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Many people today feel victimized by their inner worlds. They struggle with anxious, fearful, depressive, or lustful thoughts, and don’t know how to shut them off. Today, more than ever, we need to understand and put into practice what Paul talks about in Romans
12: “Don’t be conformed to the pattern of this world. Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)
I wrote about this in my book Leaving Your Mark Without Losing Your Mind. The pathway out of stress and
overwhelm needs to focus on developing new internal skills and resources. Our world today is so complex that trying to deal with the problem simply by making external changes to simplify and be more productive won’t work. (Granted they are important, and will be part of the solution. But we need more.) Something has to change in us, not just around us. In my research, I came across an interesting quote from the early 90’s. It’s interesting, and I think sort of prescient: “Just as we live in an external, physical world, we live at the same time in an internal world of thoughts, feelings, and desires. While our modern civilization has made great strides in understanding the external world and using it for our comfort, we have barely begun to explore the inner world. Only now are we
beginning to recognize that the forces of this inner world — forces like anger, greed, and fear — have the power to devastate the mind, despoil the earth, and destroy human beings. We need to learn how these winds blow, how they can be directed, and how they can be put to work.” — Eknath Easwaran
Take just one example: how do we deal with our anger? Do we just try to stuff it? Deny it? Vent it by raging at people? For centuries, spiritual teachers have guided people to engage in habits of prayer and meditation in order to discipline their minds to channel the energy of emotions (like anger) into something productive. In recovery meetings and talk therapy, we affirm the value of “letting the poison out.” But just talking about our anger — or our stress or anxiety — doesn’t always help. In fact, talking about it can actually make us more angry, more stressful, more anxious. Talk therapy and support groups help us if and when they give us new context and insights that change our inner landscape. Catharsis can only take us so far — in most cases venting our emotions just makes them stronger. What matters — even in groups and talk therapy — is how they help us do our inner work: learning to think differently, to not obsess over things, to understand things from a new perspective, to not take ourselves too seriously. We can learn — from the insights and example
of other group members or our therapist — to dial back our anger, despair, and anxiety. We can also learn to transmute them: anger into energy, despair into resolve, anxiety into excitement. Other people just help us do our own inner work. Listen to what Gandhi said about how he worked to channel his
anger about injustice into something meaningful: “I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power that can move the world.” —
Gandhi
How Do You Do This?Almost universally, spiritual teachers from all traditions advocate the mental training that comes from prayer and meditation as a way to gain some measure of control over our inner world. The two people quoted above — Eswaran and Gandhi — were diligent practitioners and
advocates of meditation in particular. What most people misunderstand when they start this inner journey — and it frequently causes people to give up on meditation — is this essential fact: YOU CAN’T STOP YOUR MIND FROM GENERATING ITS RANDOM DELUGE OF THOUGHTS Just as it is the essential nature of the heart to beat — and no amount of
conscious effort on your part can get it to stop — so it is with the mind. It’s nature is to generate thought. You can’t stop it, and there’s no point in trying. The goal of meditation is not to still the mind. What we train ourselves to do in meditation
is to become aware of our thoughts, and thus to detach from our thoughts. When we sit in meditation — removing the distractions and stimulation that normally fill our conscious awareness — we notice how quickly and randomly our minds are spewing out thoughts. Memories, annoyances, reminders, worries, grievances, more reminders and worries … on and on it goes. We train ourselves to simply notice these thoughts — not feeling bad or guilty because we’re “bad at meditating” — and then gently bring our awareness back to some other focus of attention (a word, phrase, the breath, etc.). This way we are separating ourselves from our thoughts … simply noticing them and moving
on. It’s like watching a parade go by. Thoughts come up, but then they go, only to be replaced by other thoughts. An endless parade. After a while, we realize three
things: - We are not our thoughts, we are a being that has thoughts.
- We can choose to believe or disbelieve our thoughts. Not everything we think is true or accurate.
- We are not at the mercy of our thoughts … we can direct our attention and thoughts to something else.
“The goal of mediation is not to get rid of thoughts or emotions. The goal is to become more aware of your thoughts and emotions and learn how to move through them without getting stuck.” — Dr. Philippe Goldin
“Meditation is choosing not to engage in the drama of the mind but elevating the mind to its highest potential.” — Amit Ray
Where this article comes from:I regularly publish content on the writing site medium.com. I'm taking articles from my newsletters in years past, and posting them to my author page on this site. You can become a member of the site, and read all my articles (along with the other 200,000 writers there). It's a great place to hang out -- in my opinion WAY better than social media sites. My Home Page on the site: https://medium.com/@markbrouwer My Recent Articles:
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