Your Mind, the Tangled Forest

The next time you meditate, imagine if your thoughts were trees.

Your most fleeting thoughts would be small, no more than saplings. Maybe your life-long dreams and aspirations would be huge, towering trees, with thick boughs and thicker leaves.

Some of your thoughts would be healthy and positive; trees strong and supple, pulsing with life. Others would be a tangle of dead branches and decaying leaves, rotting from the inside out.

In no time at all, your mind would be a forest. No matter where you looked, you’d see trees, hemming you in. To get anywhere, you’d have to climb over gnarled roots and brush aside thick leaves.

In times of stress, and worry, you find yourself running deeper and deeper into the forest. At times, the forest would be dark enough to blot out all of the light. You might even get lost.

Most people never escape the forest. They become so used to the trees that they forget there was ever anything there before. They become part of the forest, instead of the forest being part of them.

But what happens if you sit down and stare into the forest?

You look long and hard at the tangle of branches. You stare and stare, seeing nothing but bark and bracken, leaves and lichen. Then, in a heartbeat, you catch a glimpse: you see a clearing through the maze, a little pool of open space, empty, serene. And then it’s gone.

But from that point, you know it’s there. No matter how dark the forest gets, you can call back that fleeting image of peace. You begin to unweave the rainbow.

You won’t always see the clearing through the trees. In the beginning, you might not see it at all. But you practice.

And each time you catch a glimpse of that clearing, when you see a tree for the intrusive, impulsive thought it really is, you make the clearing bigger. Not by much — you’ll barely notice it happening — but bigger it gets.

Inch by inch, you carve out a path through the tangled forest, one that becomes easier to find each day. Every time you sit and stare at the trees, you’re clearing the borders of the path, making it a little wider, a little easier to navigate.

Now, in times of stress and worry, you aren’t always thrown into the dark forest. Sometimes, you can see the clearing ahead of you. You’ll still get lost, but the bigger that path becomes, the easier it is to find.

One day, you realise that you can slip into the clearing whenever you call upon it.

It becomes a path well-worn by practice. You realise your perspective has changed. You no longer see an island of calm, lost in the forest: you see a fringe of trees, bordering the bright, open spaces of your mind.

With this distance comes peace. You can appreciate each tree in a way you couldn’t the forest, the swirls in the bark, the sunlight playing through the leaves.

At times, you’ll still find yourself wandering, lost, through the forest — but it’s never quite as dark.

And even in those moments of loss and confusion, you find yourself feeling grateful for the shade, the smell of pine needles underfoot — safe in the knowledge that the clearing is just the other side of the treeline.