“Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.  Live in silence.  Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.”  Rumi

We had our seventh Introduction to Meditation Class at Yoga Bliss.  We discussed how most of us fall into habits of worry or repetitive thoughts.

Anxiety, stress or unpleasant surprises unleash spirals of planning and problem solving.  Uncomfortable interactions replay with shades of anger, regret or shame.   Meditation instructor and author, Tara Brach, says we reflexively lapse into these patterns as a way of trying to control life.  Tara says:

the common denominator is that whenever we’re lost in thought, we’re disconnected from our body and our senses. We’re cut off from the perceptiveness and receptivity that underlie our natural intelligence and kindness.

Tara says that on the most fundamental level, compulsive thoughts arise from fear-based beliefs. We take on the identity of a self who is in trouble, isolated or in danger. We become ruled by the underlying message that “something is wrong with me, or “something is wrong with you.”

Fear-based thinking does serve a critical function when we need to protect ourselves. But when this function never ends, when we become completely identified with our stream of fearful thoughts, we lose touch with actual feelings and circumstances that require our attention. Our repetitive thoughts simply loop. They lock us into fear.

Tara offers a helpful way of bringing a deeper awareness to our greatest hits or the “top ten” habitual thought patterns.  To minimize the time we lose in these spiraling thoughts we can use the practice we tried last week:  RAIN.  We start by bringing awareness to what’s happening in our bodies:  sensation.  Sensation – feeling what is happening right now – can cut through the obscuring film of “virtual reality” replayed by our repetitive thoughts.  Every time we interrupt the movie, we lessen its hypnotic pull.  If we can do this in less stressful times we build the capacity to respond to more charged situations with less reactivity.

We discussed instances in which we react to a charged situation by checking out – we go numb or feel frozen.  Even absence of feeling can be a signal to practice – we can explore this experience and come back to the hub of the wheel – the sanctuary we create with mindful breathing.  We can R-ecognize the trigger sensations, I-nvestigate our underlying beliefs, A-llow present moment experience to simply be and in this process  N-ot identify our selves with thoughts that feel real but aren’t true.  Tara describes this process as like waking up from a dream.  While we’re in it, the dream feels real.  Our thoughts are real – obsessing about what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with others – yet we can remind ourselves:  “real but not true.”

These teachings are coming in the nick of time.  Life just seems to keep throwing me curve balls.  I appreciate knowing we’re in this together – we share, as Rumi says, an ever widening ring of being.

You can find this week’s homework and other resources at:

Sunday Meditation Class 7 Homework