I recently completed a 5-day silent retreat offered by the Insight Meditation Society with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg. It was a virtual retreat, which made for an interesting experience, some pros, some cons. This retreat was particularly dense with dharma teachings, so I figured I would share just the tiniest bit here on this blog. In particular, there’s one question that has instantly made a meaningful positive difference in my life, one that I want to shout from the mountaintops, so I just had to write about it.
First, for those who have never been on an insight meditation retreat, or are on the fence about taking part in one, I figured it could be helpful to talk about the general experience. In my experience—and to be fair I’ve only been on 5 retreats thus far—these types of retreats have revolved around sitting and walking meditation. The day is spent rotating between mindful sitting, walking, and eating, all in silence. Once per day, one of the instructors gives a dharma talk. And that’s…about it. I may be doing a poor job of selling it, but it’s important to offer accurate details and manage expectations. That said, now I’ll break with that in order to state that my first retreat was one of the most powerful, transformative events of my life, without question. The day I returned from it, I said that it was one of the five most important events of my life, and today, over two years later, my feelings have not changed. That retreat gave me a glimpse into my mind, into why I do what I do, in a way that I had never experienced, ever. It got me asking important questions, it got me investigating my motivations, my feelings…myself. So, despite the seemingly bland description, don’t discount the potential. There’s a good reason that these retreats involve so much introspective time.
Except when they don’t. This past retreat was of similar mind, but it operated a bit differently. First of all, there were two major dharma talks each day by Goldstein and Salzberg, which were just chock full of useful information. There were also two additional sits with a third instructor, Jozen Gibson, who provided some additional thoughtful information, in addition to his meditations. Between all of the talks, it was expected that we would be observing some form of walking or sitting meditation while avoiding electronics and the like as much as possible.
This was difficult. There is a reason that I voluntarily give up my phone when attending past retreats, and that’s because even having that at a retreat center would likely lead to a mountain of distraction from the task at hand of examining our mind. But in this situation, not only were we able to keep all of our electronic devices, we were actively using an electronic device in order to view the talks. While trying my best, it was hard to fully dedicate myself to the practice, since my mind was regularly jumping into things that I otherwise could have been doing with my time. This led to the retreat being more exhausting as a whole, in that not only did we have a much larger quantity of useful dharma teachings for consideration, but we had to wrestle with our minds’ desire to engage with something, anything, amidst a slew of alluring distractions.
Now that you know some generalities about retreats, and some specifics of this particular retreat, I’ll move onto the teachings I’d like to discuss here. Like so many of these teachings, the take home message will seem obvious, but, also like so many of these teachings, there’s more under the hood to consider.
We all have thoughts. Lots of them. In fact, our minds are constantly coming up with new ones, all the time…sort of. Actually, a very large percentage of our thoughts are thoughts that we’ve already had before. In other words, they’re just a rerun. The fact that we spend so much of our day reviewing reruns—often about experiences that we don’t even like!—is another problem, but we’ll leave that for another day. For now, let’s start with the baseline agreement that we all think thoughts, a lot.
Often, these thoughts contain judgments, desires, or aversions. This will vary from person to person, but most of us regularly experience those types of feelings with our thoughts. “Gosh, why is Frank wearing that suit jacket, he looks ridiculous,” “Whoa, oh my god, that is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, what I wouldn’t give to be with them,” and “Ugh, I can’t believe I have to go to work again today, this is the worst” are all examples of thoughts any of us might have at one time or another. I think most of us would agree that these thoughts are, in general, not ideal, but I think that most of us would also think that ultimately they’re not much of an issue. You might think to yourself, well so long as I’m not acting on it, it’s not a problem. Actually, it is. Why? Neuroplasticity!
Our brains get used to what we do and how we think, and when situations are roughly similar in the future, they will fall back on those past thoughts as shortcuts for how you should react. This can be helpful at times; of course we need shortcuts to make sense of the world and not be paralyzed with every decision and assessment. But the problem is that these reactions can become so automatic that you end up applying them in all sorts of situations where they might not actually apply. Instead of letting our brains run the show on autopilot, we need to take the time to recognize the source of our judgments, so that we can more accurately assess the current situation.
That said, even if you’re able to notice your mind defaulting to a previous bias, noting a problem and then not acting on it can lead to feelings of frustration. It can be exhausting to put this much effort into thinking, but ultimately it’s worth it. I’m sure most of us would rather feel like we truly owned our decisions and thoughts, rather than just letting the mind generate connections on its own. It’s clear to me that we need to spend some effort at finding the root of our thoughts, so that we might alter them appropriately, so that they don’t automatically appear in the future without our permission.
It’s not that these thoughts are “bad” thoughts. Don’t think of it that way. They are thoughts; we all have them, we all have minds that are constantly throwing hundreds of thoughts at us every single day. Instead, think of them as visitors. You can observe them, you can allow them to exist, but you don’t have to do what they tell you. You can simply observe the thought, explore it, and let it go. Easier said than done, certainly. So, in an effort to help us do just that, I highly, highly recommend the following exercise, which I learned from Goldstein during this retreat.
The next time you have one of those negative thoughts arise, first and foremost, observe that you’re having the thought. This is also easier said than done, and it takes practice, but with time I promise you that it will be worth it. It involves seeing that thought bubble up to the surface, feeling that you’re thinking the thought, but not immediately giving into the thought. Once you’ve observed that you’re having a thought—”Hmm, interesting, I just realized how much hatred I am sending toward this person right now”—then be with the thought for a moment, acknowledge its existence, and then, ask yourself this absolutely pivotal question:
“Why am I having this thought?”
Now at the beginning, you might be tempted to respond reflexively to that. You might say “Well because that person is a jerk!” and feel content with the response. But I urge you to not accept the first explanation that your mind offers. Dig deeper. If you continue to probe, you will inevitably find that you don’t really have a good reason for thinking that thought, or that even if you have a good reason, it’s based on anecdotes or limited personal experience. You will likely find that there are better ways that you could react to the situation that make you happier while still being authentic.
Let’s run through an example, because I suspect this may seem like an oversimplification.
“I hate that person, he’s such a jerk!”
Wait, why am I feeling such hatred toward that person?
“He is an objectively horrible person! He exploits women, he doesn’t care about other people, and he’s the most narcissistic person I’ve ever met!”
“But what do I gain by displaying hatred? Does it make me happier?”
Well, no…but that’s how I feel!
“That’s ok to feel that way. But we shouldn’t identify with it. If we do that then we are letting him affect our well-being, our attitude toward others. This will influence our future actions”
Well what am I supposed to do—I can’t change how I think!
“Actually, you can. You shouldn’t expect to be able to change the initial thought, and you should accept that you had it. It’s ok. But you also shouldn’t cling to that thought. And after you’ve had that thought, you can think about why that person might be the way that they are. Perhaps it would be more beneficial to think of it in terms of what they need. You can turn it around. You don’t necessarily have to wish him well, or wish that he be happy, but you can think “may he be free from ignorance,” or “may he learn the impact of his actions.” Those corrections will eventually blur into your automatic reactions, and cause you to experience less pain and suffering at the hands of your thoughts, and increase your output of positivity.”
I would understand if you were to react to the above example with anger. Perhaps you might say but Jon, this hippie-dippie bullshit doesn’t work in real life, wake up! And to that, I would say indeed, I would like to wake up and I wish it for others as well. Most of us respond to events in our lives as if we were asleep, simply running through the gamut of emotions and reactions that we’ve been conditioned to do throughout our whole life. This is about taking back control, about not letting our past experiences and traumas dictate our happiness. We control how happy we are, not our mind and certainly not our thoughts.
Another simple thought experiment is to ask yourself, as you go through this process, what is a thought? I mean, really, what is it? How is our physical brain producing these mental thoughts and images? And what does it mean when it does it? Do I really identify with each individual thought? Probably not. So you should realize that you, who you are, does not begin and end with your thoughts. And thus, we should not let our thoughts run our lives.
All of this can seem intimidating. And it can be terribly frustrating to try to make the corrections that have been suggested in this post only to fail. Repeatedly. But again, that’s ok. It’s ok! We’re all failing at this, all the time. So as my final piece of advice in this post, that’s why I’d like to share Goldstein’s brilliant measurement of success in these endeavors. We should not view it as a failure if we fail to catch our thought in time, if we catch the thought but still act otherwise, or if we fail to catch the thought altogether until it’s too late. Instead, try to view things in terms of “noticings-per-minute.” How often do we notice our negative thoughts like these, per minute?
The distinction is hugely important. If we were to value success as only being achieved at the extermination of a negative thought, or at the point where we don’t have the negative thought to begin with, we are setting ourselves up for failure, frustration, and endless self-critique. We are often our own worst critics. By viewing things in that manner, we are faced with regular losses, regular disappointments, regular failures. And remember, we’re not trying to exterminate the thoughts, anyway—we simply want to observe them, allow them, and let them go, not letting them dictate our thinking or our actions. Valuing success as quashing the thought will lead to the whole process of questioning your thoughts being unpleasant, since you will so frequently fail. And what do we do with unpleasant activities? We stop doing them!
Since we not only want to continue questioning our thoughts, but increase the frequency of questioning our thoughts, thinking in terms of noticings-per-minute is an outstanding way to chart progress while feeling good about the results. When you notice a negative thought, first, just pat yourself on the back—I identified a negative thought, nice! Seriously, do give yourself this encouragement. Then you’ll start having them more and more frequently, you’ll in turn feel good about it because of the praise that you give yourself, and you’ll be on your way to naturally reducing the frequency of those negative thoughts. Again, you can’t strong arm the thoughts. Be with them, notice them, and do not fall slave to them as your master.
A mantra that I turn to in times of analysis came from a mindfulness instructor that I studied with, Nirali Shah: “Relax, Observe, and Allow.” Say those things aloud in your mind, and repeat them when you question a thought. Doing this practice will lead to greater happiness, over time. It will seem difficult at times, it will be frustrating at times, you will fail at times. Practice, practice, practice, and you will improve. It will become the natural path of your mind.
Relax. Observe. Allow.