Talking Myself Out of My Mind
We can't assume that every inconvenient thought is meaningless.
A few years ago, during a weekend retreat in southern Ohio, I snuck off to take some photos. I don’t post on social media during retreats, but I’m not opposed to snapping shots to share afterward.
Between periods of sitting meditation, I had discovered a few eye-catching trees and statues. It had been a rainy spring, so the Little Miami River was high and flowing. I wanted to capture it from an interesting angle.
Walking closer to the water’s edge, the ground was wet and sloping.
Silent meditation retreats provide a rare opportunity to devote several hours a day to paying attention to ordinary sensations. Mental images and verbal thoughts tend to get sharper and more observable, allows me to consciously toggle between raw perceptions and the interpretations that emerge from them.
In this situation, I could observe my thoughts with a bit more distance and objectivity than usual.
I heard my thoughts say, Be careful! It’s pretty muddy. It could be slippery!
In my mind’s eye, I could see myself slipping and falling.
My body weighed in with a mild feeling of fear.
Then I remembered a popular meditation platitude about thoughts not being real. Thoughts are just thoughts. “You can watch them come and go instead of treating them as facts.”
Retreats make good laboratories for testing such theories, so I slowed down instead of turning back.
A mindful step or two later, my feet flew into the air as my butt hit the ground. I burst out laughing. I felt more amused than humiliated. The cold mud on the seat of my pants provided tangible evidence that, in this case, the thoughts I’d ignored had actually been valuable.
I think about this whenever I read a profound insight on social media that resonates while shining a spotlight on half of a liberating truth.
It’s dangerous never to question the validity of our thoughts, especially when we’re harshly evaluating ourselves or others. It’s also risky to pretend our thoughts can be written off as timidity or nonsense when they convey accurate but inconvenient information.
Practicing mindfulness doesn’t mean we ignore our thoughts and feelings. It means becoming better acquainted with how imagination operates and the various ways it can distort our perspectives about ourselves and the world around us.
Contrary to pithy aphorisms we read on social media, there’s no foolproof way to know if a thought is accurate or helpful. It’s shortsighted to assume that unpleasant thoughts are inherently misleading.
We’ll never be completely objective about our subjective experiences, but we can work on becoming more objective than we would be without practicing.
We can keep trying to navigate uncertainty with as much composure as possible.
We can learn to respect the signals coming from our minds and bodies without ignoring or micromanaging them.
And when we inevitably fall on our asses, we can laugh as we change our pants, wash off the mud, and try to extend the same grace towards ourselves that we would offer anyone else who is still learning how to incorporate their messy thoughts and feelings into their lives.
