How your mind causes stress and what you can do to stop it. Part 1 of 6.

Experts and sages in both the East and the West have said that problems start in mind. I agree. They are right.  You may wonder how this little truth can help you when you don’t know what to do. “Sure, my mind is the problem,” you might say, “but I can’t have it cut out.”

You can start by getting to know how your brain works. As you may have noticed, it’s a rather complex assortment of thoughts, ideas, stories, impulses, preferences, and emotions.

When you understand how your mind works, you can see how your thoughts and feelings distort your experience and keep you from getting the happiness, relaxation, effectiveness, or healing you want. Then you can learn how meditation can help you change that by focusing and calming your mind, and ultimately by going deeper and figuring out the stories and patterns that keep causing you pain and stress. Who can say? You might not even need a lobotomy!

Because I’m an avid runner and walker, I’m fond of using natural metaphors, which lend themselves quite nicely to describing meditation. In Chapter 1, I talk about how meditating is like climbing a mountain. Here, I’m going to flip that metaphor on its head and ask you to imagine that you’re going down to the bottom of a lake. The lake I’m talking about is you. You’re going deep into yourself.

Spiritual teachers and people who promote personal growth love to use up and down metaphors. Some people talk about digging deep into your inner experience like a miner, having profound insights, or feeling or knowing things deeply.

Some people talk about having a mind like a sky or a higher level of consciousness.

Some differences come from the writer’s or teacher’s tastes. But it can also mean a way of thinking about your feelings: If you believe that the source of your being is deep inside you, below the personal, you’re talking down. If you think it lives in the highest parts of your being or comes down from above like grace or spirit, you talk about up.

My humble opinion is that if you go deep enough, you’ll reach the top of the mountain. And if you go up too far, you end up at the bottom of the lake. In the end, it all ends up in the same place. In the end, pure being is everywhere and everyone all the time. It has no place.

When you meditate, you can improve your ability to focus and calm your mind. You may also learn about yourself and find layers you didn’t know existed. What do you think is down there? It is called different things by the different meditative traditions, such as essence, pure being, true nature, spirit, soul, the pearl of great price, and the source of all wisdom and love. Zen people call it your original face, which you had before your parents were born. You might think of it as a spring from which pure, refreshing, and profoundly satisfying water of being without reservations flows.

Like many others, this source of being is who you are in your heart before you were taught to think you were lacking or not good enough. It’s how you were before you started to feel separate, lonely, or broken up. It’s the strong feeling that you are connected to something bigger than yourself and everything else. And in the end, it’s what gives you peace, happiness, joy, and other positive, life-affirming feelings, even if you think they come from outside things. People will have different experiences with this source, which is why there are so many words to describe it.

The point of meditation is to connect with this source or spring of pure being, whether you want to become enlightened or just want to reduce stress, improve your performance, or improve your life. Meditation takes you right to this source. But when you meditate, you also start to run into things that seem to get in the way of your experience of being, just like you might run into the sediment, algae, fish, and other items on your way to the bottom of a lake.

These layers aren’t a problem unless the water in the middle is rough, in which case they can make it hard to see.

When you focus on yourself, you are likely to notice that your mind is always going. Buddhists often say that the reason is like a noisy monkey that jumps from thought branch to thought branch without stopping.

Most of the time, you might be so involved in this talk that you don’t even realise it’s happening.

It might look like remembering the past, planning for the future, or trying to solve a problem in the present. Your mind is always talking to itself, often making up stories with you as the hero or the villain.

Just like an action movie or a romantic comedy can make you feel many different things, the dramas you keep making up in your head can also make you think many other things. For example, if you’re trying to figure out how to make a lot of money on the stock market or if you just met an attractive person at work and want to ask them out, you might feel fear, anxiety, excitement, or lust. If you can’t stop thinking about the bad things that happened to you recently, you may feel sad, angry, angry, or resentful. Along with these emotions come various physical feelings, such as tension, arousal, a tightening in the chest, or waves of energy in the stomach or the back of the head.

Some of these feelings might be good, but others might be bad or even hurtful. But feelings aren’t bad in and of themselves. If you keep reacting to the dramas in your head, you might be cutting yourself off from other people and more profound, more satisfying parts of yourself. You might also miss what’s going on around you.

Attachment and aversion are always at play at a level of experience that is a little less obvious than thoughts and feelings, like and dislike. Buddhists say that the best way to be happy and satisfied is to want what you already have and not want what you don’t. But most of the time, we’re unhappy with what we have. We want things we don’t have and work hard to get them. Or we may become very attached to what we have and then suffer when time and circumstances change it or take it away. Because change is inevitable, this tendency to either hold on tightly to experience or push it away can cause constant suffering.

Here’s another example from nature: Imagine that your thoughts, feelings, and even the dramas that keep playing in your head are the leaves and branches of a bush or tree deep inside you. What do you think the root is, the thing the leaves and branches keep growing from?

Come back tomorrow for part 2.

Be well.

We all need a helping hand from time to time. Please share this post with as many people as possible. You never know who might need it.

You Belong Here.