Can’t stop your mind from thinking? You’re normal.
This will sound absurd to your American ears, but from the Buddhist point of view, you’re neurotic a vast majority of the time.
You’re constantly searching for a reference point, some proof that you exist. As a baby, you needed mom and dad to respond to your cries to make sure your needs were met. Now it’s an endless checking on yourself: how am I doing, is my hair right, does he like me, is this email too harsh, am I walking like a man, am I meditating the right way?
This checking isn’t the same as slowing down and checking in on how you’re feeling — that’s healthy. It’s more paranoid than that, like a security camera you’ve turned on yourself. It’s like the rest of the world is a mirror giving you feedback for whether you’re good or bad.
We’ve all got different patterns, but if you’re like me, the evidence that I’m good lasts a few seconds — but the bad sticks to me like a wet t-shirt. A smile from a stranger satisfies me but then I realize the woman I’ve been dating hasn’t texted me back all day and all the old stories come up — I got excited and tried too hard, am I even lovable?
The difference between the good and bad doesn’t matter; what matters is our need for feedback. Feedback helps us function, of course. A car honks and we jump out of the way. But what’s at stake here isn’t functioning — it’s the game of inches between suffering and liberation that makes up human life. As long as you believe the mirror more than you believe what’s actually happening in the present moment, you will suffer.
Sign up for Liberation Notes, my weekly email on meditation and politics, and you’ll get a free guide to starting a daily meditation practice.
It’s important now to remind you that you can’t learn to relate with your mind’s neurotic tendencies on your own. Not only do we need each other, but we also need to change the things about this society that worsen those tendencies, for some more than others.
Particularly, on the one hand we’re told that we’re all individuals with equal rights and opportunity; but on the other, power and resources are concentrated with a small group of people. Oppression helps justify this contradiction and strengthens the mirror’s seduction. Those born with dark skin are given near constant feedback that they’re bad, even disposable. Those born into a poor working class family are told something is wrong with them, not the society that allows them little power over their lives. Getting groceries at 7–11 is a “dumb” and unhealthy “choice,” not a sign of poverty, a sign that this society is backwards.
That’s the big stuff we’ve got to face head on together, but many of us can also start to relate to our neurosis in small ways. Every time you open a new tab while waiting for Facebook to load you’re looking into the mirror. Your mind is jumping so fast because you want to accomplish something, anything to prove that you’re good and we exist.
Meditation practice is the foundation to start to go off this sort of auto-pilot and wake up. Everything you experience is practice. Except meditation is sort of a double practice. You practice the technique — breathing and so on — but then you also practice with the neurosis and boredom that inevitably comes. It’s practicing feeling content in the mirror, no matter what shows up.
But try not to make meditation into yet another source of feedback, another reference point. Just keep trying to show up, over and over again. As Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa was fond of saying, “That seems to be the point.”
