One day, you had a thought that didn’t seem right to you. It didn’t reflect your belief. But it was your thought. Why would you have it without believing it? This disconnect triggered a feeling—not just mild dissatisfaction but some kind of psychological pain. Like any healthy, rational person, you set out to get rid of that pain. However, everything you could come up with seemed to help only for a brief moment and then caused the pain to strike back more viciously.
The more you tried not to think about it, the more the thoughts intruded. The more you self-soothed, the more you hurt. The more you avoided, the more you were forced to confront things. You tried to let go but couldn’t. People said, “Just drop it,” and you began to resent them for being unfair. Your world got smaller and smaller, the things you love became reminders of what you hate, and you began to see yourself as an imposter.
When you see yourself as the imposter, you perceive yourself as merely pretending to be a functioning human being; inside you experience constant, relentless suffering. The imposter is contaminated, a danger to others, deviant, unloved, disconnected, imperfect, immoral, and, above all, not in control. You’re not just anxious. There’s something sharp jabbing into your mind. But all is not lost. Although your suffering may be great, your ability to change this experience is within your grasp.
Mindfulness is the state of acknowledging and accepting whatever is happening in the present moment exactly as it is. As a skill, it emerges from your developing the ability to notice what your mind is doing with the information it receives from the brain. This involves noticing individual acts of the mind, as well as patterns and tendencies of the mind.
The experience of anxiety is feeling very much out of control of your mind. When you don’t see yourself as separate from your mind, you may feel as if you are doing whatever your mind is doing. That means you not only are being asked to cope with the presence of intrusive thoughts, but also are taking on personal responsibility for how terrible they appear.
You may attempt to pull the mind away from the unwanted thoughts by purposefully reviewing and predicting horrific hypothetical situations, trying to convince yourself that what you came up with would never happen, that you’re safe and it’s okay for your mind to stop. But it doesn’t work. The brain presents, the mind receives and acts, and you feel like a slave to the whole process. But if you develop the capacity to better observe what the mind is doing, you can begin to view these thoughts as something different from their content. Because we so often find pain in thoughts, we become accustomed to seeing our minds focused on judgment and rejection of what the brain offers. Rather than let the mind take in the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations as they are, we fight. But it’s the wrong fight.
If you can choose to stay on the sidelines and observe what your mind is receiving and where it tends to go with it, you can begin to choose measured responses to thoughts. Instead of automatically reacting as when two chemicals spontaneously change form, you can begin to respond.
To react is to jump into compulsions. To respond is to observe what your mind is doing and choose your next step.
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