I shared some information about Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in my recent post, “Get Your Mind Right with MBSR.” I learned many things through the Palouse Mindfulness MBSR course, which I plan to write more about for the blog. I encountered many of these concepts previously and diving deeper on exploring them helped me more successfully shift how I think about and experience life. Others are ones that I’m still internalizing and figuring out how to incorporate into navigating the day-to-day.
The first I’d like to explore and reflect on a bit are two related concepts:
I Am Not My Thoughts
and
My Thoughts May Not Be True
Among other places, I’d read these notions early on in my spiritual and healing journey in Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle books.
I appreciated Tolle’s comparison of the brain to a computer:
Think of the human brain as a computer. It is a blank screen and then you come along and type commands into the computer. The computer will then execute what you told it to. What would happen if the computer ran amuck and just started typing commands into itself based on things you had asked it to do in the past? Your brain uses ‘old commands and data’ to decide what it should do next, unless you stay present and focused in the now.
Framing it as an instrument, Tolle suggested:
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
This notion of the instrument taking you over reminded me of a scene in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The protagonist imagines what is going on inside of his head as it repeatedly circles back to traumatic and sad events and describes a room filled with filing cabinets containing all of his memories. For some reason, one of the diligent workers keeps bringing to him the file folder of an especially heavy recollection. No matter how many times the protagonist insists that he doesn’t need to see this right now, the worker keeps shoving it toward him, insisting that it be given attention again and again.
Although there are points when our brain seems to be doing things beyond our control, that’s not always the case. Sometimes the instrument behaves, which sometimes makes it all the more disorienting when it fails to do our bidding or offers up distorted reflections about who we are or what is happening at any given moment. Chopra alludes to this in the following:
If you are asked to add 2+2, you can call up the necessary mental process, and there are millions of similar tasks, such as knowing your own name, how to do your job, what it takes to drive a car home from work – these give us the illusion that we control our own minds. But someone suffering from anxiety or depression is the victim of uncontrolled mental activity, and even in everyday circumstances we have flashes of emotion that come of their own accord, along with stray thoughts of every kind. Artists speak of inspiration that strikes out of the blue. Love at first sight is a very welcome example of uncontrolled mental activity.
So at the very least, the human mind can’t be explained without understanding the dual control feature that gives us total control over some thoughts and zero control over others.
In spite of “getting” this concept in theory, I had a hard time remembering and applying it in moments when difficult thoughts arose. I’ve long been someone prone to ruminating endlessly — once a dark thought pattern is in my mind, it’s a challenge to take my thoughts anywhere else. And unfortunately, that didn’t change simply as a result of becoming more aware of what my brain was doing in any give moment.
In fact, it was actually the opposite: As I began to grasp more firmly onto the notion that I was not my thoughts and gained more awareness that the thoughts were not serving me within these cycles of perseverating, the more desperately I wished them away and the more ardently I judged myself for being so incapable of ridding myself of this self-created harm.
But, at last, two Tara Brach videos (one of which was included in the Palouse course) finally helped me to contextualize the concept more deeply and reach a turning point of sorts.
It’s not that she said anything better than Chopra or Tolle, or countless other philosophers and guides (some of whom she quotes in these talks) who have attempted to explain these ideas time and again, each reinforcing the need to be gentle and compassionate in observing any thoughts arising. But I’ve discovered that I’m just the kind of person who — at least when it comes to concepts relating to inner work, healing, and so on — typically needs to encounter the same information framed in different ways from multiple perspectives in order for it to really sink in.
What helped even more than repeated exposure to these notions was the informal practices assigned throughout the Palouse Mindfulness MBSR course, which offered opportunities to examine specific situations in which both of these concepts held true. In my midway assessment describing my progress in the course up to that point, I wrote: “I’m more inquisitive when thoughts come to mind that I don’t think are true or actually agree with. I poke at where they’re coming and tell myself I don’t have to take them at face value just because they arose.”
Although I’m finally getting the hang of non-judgmentally observing my thoughts, I’m still trying to better understand how I can choose what to do with each one that passes through my mind and more effectively let go of those that don’t serve me. It’s one thing to tell yourself you don’t have to believe a thought is true just because it’s real and you’re thinking it, but it’s another matter entirely to know what to do with it then. I now often find myself struggling at that juncture, thinking to myself, “Okay, so it’s not necessarily true. But it’s still in my head and I’m feeling __________. What now?”
Sometimes the natural response to this desire for closure or relief is striving to will the unpleasant thought or experience away. But mindfulness practices recently taught me that striving is actually the antithesis of helpful and has likely been the crux of some blockages I’ve experienced for a long time. More to come on this topic in a future post.
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