How to work with your mind to live a happier life.

There’s an apt term for the way many of us spend our waking hours: “lost in thought.”

Most of us aren’t aware of it, but our minds are constantly assessing our current state and making judgements, then acting on those judgements.

It all sounds pretty reasonable and even necessary. We should be paying attention and making decisions based on our reactions to our current state. But if we begin to pay closer attention to how our thoughts are functioning — how they are impacting our daily existence, we will often find that we are causing undue stress simply by how we are responding to the world around us.

Most beginning meditators are alarmed and disturbed by the amount of activity going on inside their heads once they sit on their cushions. It can be very noisy in your mind once you stop all the other activity:

Thoughts rise up and take up a life of their own, they course through your brain and turn into lists and worries and wishes.

Of course, what we direct our mind to, what we think about and how we think about things is what colors our days. Without any intercession, we become slaves to our thoughts whether they are good, bad or indifferent.

Many of us wonder how we might lead less stressful, happier lives. We feel a longing for a simpler life. The answer is not always in getting rid of our commitments, making big changes or ignoring our to do lists. It can be as simple as learning how to work with our minds.

All thoughts can be largely divided into three categories: pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. That may seem reductive but if you pay attention to your thoughts you will notice that they all fall within one of those three buckets.

The issue is never what a thought necessarily is, it is how we react to it. In general, we want more experiences and thoughts that are pleasant, less unpleasant ones. If we even notice the neutral ones, we tend to avoid this group by quickly moving on or distracting ourselves — usually by turning to something that we have labelled “pleasant”.

Once we see that our thoughts can be divided into these three categories, what are we to do with that information? Just as with everything that we are hoping to work with, noticing is only a first step.

Our next step is to begin to track how the thoughts impact us. We learn to work with our thoughts by seeing how our bodies, emotions and thoughts react to the original thoughts.

Even pleasant thoughts can be problematic if we aren’t aware of our response. For example, we might be enjoying a nice, warm cup of tea. We can notice the warmth of the cup on our hands, the steam rising from the tea. We can expand our awareness to note the slant of the light on the table. We can breathe in deeply and happily take in our surroundings and the taste of the tea. But then we might notice that we are wishing that this moment could continue. We don’t want this moment to end. And then, we might start to notice a pang of sadness under the happiness — this experience is so pleasant, we want it to go on and now we have become vaguely irritated that we will have to get up and start making dinner. As we finally do get up and start cooking, we resent this next activity, thinking only back to how pleasant that cup of tea was.

There’s a lot going on in that simple cup of tea isn’t there? In the moment of enjoying what should be a pretty mundane moment, we can see that is actually really easy to get caught up in wishing and grasping for more of the pleasant and a lot less of what we have deemed unpleasant. And, yet — in doing so, we have altered the pleasant so that it, too, has the tinge of unpleasant and we have preordained that our next activity (in this case, cooking a meal) will be unpleasant.

What if we had been truly present and appreciative for the cup of tea — inhaling the aroma, appreciating the warmth and stayed in that moment? No layering on of wishing for more or resentment of what is to come. The whole thing would have been much, much more pleasant.

Of course, the unpleasant comes with its own challenges, most of them having to do with aversion and wishing it weren’t so. Again, we can’t do much about responsibilities and general unpleasantness, but we can work with our reactions. Once more, we spend time looking at how our body, mind and emotions react to unpleasantness.

There’s a pretty easy and instructive exercise that you can do that demonstrates the power of your reaction to an unpleasant experience.

Grab an ice cube and hold it. First, focus on the experience as cold and notice how thinking about cold, creates aversion and pain. Now, still holding the cube, strip away the negative thoughts and begin to describe your physical sensations without using words that create judgement. Maybe you still note that the ice cube is cold and is beginning to numb your hand, but you don’t load up on thinking things like — “This hurts. When should I put it down?” “Am I giving myself frostbite?” “This is the stupidest exercise, why am I doing this again?” Instead, just note your experience with curiosity and even friendliness — “that’s cold” “cold has an interesting quality — there’s pain, even a little burning” “my hand is gripping” and so on. Did you notice an immediate loosening of mental tension? The experience changed because of your relation to it.

These are not mind games. What you are actually doing as you explore how you perceive your world and your reactions is beginning the very important process of not getting hooked by your thoughts. You are providing yourself more freedom in your day to day existence. In that freedom, you are giving yourself space to be truly present for your whole life — the good, the bad and the boring. In this space of clear seeing, you can begin to understand our deeper motivations and reactions. You might see new ways to live — even in the midst of your commitments and concerns.

Try this:

For one whole day, take note of every pleasant thought and experience. Pay attention to how your body feels in that moment. What are your thoughts? Do any emotions come up? If you are recollecting this moment at the end of the day, what comes up for you in that moment?

The next day is your day to log unpleasant thoughts. Follow the same process as above.

You can alternate days until you have monitored either pleasant/unpleasant for six days.

Notice how your relationship to your thoughts might have changed as you bring more awareness to your reactions.

Are there any patterns? If there are — instead of becoming frustrated by the repetition, you might welcome them as something to learn from.

As Ram Dass once said “What has changed is that before, [my neuroses] were these huge, big things that were very frightening, and they took me over… And now they’re sort of like little Shmoos. They’re little, friendly beings, and I invite them in for tea.”

Just make sure you aren’t clinging to that little tea party!