“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
Richard Rohr
Without a doubt our world has gotten noisier and nosier.
I’m not referring to the world “out there.” I’m talking about your inner world. Yes, the outer world is noisy, but it can scarcely match how noisy our minds have become.
It would be one thing if our minds were noisy with positive reinforcement, but sadly it’s the exact opposite.
Our minds interpret and reinforce most of what we experience through a negative lens. The evolutionary advantage of this negative bias is that it protected us from being eaten by predators. But in today’s world all it does is cause unnecessary emotional and spiritual pain.
Each day you have at least a couple thousand thoughts. They are mostly fearful thoughts, full of dread, loss, and overwhelm. They assault us one after another, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day.
Even when we’re asleep the thoughts don’t stop. And when we wake up, our minds pick right back up again.
The mindfulness pill
Our noisy minds are downright oppressive and sometimes intolerable. It’s one of the reasons why mindfulness and other forms of meditation have exploded in popularity in recent years.
Those tools can certainly help. But there are times when my own mindfulness practice feels like fast-acting medication. I may feel relief from my emotional and spiritual pain for a brief time only to be assaulted by my thoughts once the effects wear off.
And I have a feeling I’m not alone in my experience. Not because mindful practices are bad, but because when practiced a certain way, they become just another pill that works for a time to relieve symptoms without addressing the underlying condition.
The embodied individual
So is there any hope of finding relief from the noisy chatter in our minds?
Absolutely, there are steps you can take to find relief. It requires making one big shift:
Move from being a mind individual to an embodied individual
Think back to the example of having a mindfulness practice. What’s the first thing just about every mindfulness program asks you to do? Become aware of your breath. Become aware of the ground beneath you. Become aware of how the chair or ground holds you up.
These are simple but profound ways of embodying that interrupt the mind chatter. These are not unimportant perfunctory acts you do before getting to the good stuff of floating away into mindful bliss.
No, the very beginning of any mindful practice is the whole point. You are being brought back to the body as the primary experience of who you are.
Truth is, you have five readily available but overlooked ways to become more embodied and more grounded…
I see, therefore I am
Our privileging of the mind over the body goes back a long way to the great philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes.
It was Descartes though who ushered in the modern age of mind-body duality with his formulation of arguably the most famous line in all philosophy: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.
Getting there for him involved the arduous task of uncovering all the ways he could be fooled or tricked into believing in things that weren’t true. His all-encompassing doubt led him to mistrust the five senses since humans could so easily be fooled by them.
He continued to doubt everything until it led him to a startling truth. The fact that he could doubt. Doubting was an activity of the mind. Thinking. This was finally the truth that doubt could not wash away because thinking itself created doubt. The doubter must exist – the first principle upon which all philosophical knowledge, indeed all knowledge, could be built.
Whether or not Descartes intended it, our sole dependence on the mind to validate our reality caused us to degrade the importance of our body. But we are not just minds who happen to have bodies.
Mind and body must work together seamlessly to create the subjective experience of being you. How do we keep our minds from driving us to despair? By grounding the mind in the body, particularly through the five senses.
What if Descartes epistemological ground started with these statements instead?
I see, therefore I am.
I smell, therefore I am.
I hear, therefore I am.
I taste, therefore I am.
I touch, therefore I am.
What if he could trust and value the senses as a form of knowing that was qualitatively different from rational certainty. Would we be less susceptible to being hijacked by our minds today?
Meditations on the senses
Catch yourself being overwhelmed by your thoughts? Open your eyes to a beautiful sunset, or a smiling baby, or the people around you.
Take in the aroma of freshly baked bread or calming essential oils or the smell of your partner’s hair and skin.
Hear the moving sounds of music or the sound of traffic or the fullness of silence.
Eat slowly so you can really taste and experience your food.
Feel the texture of a favorite item in your home or the soft hands of your child.
Take it all in, become grounded. Allow the mind to be part of the experience without its having to take command.
This is how you quiet a noisy mind. This is how you find peace, the peace that comes with knowing the truth that you are here, not just in mind, but in body.
Thank you very much for a profoundly useful post.
We imperfect creatures tend to ‘egotise’ everything – even those practises designed to lessen our egos!
Any and all moral,or at least morally neutral practises, that divert us away from overly ‘thinking about ourselves’ are beneficial.
Thank you.
Yes, for sure. Thinking too much about ourselves often gets us in trouble…I speak from experience!
Philosophers are named and their premises and beliefs but God is not mentioned once in the 2 writings I read. He is described as a “spiritual chaplain”. But the spirit He teaches is not the Holy Spirit of the one true God. Be aware.