How your mind causes stress and what you can do to stop it. Part 5 of 6.

The great meditative traditions teach that the belief that you are inherently separate from others, from the rest of life, and from being itself is the root cause of suffering and stress. This belief also gives rise to your stories. Because you feel separate and alone, you must do whatever it takes to protect yourself and ensure you will live. But you don’t have much power, and there are forces around you that you can’t control. No matter how hard you try, you will keep suffering as long as you keep trying to defend your territory. Meditation lets you let down your guard, become more aware, and see who you are beyond your stories and the illusion of a separate, isolated self.

Here’s the good news: If all the talk in the earlier posts made you sad, let me reassure you: Your story or drama may give the impression that it shows who you are, but it doesn’t. No matter how complicated and exciting your account gets, it won’t change who you are. Also, your mind and heart can be changed, even if they seem stubborn and hard to change. Practising meditation regularly can help you feel less pain and stress by calming and eventually eliminating the chaos and confusion inside you.

First, you can learn how to focus and concentrate on your mind, which helps calm it and keeps it from getting upset. As your focus gets more robust, thoughts and feelings that have been building up inside you naturally rise to the surface and disappear.

When you can focus well, you can become more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and the deeper patterns and stories behind them. Then, with the help of penetrating insight, you can look into the different layers of your inner experience, learn how they work, and use this knowledge to break the patterns that keep causing you stress.

So, your mind is always going, making you feel confused and stressed, and you don’t know what to do to stop it. Well, you can start by using a form of meditation that focuses on concentration, like counting your breaths or repeating a mantra When you get the hang of it, you can move from your thoughts to the present moment wherever you are. And if you want to, you can develop good traits that counteract some of the bad things your mind and heart are prone to do.

If you’ve ever tried to stop your mind from thinking, you already know how useless that can be. But the more mental energy you put into one thing during meditation, the more your mind becomes focused on that one thing and the more the other things fade into the background. Over time, you can learn to keep your mind on one thing for a few minutes at a time. When your mind wanders, you can gently bring it back.

When you focus on one thing more, you feel more inner peace and harmony as the sand in the lake of your mind slowly settles, leaving the water clean and clear.

Most of the time, this experience is accompanied by calm and relaxation, and sometimes by other good feelings like love, joy, happiness, and bliss, which come from the bottom of the lake in pure being.

When you focus on something more deeply, you may become absorbed. This is called samadhi. When you focus your attention like a laser beam on everyday tasks, you can reach a state that psychologists call flow. In flow, time stops, self-consciousness goes away, and you become one with the activity.

Once you’ve started to improve your focus, you can use it to keep moving away from your inner drama and back to the present moment in your everyday life. You may not be able to get rid of the trouble, but you can keep looking past it. The more you look past the drama, the more you see the freshness of being itself in what you see.

By coming back to the present moment over and over, you create a path that lets you avoid your problems and makes you feel more connected to life.

You can use the focus you gain from meditation to find better ways to deal with anxiety, fear, anger, depression, and other intense feelings when you’re in your story.

Lovingkindness, compassion, equanimity, and joy are all good ways to think.

When you meditate regularly, you start to notice that thoughts and feelings that have been building up inside you begin to leave on their own, like mist rising from a lake. To make this happen, you don’t have to do anything special. It happens as your concentration gets more robust and your mind calms down. You might sit down to meditate feeling heavy and worried, but when you get up after half an hour, you might feel lighter, more open, and less worried.

Who knows what causes this strange thing to happen? You could say that meditating is like taking the lid off a pot of soup that is already boiling: You make room for the water to evaporate and relieve the pressure that has been building up inside.

When your mind isn’t stuck on one thing, a thought, a memory, or an emotion, and it’s as big and free as the sky, you’re no longer putting energy into your drama. Instead, you’re giving what’s going on inside you permission to come out and go.

In this post I have talked about techniques for concentration and awareness that can help you avoid drama, find alternatives, and calm your mind so that drama doesn’t bother you. The problem with these techniques is that they don’t change your inner stories. When your concentration wanes or your loving-kindness fades, the same distracting thoughts and troubling feelings stress you out.

But if you practise penetrating insight, you can get to know your drama, learn how it makes you suffer, see beyond it, and eventually be completely free.

Come back tomorrow for the 6th and final part.

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.