How your mind causes stress and what you can do to stop it. Part 2 of 6.

As a clinical hypnotherapist, I’ve found that many people have trouble telling the difference between their thoughts and how they feel.

If I ask, “How are you feeling?” they might say, “I feel like I shouldn’t be so open with my partner anymore.”

Even though this insight starts with the right word, it is not a feeling but a judgement.

Feelings show up in your body as a set of clear sensations. When you’re angry you might feel a rush of energy in the back of your head and tightness in your shoulders and jaw. When you’re sad you might feel heavy in your chest and heart, and your sinuses and throat might feel stuffed up. You can learn to separate your feelings from the thoughts and stories that keep them alive and feel them directly as sensations through meditation.

Thoughts are the images, memories, beliefs, judgments, and reflections that go through your mind and often lead to feelings. If you use the word “like” after the word “feel,” you’re probably not talking about how you feel but about what you think or believe. You can get better at breaking down strong feelings by asking yourself, “What thoughts and images in my head keep me feeling like I do?” And, what else am I feeling in my body right now besides my thoughts?

Thoughts not only cause feelings but also often pretend to be feelings, try to talk you out of your emotions, judge your feelings, or shut them down completely. The more you separate your thoughts and feelings, the more clearly and consciously you can connect with what’s happening inside you.

You might be surprised to find out that the root of the problem is a group of negative beliefs and stories that have grown from what people, critical people in your life, like family and friends, have done to you and told you over time. Throughout your life, these ideas and stories have come together to form a “life script” that shapes who you think you are and how you see the people and events around you.

Here’s the point: Your tendency to identify with your life script limits your choices and makes you unhappy because it acts as a filter through which you see things in a bad light. To use the nature metaphor again, you can keep cutting back the branches, but you’ll keep living the same old story until you pull the story out by the roots.

Even though meditative traditions teach that separation is an illusion and that everyone is connected in a way that can’t be broken, the feeling of being separate is powerful. Often, it has to do with things that happened when you were young, like when your mother or another caring adult had to leave you before you were ready. It can sometimes be traced back to birth, like when you had to leave your mother’s womb for a colder, more complex world. Or, as some traditions say, it might come with the hardware of the embryo.

Pay attention to your thoughts as you start this meditation. After a few minutes, pay attention to what your thoughts are telling you. Does one voice stand out more than the others, or do they all try to get your attention? Do they pick you apart or cheer you on? Shame or praise you? Or do they mostly talk about the people around you? Are there any voices that disagree with each other?

How do you feel when you hear these voices? Are they kind and loving, or angry and quick to get upset? Does one voice sound more like yours than the others? Do any of them make you think of people from your past or your present? How do you feel when you hear these voices?

Start by giving this exercise ten minutes. When you get the hang of it, you can stop during the day and listen to what you’re saying to yourself. The critical thing to remember is that you are not your thoughts, and you don’t always have to believe what they say. Wherever it comes from, this feeling of being separate may give rise to a primitive fear: If I’m detached, I must end at my skin, and everything else must be different. Because these other people are often more significant than me, and I have very little control over what they do, my survival must be at stake, so I need to protect myself at all costs.

Life scripts, which were discussed previously, develop as ways to stay alive in a world where people seem separate and may be unfriendly, withholding, demanding, or rejecting.

When you’re having trouble inside, it’s apparent that it might be hard to connect with being when you sit down to meditate. Sometimes your mind will settle on its own, and you’ll be able to see to the bottom of the lake. There may be feelings of inner peace and calm, waves of love and happiness, or hints that you are one with life.

But most of the time, you might feel like you’re doing the doggy paddle in dirty water.

When you meditate, the chaos and confusion you feel don’t just appear out of nowhere. It’s always been there, clouding your mind and heart and making it hard to see. You might feel claustrophobic or dense inside. In other words, you’re so full of your thoughts and feelings that you have no room for the thoughts and feelings of others or any new or strange thoughts and feelings that might come up inside you. Or you might be so caught up in your drama that you don’t even realise you’re changing the way you see things.

Most of your suffering and stress come from how your inner turmoil and confusion distort and filter your experiences, not the experiences themselves. The good news is that meditation can teach you how to calm the troubled waters of your mind and heart, turn some of your inner claustrophobia into inner space, and find your way past your filters so you can experience life more directly and reduce your stress in the process.

Find somewhere quiet to sit down for the next ten minutes. Do the following when you’re comfortable:

1. Breath in slowly and deeply.

2. Focus on what you’re thinking. If you’re an emotional person you can do the same thing with your emotions. Instead of getting caught up in your thoughts, or emotions, as you might typically do, watch them closely like a fisherman watches the tip of his rod or a tennis player watches the ball. If you find your mind wandering, bring it back to what you’re doing. At first, it may feel like your mind is full of thoughts or feelings, and it may be hard to tell where one thought ends and the next one begins. You may also find that some ideas or feelings keep returning, like old songs. If you pay close attention, you might start to see that every thought and feeling has a start, a middle, and an end.

3. When the ten minutes are up, stop and think about what you did. Did you feel like your thoughts or feelings were far away? Or did you keep getting lost in your thoughts or feelings?

The point of this exercise isn’t to see how well you can keep track of what you’re thinking or feeling; instead, it’s to give you a taste of what it’s like to watch your thoughts. Whether you believe it or not, you are not your thoughts. As you get better at meditating and seeing your reviews more clearly, you may find that they begin to lose the power they once had over you. You can think whatever you want, but your thoughts won’t control you.

If you’re worried that meditation will stop you from being able to think and feel, fear not, it won’t.

Come back tomorrow for part 3.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.

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