Saturday, March 31, 2012

Strangers in the house

I heard a quote not too long ago that got me reflecting on how we can so easily get stuck in certain patterns or psychological modalities. The quote is as follows: “thoughts are like strangers in your house”. It’s so true. If strangers were to enter our house in the middle of the night we would likely ask them what the fuck they are doing there or we would make them leave. If we let them roam around in our house, they would get into stuff and fuck things up. Well then, thoughts are not unlike “strangers in our house”. We too often allow them to roam around, giving them control of how we interact with the world around us.



The long term affects can lead to depression, social and other anxieties, as well as any number of psychological behaviors that inhibit our ability to lead productive meaningful lives. This reminds me of my own experiences with social anxiety. Some time ago when I went to an event with many people I was unfamiliar with, I noticed something new. I was extremely nervous. That’s not to say I’ve never been nervous before but this time I became overly self-conscience of it. The next time I was in a similar situation, the nervousness got even worse- I was even a little shaky. So what did I do? I tried to avoid such situations for fear that others would notice how nervous I was. And any new events looming over the horizon would end up taking up too much space in my mind as I incessantly dwelled upon it. Are you seeing the pattern? Thich Nhat Hanh might suggest that we are putting too much water on the seeds of nervousness, in our garden. That is to say that nervousness like all other emotions/conditions exist within all of us in a subconscious garden. And when we water the seeds, they grow, often hijacking our lives in unexpected ways. Well, eventually my own experience with this condition subsided but not without much observation and diligence.

The answer in most cases is quite simple. In order to ease the suffering that arises in these situations, we must first become aware of the conditions that give rise to the suffering. One way to do this is by observing our thoughts. If we so choose, we can even investigate where the thoughts originate from. It’s amazing the things we find out about ourselves- the culture around us and even our upbringing when we do this. We can also choose to stop the thought process and break the emotional or bodily responses we experience as a result.

One of the problems we may experience along this path is how the brain can often work against us. The problem is- the emotional center in the brain tags certain experiences with emotions. If we are constantly fearful of certain situations, the brain will automatically remember and that fight or flight response may arise before we even knew what hit us. So we have to trick the brain by developing new perspectives and we do this by observing the internal dialogue; we stop it in its tracks; we push it out in front of us so we can see the absurdity of it all and then we can begin to water other seeds, form new experiences we didn’t think ourselves capable of and develop healthier perspectives. This is a great exercise in discovering and breaking habitual patterns that lead to internal and external conflict in our lives.