you that the typical activity of running a mile or pushing a problem down if it hurts isn’t the best response. Go to your special meditation place and get ready for a longer practice. Cover yourself with a shawl or blanket:
1. Focus on the sounds you can hear and your breathing. Get a sense of your body as a whole.
2. Begin to engage with your thoughts. Look at them simply as mental events.
3. Notice whether you start getting involved in a ‘story’. Kindly allow this thought and related ones to pass by, endeavouring to observe thoughts as if they were sounds – here one minute, gone the next, pleasant, unpleasant, significant, insignificant: just thoughts. When you become settled in looking at your thoughts without ‘owning’ them, you can move on to the next step.
4. Introduce some difficulty into this practice. It may be something you’re feeling in your body right now or a thought, a memory even. Whatever it is, try simply to accept it, maybe adding words such as ‘whatever it is, let me feel/experience it’. Stay in the eye of the storm, to get right close to it. As you stay with the difficulty, does it change with time? This process may happen in one sitting or in a repeated attempt but after a while you’ll be able to really feel it: its temperature, its intensity, its stinging or stabbing or numbing pain. Let go of being the victim and really study the difficulty. See what you can discover by doing so.
5. At the end of the practice, please note any meaningful insights in your diary.
To approach big issues with this practice, you have to be an experienced meditator or to do the exercise along with another person. Please start with baby steps, and most of all keep yourself safe, protected and calm.
Visualising problems and problematic people
In this exercise, the key point is to understand that you have the choice to identify less with your thoughts and thus relate to them differently. When you deeply accept this notion, problems and difficulties tend to feel lighter and easier to deal with. Please relax yourself and when ready:
1. Sit down on a chair and close your eyes. Connect firmly to the chair you’re sitting on and feel your feet deeply rooted to the ground.
2. Visualise walking into your workplace. You see a certain colleague to whom you feel inferior and who tends to create in you a feeling of weariness and discomfort.
3. Ask yourself, as a compassionate friend would, what is causing you to feel so low, anxious or unworthy when this person enters your space? Has this person ever belittled you or put you down? If the answer is no, search deeper. Does the person in any way remind you of other people who competed with you or were praised when you weren’t? If the answer is yes, use a compassionate phrase you could say silently to yourself. For example, you might say, ‘I know he reminds me of Peter in sixth form who always got the better reports and who was praised publicly. But right here and now I want to let go of this old tape in my mind. I am good enough and the best I can be at this moment.’
4. Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a circle made up of mannequins that represent this person. Each mannequin holds up a sign which represents one of the feelings this person seems to make you experience (such as insecurity, envy, fear, and so on).
5. Imagine stepping out of the circle and looking at these mannequins from the outside. The mannequins and the feelings they represent aren’t really the person you’re thinking about. Kindly understand that at any moment you can let go of these negative attributes your mind has made up. If you’re feeling particularly creative, perhaps imagine each mannequin coming to life, stepping into the centre of the circle, taking a bow and walking away before disappearing into thin air.
6. Let go! Maybe you begin to realise that all human beings have their fears and insecurities, but that these feelings do not define them, nor do they define who you are or how you have to feel.
As with all meditations, note down insights and discoveries in your diary.
Being Kind to Yourself
The exercises in the preceding section (and indeed many of those throughout this book) help you to gain a clearer understanding of the fact that you don’t have to be limited by your thoughts. They’re mental events, influenced by your upbringing, environment, what you’ve been taught, and so on; they weren’t imprinted unchangeably on your original brain from birth. By understanding thoughts and their origin, you can choose not to be consumed by them; on the contrary, you have the opportunity and ability to change negative and debilitating thoughts.
A key part of this thought-changing process is showing yourself kindness. While remembering that old habits die hard, you can focus on what’s beautiful, nourishing, generous and supportive in your life. As each moment is a new beginning, you can decide here and now to let go of destructive and limiting thoughts that weigh you down or cause behaviours that lead to negative actions.
In this section I introduce you to the loving kindness meditation. It was the last practice the Buddha taught to his students. So you may say it is the most important one of all. I ask you to look at typical self-doubting or self-criticising thoughts and to try and change them at least a little, step by step. Basically, I invite you to learn the language of self-kindness.
Treating yourself well with the kindness meditation
In order to achieve the kindness and compassion that you need to acknowledge your demons and leave them behind, you may want to use this section’s meditation, which focuses on kindness and compassion. It’s a little bit like a prayer and starts with the seed of intention. By practising and trusting that these words have supported millions of people before you, you simply do it and see what happens.
Read the following phrases and then repeat them a few times silently to yourself:
May I be safe and protected.
May I be peaceful and free of suffering.
May I live at ease and with kindness.
Visualising yourself, vulnerable as you are, as an image of your face, as your name written on an image of your heart, or by hearing the sound of someone saying your name, can be really helpful. Maybe even put one of your hands on the centre of your chest (to soothe yourself) before you repeat these gentle phrases again.
If you don’t like these words, by all means change them to something simpler such as, ‘I want to be safe, healthy, peaceful and kind.’ Or make up your own verse.
Each time you recite these phrases, you’re inclining your mind towards what’s wholesome, kind and nourishing. Each time, a new thought of kindness imprints itself in your brain, mind and heart.
Remembering real moods occurring during real events
Thinking about how you felt in certain situations and being completely honest about your moods and emotions can help you understand them and get more joy and contentment out of life. The human experience is one of constant change, but you can create the intention to minimise harmful thoughts and actions for your own sake and that of others.
Even when a mood returns that in the past caused you to react emotionally – for example, erupting in anger – with more awareness you can see it for what it is. Using mindfulness and perhaps the coping breathing space from Chapter 8, you can be with the mood and observe it. Eventually you may master the situation, at least sometimes, and ride the waves of your anger without the need to lash out. You still feel the mood as it really is (with bodily sensations and emotions), but you intentionally don’t replay the whole story over and over as you did in the past. In other words, you change the resulting action.
I suggest that you write down a list of memories or stories that tend to start you spiralling off into fruitless rumination. Draw up a list of events that created particularly strong positive and negative emotions. Consider what you felt during and after the event. Please try your best to be completely objective and without judgement. Then look for patterns, and find those that keep you stuck in the ‘if only’ or ‘poor me’ mental state.
Please take a look at the following two examples of hypothetical events and the negative thoughts and responses that you might have that are connected to them. See to what extent you can adapt them to suit your own experiences:
Remembering the last evening of a holiday romance:
• ‘If only he hadn’t been Greek and lived overseas, he may have been the love of my life.’ (Attachment and all-or-nothing thinking.)
• ‘Why do I never find any exciting wonderful women who are available and live near me?’ (All-or-nothing thinking.)
• You experience a lump in your throat and a tightness in the chest; you feel tearful and sad, with thoughts such as ‘poor me’, ‘life is cruel’ and ‘why me?’
Remembering a wonderful dinner in town with many of your old schoolmates:
• ‘Most of them looked so good and had such interesting stories to tell. I’d love to experience this feeling every day.’ (Desire for an experience to be repeated, which can lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment.)
• ‘My stories must have been really boring.’ (Crystal-ball gazing; do you really know this for sure?)
• ‘Most of them looked so much better than me.’ (Maximising the negative from your point of view and minimising the positive in regard to you.)
• You’re tense all over, repeatedly checking in the mirror and looking at those aspects of your appearance you don’t like. You feel low and despondent. You want to curl up in bed thinking, ‘I’ll never go again.’
Consider what you notice about the thoughts and reactions, and whether you see any patterns emerging. Here’s how I see the process:
1. Both scenarios start with a happy memory.
2. You then add attachments and rejection, plus negative automatic thoughts (NATs), quite arbitrarily and based on no evidence.
3. Eventually nothing positive remains in your emotional, sensory and thinking awareness; it’s all doom and gloom, brooding, disappointed ambitions, ‘if-only’ thoughts, and so on.
The main thinking error is that you’re seeing everything in a highly generalised way. The more you see things in this way, the harder you find it to pick out what really made you happy, calm and joyful, and which aspects of experience really were painful or uncomfortable. When your mind enters this dark space, you open up to all the fears that your mind can conjure: not being good enough, not good-looking enough, not interesting enough, not loved enough. Of course some of these fears may be based on real experiences, but over-generalising from past events and everything happening now and in the future is emotionally unwise. Fear has the tendency to feed on itself and soon you end up in a never-ending cycle of defeat.
Scientific evidence proves that the more you remember events in a generalised way, the more you experience negative mood traps of brooding, all-or-nothing thoughts and a sense of being stuck. The more specific you can train your mind and memory to be, the less trapped in negative mood states you feel. Mindfulness practice is a great way to train your mind to be specific.
Here are a few practice points you can experiment with in your diary. Write them down and then answer them as accurately as possible:
When did you last feel grateful?
When did you last feel childlike?
When did you last feel peaceful?
When did you last feel upset?
When did you last feel adventurous?
When did you last feel stuck?
Although the list contains negative mood states, I guess that if you can answer the question precisely you won’t end up ruminating about the situation for ages.
Avoiding self-criticism and -judgement
The Rumi poem ‘The Guesthouse’ that I talk about in Chapter 8 indicates that moods and feelings come and go like unexpected visitors. By encouraging you to welcome negative emotions, I don’t mean that you’re desperately waiting for them to come back. But if they do, I ask you thoughtfully to accept that this is part of the human experience and remember that they’re going to leave again sooner or later.
Negative thoughts, moods and feelings visit everyone. You can learn from them sometimes, or deepen your compassion for all humans, but you’re not to blame when they arise.
I believe that over-simplistic and excessive judgement is a real bane of the world. From the day people start school until they retire (and often still thereafter), they’re judged by their usefulness and how well they fit into the structures that humans have developed over the centuries of living in bigger and bigger tribes. Although society is now arguably more supportive than in old tribal atmospheres, many of the same hierarchies still remain. Some of these structures may well be welcome and helpful, but on the other hand in many respects people often forsake their uniqueness in order to fit in. Consider your responses to these questions:
How much do you feel you judge yourself and others on a regular basis?
Are you prepared to give yourself and others the benefit of the doubt?
Do you look beyond the first layer of truth and deeper into the why and how of situations?
Consider these situations:
When you see a figure wearing a hoodie, do you expect the worst even when it’s windy or raining?
When you tell your boss that you can’t complete this task because you’ve an appointment booked, do you feel guilty?
When somebody cancels an arranged date, do you judge the person as unreliable or think of yourself as unimportant?
When you see a beggar, what do you think of the person?
Please write down some of your most common judgements about yourself, other people and the world in your mindfulness diary. Leave space after each statement. Then sit a little with each point and see whether your mindful self can come up with alternatives. It may happen, or may not, but give it a try to expand your awareness.
Releasing unhelpful emotional habits
One thing I encourage you to do is to plan your escape route for every potentially difficult situation – your figurative rope ladder that allows you to climb down from a heightened state of negative emotion when it seems to entice you to act aggressively and destructively. The platting of the rope ladder is your ongoing practice of mindfulness.
The platted rope – sometimes also called a safety net or a parachute – refers to the fact that mindfulness needs to be woven deeply into your unconscious so it can be an effective support in challenging times. It won’t suffice if you use it like a headache-pill or a plaster to cover a scratch. Frankly speaking, if you practise mindfulness only occasionally, in times of trouble, it may not be helpful at all. It’s a skill that you need to know by heart, so you can access it even when you’re stewing in adrenaline and most rational thinking and decision-making fails.
Please consider writing a list of negative actions that you want to let go of, bit by bit. The point of this list isn’t to make you feel guilty, but to create a reminder of what work lies ahead. Here are a few examples, but please note down your own little errors if they aren’t contained in the list (avoid mentioning any big or grandiose mistakes you’ve made, and concentrate on the little things that can make all the difference):
Shouting at somebody who made a mistake or to vent frustration.
Belittling somebody for a weakness.
Being overcritical of others even when they’ve given their best.
Letting others down because you don’t feel like doing something.
Taking advantage of someone’s kindness or vulnerability.
Being greedy and/or lacking in generosity.
Being short with others when they need a listening ear.
Not offering your seat on public transport to somebody who needs it.
Judging others who seem to be wasting their time – for example, people who live on the street.
Finding logical excuses for not giving to charity.
No doubt you can think of other little deeds and acts of meanness that you can easily give up, as much for the sake of others as for yourself.
Recent research on the brain shows that self-compassion feeds outward compassion and vice versa. In all the above instances, kindness meditation helps you to let go of unhelpful habits and increase your awareness of kindness towards yourself and others.
Finding inner peace by sitting with your thoughts
Here, I describe another way of sitting with your thoughts and inviting them to arise in your awareness (to add to the methods in Chapters 6 and 8). This exercise differs from allowing random thoughts to engage you in a longer thinking process. You’re going to watch thoughts as if you were outside yourself looking within. You observe the events of your mind without judgement and let them go. No response is expected or required.
The start of this practice may be familiar to you from Chapters 6 and 8:
1. Settle into your preferred starting position in your meditation practice space. Make sure that you won’t be disturbed and that you feel warm.
2. Feel the connection points of your body and the surface you’re sitting on. Shift into a dignified upright posture, using your breath or sound as your focus of awareness.
3. Bring your focus to your body. Some areas of your body tend to feel strong sensations. The invitation here is to bring friendly curiosity to this experience. If at all possible, go even further, softening and opening to the experience of discomfort and observing whether this makes any difference to the experience.
4. Say to yourself: ‘What is this feeling I’m experiencing about? Does it feel like fear or more like anger?’ Many thoughts are tightly linked to feelings, so experiment with observing the root of the feeling more closely. Again, dare to get really close to any destructive emotion or thought so that you understand the intrinsic parts of it and may with time discover that you can let it go earlier and earlier and more and more.
5. Finish the practice after 30 minutes by returning to your breath, grounding yourself and eventually opening your eyes. Sit for a little while before you get up.
Here are further ways in which you can vary this meditation:
See your thoughts or feelings as dandelion heads that are ready to be blown away. Get familiar with them and before you enter the realm of the story you are about to tell yourself, blow them away.
View your thoughts or feelings as snowflakes falling from the sky. Try to catch them, and as soon as they’re caught, they dissolve.
Visualise yourself standing on top of a big bridge over a motorway. Each vehicle that passes by carries a thought or feeling, which you briefly get a glimpse of before it disappears from sight.
Reviewing Your Accomplishments This Week
Whether you’re following this course sequentially and have now completed week six or you’ve read only this chapter, please use these questions to help review your efforts:
Do you feel able to relate more effectively and positively to your thoughts after reading this chapter? If not, perhaps consider taking another look through the earlier section, ‘Demystifying Thoughts: They’re Less Peculiar Than You Think’).
Are you managing to disengage from your thoughts a little more easily after practising the exercises in the ‘Parting the Waves of Self-Doubt’ section, earlier in this chapter?
Can you look upon yourself with more compassion, perhaps giving yourself the benefit of the doubt a bit more, as I describe in the earlier section, ‘Being Kind to Yourself’?