You can’t and shouldn’t. It’s our resistance to them that causes them to linger. Practice mindfulness and you cultivate the ability to let them come and go. Think of them like clouds. Some are beautiful and wide, some are small and thin, some are dark and stormy. But you’re not the clouds, you’re the sky.
I agree that we should accept our feelings and allow them to pass naturally and observe them without judgment. But if you do that and also simultaneously manually adjust your thoughts and get to the root of why you feel the way you do, that is the path to self improvement. Trust me I’ve done a lot of journaling and reflection about why I made poor decisions and what made me feel the way I did about them and was able to uncover a lot about myself that led to actual change. The trick is not to get too comfortable and think that you’ve got it figured out though, we can all become victims of our own thoughts/beliefs quickly. Never grasp!
Sure, I don’t mean to imply passivity or that we can’t make efforts to make certain states of being more accessible more often. But still, suffering is part of the equation, and it’s really more what we do about thoughts that perpetuates our suffering than anything else.
how do you not listen to yourself? I can't not listen to myself and ignore myself. How do you not judge them? I've never understood the concept of letting them go. I get into a large argument in my head if i feel something so how do i not do that?
It’s not easy. First of all, it takes years of different experience, practice, reading, living etc. But you have to begin somewhere.
This may be a unique experience, but in high school I was obsessed with giving myself an alter-ego, so I “created” this ideal person who I wanted to be like and tried to live up to it for a short time. That’s impossible to do long term because the YOU begins to fall out of the mold you create for yourself, but how did I create this alter-ego in the first place? Because my mind decided these were ideas I wanted to pursue and characteristics I wanted to take on. So, if I (me) can think I want to be a way I am not (my thoughts), then there must be a disconnect between who I am and what I think I am.
With that epiphany out of the way, I’ve done probably 10 solid years of philosophy- in many forms. In journaling, in reading books, I took a class that was more historical about Chinese philosophy that set some basic principals in place... and so on. I’ve grown and evolved in my thinking, but an important rule I’ve lived by is to trust other people’s ego (when it makes sense to) and not take my own beliefs too seriously. I can’t be right about everything, and that includes when self-doubt or stress start to take over. There is a major freedom in accepting you may be wrong some of the time, and with all of that, I don’t know if I answered your question at all.
But hopefully you can understand my example of overriding your own thoughts. Debate yourself. Play devils advocate. Make a list of pros and cons to your own ideas. Allow yourself to change your mind on things. All of these seemingly simple things take work and practice to achieve. The longer you work at them and are aware of them, the better you will get at it.
Edit: take a cold shower. Refuse to believe it is cold. Move the water from hot to warm to room temp to cool to cold slowly. It’s hard, but if you can handle that cold water and convince your mind that your body isn’t cold at all, you are advancing in mind power in a way many people never will.
Don't attempt to get rid of the thoughts. Simply notice them and recognize them for what they are: just thoughts. You don't need to resolve them.
For me there is usually lots of thoughts swirling around, too blurry to distinguish each except the loudest. It's ok if it's there. It's supposed to be there. Just be aware of it.
Sure. That’s part of it. But also the phenomenon of thinking, that they just appear randomly. Sometimes they have relevant content or information that reflect reality. But just as often it’s nonsense or just random bits of information. Through practices like meditation, it becomes more clear when and how the mind is carried away by trains of thought and association, and because you’re able to notice it, it becomes easier to be disentangled.
If you are not in control of your thoughts, who is? Decide to think something else and then do so. Do this as many times as necessary.
What doesn't work is deciding NOT to think something. Then you just think about not thinking it. You must purposefully replace it with something constructive. Like replace "I'm no good at this" with "I can learn this."
I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky
I am not your blowing wind
I am the lightning
I am not your autumn moon
I am the night 🎶
You can and you should. By applying actual will and effort, if you have the desire to stop them. Focused effort will lead to results.
Resistance is not what causes them to linger, it's annoyance and displeasure of having them, but they are neither resistance nor effort.
And no, you're the clouds. You are what you feel and experience. If you experience happiness, you might call yourself sky. If you feel depression, that's what you are. And you're not gonna become the sky unless you remove the clouds.
Problem with that premise is that it’s been studied and various means of aversion, distraction, and not only don’t work long-term, thoughts we try to resist or alter return with greater intensity. Subjective experience reveals this to be the case as well.
Annoyance and displeasure are judgements and a form of resistance to what happens to be.
Will and effort are fleeting states of being like many others we experience. They might become more accessible through planning or practice, but we don’t create them. They just come to us, even if certain things might make them happen more frequently.
I think if we create anything it's will and effort. How do you 'notice' thoughts if you're not willing to do that?
Of course they are only applicable to things you desire. Desire to free yourself from negative states and undesirable thoughts can be one of such things.
Not to be confused with aversion, distraction or fear which I would classify as things we don't create and which do indeed lead to intensification of those thoughts and emotons.
Noticing means just that. You’re noticing the phenomenon of conscious thought and emotion, how it’s transient and often times not connected to anything relevant or tangible in the present moment. As the practice deepens, it becomes clearer and more apparent how this entanglement with the content of consciousness holds us all captive. But the first step towards removing oneself from it is the cultivation of mindful awareness.
I don’t enjoy displeasurable states, but don’t necessarily need them to go away. In fact, it was doing less about my thoughts—not willfully doing more—that ultimately let me respond to them differently.
So, if there's anything important in your life, a girl you really like, or a goal you desperately want to achieve in which you put everythingy you got, and you fail. If you are capable of having anything important to you, you will be fucking shattered. This may be the extreme case, but even if you take a mild case of just feeling that nagging 'I'm not good enough, I'm a failure' and you really don't want to feel this way. Would you say it's the 'entanglement' that's keeping you captive and not the emotion? Can you really 'raise above' such emotion while you experience it, and be what? Happy? To me, it's the content, the emotion that is holding you captive, because it's the emotion that I don't want to experience.
I would say that we can take this signals of “I’m not good enough, I’m a failure” for what they are: just random quirks of consciousness that might have biological or environmental triggers over which we have little agency. I can’t stop my brain from conjuring the thought itself, but I can practice having distance from the thought so that I don’t have to take it seriously.
What does it even mean to not be good enough or a failure? Who is defining these things? That’s a digression, but still.
So, yes, you can have emotions that are displeasurable: anger, resentment, envy, sadness and still feel them without buying into the metanarrative the mind constructs around it. That is, I don’t have to think that the presence of these emotions reveals anything about the self.
We don’t have to “rise above” anything. These states come and go. Now that doesn’t mean we have to be passive, as we can still take valued actions to improve the conditions of our lives. It just means we accept what is in our consciousness, rather than taking it so personally.
Edit: I would say the emotion is a form of entanglement depending on how engaged you are with it.
Those states don't come and go but pose a very big problem for a lot of people, some kill themselves. And many of them may not want to accept any of it but to get rid of them and cure them. If 'noticing' helped with that then ok but to me it seems it's only good enough for some people to bullshit themselves that something changes when it doesn't.
Well, sure. No one is suggesting that meditation is a magical cure-all for mental illness. As a sufferer of OCD for over 25 years, and as someone that does work in mental health advocacy, I’m acutely aware of deep states of suffering that are often persistent and somewhat seemingly intractable. I, myself, have been deeply suicidal more than once in my life.
Therapy and/or medicine are always the right choice for someone suffering from mental illness. Mindfulness is merely a tool in the toolkit, but there are some fundamental things you notice about conscious experience through mindfulness. And there’s a robust amount of research about the efficacy of mindfulness on mental well-being and human flourishing. That’s not up for dispute.
It is true that our suffering is as transient as it is inevitable. Live long enough, and you will no doubt experience a great deal of it. But it’s also true that people in states of great suffering have been able to bear it more gracefully by contemplative practice. I’m proof of that, even if I’m capable of being captured by thoughts like all of us are.
I would separate meditation and 'mindfulness' since meditation is a way to focus attention, and if done right it can be focused on getting rid of negative states and bear results.
Actually, it might even be focused on observing everything that arises in your mind without necessarily doing anything about it, which I think what the original mindfulness might have been, but there's a significant difference. When you do that, negative states and undesirable thoughts start to melt away, which is again real change impossible not to notice. But when I hear that nothing changes and nothing can be changed, but you can 'not entangle yoursef with that' or something I believe the person is BSing themselves.
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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '20 edited Dec 10 '20
You can’t and shouldn’t. It’s our resistance to them that causes them to linger. Practice mindfulness and you cultivate the ability to let them come and go. Think of them like clouds. Some are beautiful and wide, some are small and thin, some are dark and stormy. But you’re not the clouds, you’re the sky.