Chapter 24: Monkey mind

 

We are locked into our minds,

but we do not really know them.

We are adrift and struggling,

buffeted by the waves of our minds,

having not learned how to focus.

                          ~ Mark Epstein 

Ever tried to meditate?

If so, what you experienced was the normal state of this anxious brain we inherited.

It’s that ceaseless river of thoughts and feelings, fears and fantasies Buddhists call monkey mind.

Research suggests we have more than 6,000 thoughts per day, many of them clustered around the same topics.

Think of each thought as a branch on a tree, and the mind swinging from thought to thought, minute by minute, hour by hour, all day long.

What if I get sick? Will I have enough money? Is my boss mad at me? Is my boyfriend cheating on me? Do I look fat in these clothes? Did my joke offend someone? What does X think of me? Are they talking about me behind my back? What if my tire blows on the expressway? What is X gets reelected? Did I turn off the stove?  

If you have a normal human mind you know exactly what I mean.

Being caught up in this flood of paranoid chatter is enormously stressful. It keeps us anxious, tense, on guard, and exhausted.

That’s because most of the time we’re unable to remember that These are just thoughts.

We respond to them, emotionally and physically, as if they were events in the real world.

It’s like watching a horror film and forgetting it’s just a movie.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca said,

We suffer more from imagination than from reality.

Psychologist Eric Maisel writes,

We are not mad, most of us, but our minds nevertheless resemble lunatic asylums. It is real bedlam in there. 

And from novelist Leni Zumas:

Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances, future and past.

They are all describing monkey mind.

So was Mark Twain when he wrote,

 I’ve lived through some terrible things, some of which actually happened.