Why do we suffer and can we do something about it? Suffering is caused by our reactive modes of responding to what is happening around us. We can thank our excellent survival mechanism for its hair-trigger body responses. If we had not been able to take
action, such as run, fight, or freeze when we were threatened by animals in the wild, our species would not have survived to tell the tale. But in our modern world, our hyper responsive systems creates chaos in our minds. Humans are meaning-seeking organisms. If we feel something in our bodies, we attempt to figure out why it is there and often pin it on something that may have little to do with the actual trigger. Often the body reactions travel so rapidly to the thinking part of the mind that we are not aware of the triggering body reaction. We become
captured by the thought that we made up to "explain"what we experienced in our bodies.
We have what Buddhists call "monkey minds": minds that jump from thought to thought, like monkeys that swing from tree to tree. It is this continual jumping from thought to thought that keeps up aroused, anxious, and reactive. This jumping around takes us into future possibilities ("what if" scenarios), then takes us to revisit past injuries, mistaken beliefs, and wrong actions taken. We forget that the past is done and over it, the future is not here and ...the only thing available to us is the present moment. Our mind seduces us to believe that this continual reworking of the past and attempting to control the outcome of the future is the solution to the problem. And, the problem is that we are really, really really, uncomfortable this very and and all we want to escape!
Retraining our "monkey minds" means accepting that this highly adaptive, incredibly complex organism that we are has some serious engineering flaws. Just as we cannot accept sense data without question ( see Fun tab this website and look for experiments in sense perception), we cannot blindly accept that our thoughts are telling us anything that is fundamentally True.
What mindfulness does is retrain the mind to be here in the moment, in the moment with our uncomfortable body sensation because that starts the entire cycle of reactive mind-swinging. Once we go off into monkey mind swinging, we are caught, captured by our own process. Mindfulness trains us to understand that we are NOT our thoughts; the thoughts are constructions, made up "stories", and as such we ought to be careful about responding as if they were True.
By training the mind to be here right now, even in this moment of physical discomfort and not permitting the mind to run off and tell some glorious story or fascinating narrative, we become aware that we are
first of all "
reacting" and that we need to attend to reality right now, before we swing to a thought or a narrative about what might be happening or just happened.
Retraining our monkey minds is tough. We resist staying right here
now. We want to escape into the stories not realizing that it is the stories that intensify the suffering. Mindfulness is the way to retrain our monkey minds, but just like exercise, or any concerted action that requires developing a skill, it must be practiced to develop competency. You cannot lift weights one day and be fit; You cannot expect to be mindful one day and be free immediately of your mental suffering. But with practice, the possibility of freeing ourselves from mental suffering is there for all of us.
