Our wonderfully complex, highly developed minds are not always our best friends. That is the heresy that Steven Hayes is proposing in the above quote. Don't get him wrong, however, our minds function exceptionally well in certain areas of life, especially those in which we will be interacting with the environment. For example, we can figure out in our minds how to solve a theoretical problem. We do not have to be at the place having the problem, but we can imagine what tools, strategies, and actions we would take to resolve the problem. But when we turn the mind to control, evaluate, and assess our own private experiences, we create the origin of human suffering.
Steven Hayes, one of the prime originators of ACT Therapy, calls it "minding" when we become entangled with the mind and confuse what is going on in there with what is our life. People often ask themselves if they are happy and have a heckuva time trying to figure out the answer. Checking in ("minding") to determine if one is happy or feeling good detaches us from the actual lived experience of the here and now.
This type of evaluation is based on the assumption, supported by culture, that there is a "right way to be" and that the "right way" to be is happy. This self-monitoring destroys the possibility of "being present" or spontaneous. The more that we enter into our evaluated verbally reality ("stories" about what is happening) the less that we are in this world as it unfolds in the here and now.
Ironically our minds tell us that we should evaluate how we are doing, but the moment we do that, we step out of experience, we detach and evaluate in our minds how we're doing and create a certain deadness and detachment from the world – – which is the very antithesis of happiness. Check this out experientially; when you ask yourself if you are happy, do you ever feel happy? Isn't it more likely that you feel detached and somewhat alienated from the moment you are trying to assess? Does the question lead to clarity, vitality and connection to the moment, or confusion, vagueness, and deadness? Like Steven Hayes says, our minds just do not know what is good for us.
