In order to
fully experience life, you need to loosen the grip on your thoughts.
Having just
become the proud parent of a healthy, beautiful baby girl made me think again of
a fascinating thing that happens in the developing brain: "pruning". We
have this "internal gardener" that goes to work to trim unnecessary or
misleading connections, thereby balancing stimulating and calming signals.
While we
have no conscious control over this internal gardener, we can develop our "green
fingers" through self-awareness and mindfulness, thereby bolstering the
process of bringing eternal sunshine to our spotless minds.
It is
estimated that we have some 60 000 thoughts a day. Some are fruitful and take us
forward; others are meaningless chatter - the brain's "white noise". Some
we never even become aware of; others, however, grab us and suck us into a
vortex of endless and fruitless entanglement and rumination.
Attempts are
made to control and disentangle us from this web of unwanted thoughts, feelings
and memories (many of which have self-critical and self-downing qualities). The
respective processes of entanglement and getting rid of unwanted thoughts are
called fusion and experiential avoidance by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
practitioners. Both of these processes have one net effect: they obscure the
sunlight and make the weeds proliferate in the lush garden that could be our
world.
Why do we
spend so much energy trying to rid ourselves of negative thoughts? It is
because we have been conditioned to believe that the precondition for happiness
is to figure everything out with this powerful problem-solving machine between our
ears, and eliminate all that is distressing, negative or marked by suffering.
Here are some
tips to live a life characterized by acceptance and commitment (some by Russ
Harris from his book ACT Made Simple):
- First,
accept that it is a myth that you are engineered to be inherently happy, and
that bad thoughts or memories interfere with this, and must be eliminated. If
that were so, you would have only one emotion: joy. The fact is, you have six:
sadness, joy, anger, disgust, fear and surprise. To be fully human is to accept
suffering, experience all six emotions fully and not buy into the "mood
stabilizer" nonsense. Life is like standing in a canoe on a raging torrent
- you need to rock back and forth to remain upright.
- Second,
in order to experience life directly and fully through your senses, you need to
loosen the grip on your thoughts:
- Accept
that what you think may or may not be true - rather focus on whether it is
workable;
- Take
a step back by looking at your thoughts from the perspective of pure
consciousness - the essential, enduring, never-changing core of your being -
and observing self, which has superior insight. It is only the ego that takes a
knock from self-critical and self-directed notions, due to fusion with shaky
self-definitions based on occupation, status, etc.; and
- View
your thoughts with openness, curiosity and flexibility (resisting a negative
thought only intensifies it). Think "this is an interesting thought",
then place it on an imaginary leaf drifting by on a slow-moving stream.
- Third,
bring your behavior increasingly under the influence of your core values -
those which you yearn for at the deepest level of your being, your very raison
d'être. This is more fruitful than wasting precious energy on unworkable and
self-destructive actions, or disentangling yourself from unpleasant thoughts or
feelings.
