Our minds’ job is to produce thoughts; most of us just don’t know how to stop listening and believing its thoughts. So we become our thoughts and we have stress, anxiety, worry, fears, depression and on and on.
Instead of giving in and reacting to our mind’s incessant mental chatter that causes stress, worry, anxiety, depression – it’s just doing its job, having thoughts! – by just relaxing into this knowing, Pema Chodron in this video short from her “Getting Unstuck” teaching presents this comical yet so real picture of how we humans are with our monkey minds and our uncomfortable feelings, how we drive ourselves with these itches and expectations – and just the silly sharpness that the monkey mind can have. But as usual, Pema delivers with humor.
What is Meditation? Meditation helps us to slow the thoughts and just be with ourselves.
I consider Pema Chodron my third meditation teacher, or guide to the human mind. Her teacher, Chogyam Trungpa – a Tibetan Buddhist Monk – helped me through his Shambhala Windhorse Warrior training tools while I was living in Asia amongst the Taiwanese Chinese. I felt I had to choose to apply these Tibetan Buddhist Warrior tools particularly while I was weight training 5 days a week 2 hours a day at a mostly Chinese all-male body builders gym as a blonde haired/blue eyed American female. Generation Xers’ females were raised to be “strong”; the women there were raised to be “soft,” …Quite a few triggers for me to have emotional reactions to there!….
Both Chodron and Trungpa (with Chodron following her teachers’ teachings) speak to how to deal with our emotive reactions, our places where we get stuck, what GETS us HOOKED into reactivity. Essentially, it’s identifying what our stuff is, and learning how to be with it, observe it, and gradually in this act of bringing more awareness to our triggers, eventually dismantle our habitual reactions with mindfulness – meditation style awareness, done through detachment from lower, smaller, human self and observing from higher Self or bigger mind as best as possible the smaller human self walk through this world with its expectations and annoyances – its triggers.
My first meditation teacher, Eknath Easwaren, was the first to teach meditation at the university level – University of California @ Berkeley. He was an English Literature professor from India. He taught me about the activity of thoughts, and how our minds like to always have something to chew on. And if it doesn’t, it will create something – read “problem” – to have to do – read “worry” – so that it won’t have to deal with silence, or with where we’d go if the mind wasn’t holding down the fort with its control, with its habituated activity.
This 19 years of meditation has been a two tiered process. First the nature of THE mind, and then as I got more able to detach, I went in to the nature of MY mind, looking at my own particular triggers.
There is no other healing tool as strong as this. I teach this to my students, as I direct them towards gradually unearthing the most frequent tone, or texture, to their mind’s loudest track. This is one of the most profound steps a human being can take because it is the start of unseating the monkey mind from its throne, and flushing the human system with a higher consciousness.
