So you sit down to meditate. You feel the rising and falling in your stomach. Slowly you begin to feel a relief from that constant pressure in your head. You feel your energies being stirred, and your senses begin to feel more vibrant. And suddenly, the magic happens – there is a sense of space between you and your thoughts. You float into a soothingly light, clear and peaceful space, just watching the thoughts. It’s undeniable and liberating. That oh-so-pressing dialogue that seemed intimately part of you just minutes ago now seems like meaningless drivel in the face of the raw reality you just dropped into.
“Oh my God, I think it’s happening”
Just like that, you’re sucked back into it.
“This is amazing, I want to be like this all the time. I better start meditating more. Maybe I should read that book… what was it called again? …. I should tell my friend about this…. Oh wait, shit, I’m thinking… am I?… does this count?….oh man I forgot to buy groceries today…. I’ll go tomorrow after work…. I hope I don’t have to stay late…”
Off you go, hypnotised by your thoughts once more. Who knows how long until you snap out of it again? As soon as you seem to peel away from the mask of ego and self-concept, another one forms.
Sound familiar? It sure does to me. This has happened to me again and again: my mind responds to my efforts to get away from it with shadow-like sophistication. I step right, it will step right with me. I step left, it will follow seamlessly. Try to take a step forward, it spins me around so you take a step in the other direction. It’s like dancing with the Devil.
After I noticed this pattern a few times, I felt I was kind of getting a one up on it. I thought “Aha, at least I’m breaking out of the spell more frequently, the meditation is working!” But then I realised that was thinking as well. The Devil is quick on its feet.
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I sometimes find it jaw-droppingly freaky to see just how little power or control I have in my head, to realise just how much of the time I’m basically in a trance, totally invested in what whatever my mind is saying. I even stopped meditating for many months because I really didn’t like acknowledging this.
You might find yourself in a similar boat to me, asking yourself what the way out is.
Well, I don’t really know. I haven’t totally found it yet myself. But here’s what I’ve learnt.
1) Don’t struggle
When you notice the pull of you mind on your attention, it’s super tempting to resist it and try really hard to stop your thoughts. But there is no winning this fight, your mind will always eventually pin you down and tap you out. When you find yourself dancing with the Devil, it’s best not to turn it into a wrestling match.
Despite learning this time and time again, I still can’t help myself sometimes. It’s a really primal reaction to just want your mind to shut up. It feels like the right thing to do. But let’s take this intention to its natural end: inner silence is great, but do we really want to get there by snuffing out the mind completely? Is that really the goal?
I don’t think so. I think we want to find a way to live in harmony with this thing in our heads, and be able to use it to engage with the world. You can’t find harmony if you’re always struggling against your mind. In fact, this internal struggle, by its very nature, requires you to be divided within yourself so that one part can fight the other, which is pointedly counterproductive to creating a lasting experience of peace and oneness.
What I’ve found really helpful when I get frustrated with myself is to use the symptoms of this mental struggle as cues to wake up and snap out of it. To me, the struggle with my mind often feels like an effortful pressure in my head or a background sense of tension in my chest. These sensations act as a recognisable signal, reminding me that I’m not approaching the situation correctly.
2) Ask the right questions
You might be familiar with the concept of an anchor for your attention. This is an object in your conscious experience that you consciously bring your attention back to during meditation and/or throughout the course of your day. The idea here is that you can train the mind into the habit of going back to focus on this anchor. Then, when you are eventually lost in a stream of thinking, you will tend to automatically stumble back onto this anchor. The anchoring object can then serve gateway to help you relax, be present and let go of the mind.
A classic example of an anchor is the breath. But, a question can also be an anchor. I find this particularly useful because, as someone who tends to very frequently get lost in intense thinking, I stumble upon this quite frequently and it helps me snap out of my thinking spree quite smoothly. I also just think there’s a funny elegance to using the mind’s own tendency for repeating itself to help liberate yourself from its spell.
I keep asking myself “Who am I?”, but I don’t try to answer it intellectually. I just look to see everything I can perceive in this moment and ask myself “Am I any of this stuff?” This triggers a remembering of a profound experiential truth: Anything I can perceive is not truly me. I am the one who is looking.
I find this helps me remember that I am not my thoughts, because I see my thoughts, and allows me to float into an empty and peaceful space outside my head – at least until I get caught up in the dance again.
3) Look to the heart
Why is there so much thinking? What is the root cause?
Well, it seems the mind is often preoccupied with trying to solve a problem or achieve some goal. How you should make more money, how you should organise your day, figuring out what to say to a person, or even worse, what you should have said …. etc. It certainly seems like there’s an endless supply of apparently legitimate issues it needs to deal with, but is that really the case?
What is it that we really want to achieve with all this thinking? Why is it that we’re so keen to solve the next problem that comes up? What are we striving so hard for?
Despite its various colourful manifestations, there is really only one desire that drives all of us: to stop suffering and be happy.
What your mind is actually trying to do is put an end to your internal discomfort, it just tries to achieve this by judging external situations and telling you to fix them.
This internal discomfort is a sense of unease with what you are feeling and it is ultimately rooted in fear. A deep seated existential fear of experiencing emotional pain, which triggers a strong compulsion to resist and control one’s experience. This resistance is why the mental activity kicks in – you project the cause of your discomfort to be somewhere in your external circumstances, and begin the work to control those circumstances in a way that will appease your feelings.
We operate, often implicitly, under the belief that if we think more and more, we will eventually reach a point where we can understand, predict and control life so that we can finally be happy and never have to feel pain again. But, ironically, this act of resisting only serves to aggravate the discomfort and is the true root cause of our suffering.
The only way to truly remove the internal suffering is to open your heart to experiencing painful and uncomfortable feelings. Embrace it, arms wide open, and feel it. It will hurt, but you must let the sensations flow through you. That is, by their nature, what they are meant to do. The longer and more tightly you have been resisting the flow of these feelings, the more it will hurt to let them through – there is a lot of backlogged emotional sludge from your past that you have to process.
Frankly, this process can suck sometimes – you will find yourself instinctively closing off to it and resisting it. Sometimes the discomfort can be so intense that you will question whether you’re doing the right thing. But I can tell you it’s worth it. You just have to keep taking leaps of faith and see what happens. You will see that the painful feeling eventually leaves you, and as it passes through can bring up powerful insights about yourself and your past along with a profound sense of relief. At the end of it all, you are left that much clearer, that much lighter, that much wiser, with space in your heart for true joy.
The process of opening the heart is something I learnt about very recently from reading Michael Singer’s “The Untethered Soul”. It’s an extremely powerful and concise masterpiece of spiritual literature. I highly recommend checking it out.
I found myself initially a bit skeptical of the whole thing. I mean, claiming that most, if not all, of my thinking is really just caused by some sort of blocked feeling? That’s a tough sell. Surely, some of it must be legitimate and helpful, right? Well, I’m not so sure anymore. All I can say is, I am repeatedly surprised to see just how quickly seemingly important and urgent threads of thought can lose their steam as I start to let my feelings flow.
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So, there you have it. That’s how I’m approaching my dance with the Devil. I intend to have fun with it, and I hope you do too.