My Journey with Mindfulness
‘Face the fear of not interpreting and stay with the experience’. I read maybe 15 years ago. It hit me powerfully at the time.
Now that I’m having more inner quiet and longer breaks in between my thoughts, I can see the contrast. I have been noticing just how much of my life has been, and often still is, lived through my thinking, and the ongoing interpreting of my minute to minute experiences in my thoughts. And how very crowded it can feel in here due to that.
That chat inside the mind. ‘Oh that’s a beautiful tree’, ‘ooo this food is delicious’ ‘yes think it’s time for a cup of tea’ ‘that’s an annoying noise’ ‘I think I might call S soon’ and so on. When I can actually do all that without thinking about it, so what is the point in all that inner dialogue going on?
I remember saying to my 10 year old son as we walked across a field in Pollok Park, “Oh look at that beautiful sky!” and him saying, “Mum you don’t have to say that out loud, it spoils it”. He felt the dampening effect of my interpreting the experience out loud instead of just being there directly experiencing it.
We are so used to it, it has become a sort of defence mechanism I think, a way of buffering the rawness of the direct immediate and intimate experience of life.
We know that we don’t have control over how life will unfold for us and so we try to give ourselves the illusion of control through the constant interpreting of experience real time with the commentary in our heads. And now, addicted to it, we only let the raw experience in, in small doses.
And there is the accompanying threat detection facility courtesy of the amygdala which evolved to help us watch out for wolves behind bushes. It is very quick to comment in our minds. Worry thoughts. ‘You better watch out, ****** might happen if you don’t do this on time’, kind of thoughts. Which has us on edge a good bit of the time, believing there is threat – though 99% of the time the threat was imaginary in our minds.
I hardly ever got to experience life directly, and the rawness of the experiencing directly became a little scary as I wasn’t used to the sheer direct intimacy of it. We can come to feel exposed without our inner dialogue chit chat to buffer us from the rawness of reality after a while.
For so many years I had this sense that I was living life through some sort of web of fabric in front of me, a barrier of some kind that made me feel removed from life, from directly experiencing and from myself too. I didn’t know what it was but now realise it was this constant inner dialogue, the constant interpreting and judging and appraising.
I’m now in recent decades, I’ve been engaged in learning to ease myself back into the direct experience. Tolerating a little discomfort initially, I persevered and discovered a whole new world opening up which I had been missing. By noticing the thoughts and the inner dialogue, it becomes less seductive, less believable. Just noticing it is very powerful. More space appear.
Once we get used to it, this space becomes not only a place of refuge of quiet and peace, but we notice that a natural joy arises. A joy many of us only have fairly short glimpses of and nearly all of us experienced daily as young children.
The joy of the momentary raw direct experience without thought interpreting it for us. It became a wonderful new adventure for me. Life was richer and more intense, and many previously ignorable and ordinary experiences have become fuller in feeling and colour and texture.
If we slowly let go of some control as it feels safe to, little by little we realise that everything doesn’t fall apart after all. That we don’t have to hold it all together. Life unfolds just fine, even when we loosen our grip a little.