Monkey Mind

"Only monks have a monkey mind." - Lorin Roche

This whole monkey mind thing started with monks, who have put themselves in a position where they try to sit still and make their minds blank and pure. When you do that, you'll find you mind bounces around against your will – because you have set your will against the flow of life. This gives rise to the derogatory term "monkey mind."

A monk or nun, by definition, is a person who has taken vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. When you cut yourself off from life in that way, a phenomena happens that is called "the return of the repressed," in which the desires you refuse to act on force their way into awareness. No matter how hard you try to force them out, the thoughts keep coming. No matter how sexless and docile you try to make yourself, you'll still have some defiant thoughts coming from one direction or the other.

The monk's life is a tough row to hoe, and I am not a teacher of monks. I am a teacher of householders, the other 99% of the population.

Householders do not have monkey minds. They have busy minds, which is a totally different thing. Householders have long to-do lists and complex lives to choreograph. When they sit to meditate, part of the time is spent planning and reviewing. This is healthy and adaptive. The last thing a householder needs is to internalize the toxic inner dialogue of a monk, who is trying to kill off all desire to live.

So . . .

Many thoughts? Not a problem. Take a breath and read those five words again.

One of the most persistent non-problems people have with meditation is that they think they have too many thoughts. "It can't be right that when I close my eyes, there are so many thoughts zooming around my head, it's like I am watching 10 TV sets at once." I often hear the complaints, "I have too many thoughts," and "The thoughts move too fast."

This is not a problem because part of what you are doing in meditation is reviewing your life and letting go of stress. Meditation is not a drug state in which your consciousness is obliterated. Your brain is busy sorting, planning, and rehearsing future actions. This is all good, welcome it. What the wisdom of your body is doing is training you to be relaxed and aware as you move through life.

"I'm not disciplined enough to meditate"?

A pattern I have noticed in almost everyone I talk to is a background feeling, "I am not disciplined enough to meditate." There are variations on the theme. "I am not virtuous enough to meditate – I still eat meat." Or, "I am not the kind of person who can meditate – I still love sex, a good laugh, music, and dancing."

Well, I've got news for you. I just spent 36 years listening to meditators and wanna-be meditators, and I have found that just about anyone can meditate. The ability is built-in to your body, like the abilities to be awake, fall asleep, eat, have sex, and enjoy music. If your nervous system is intact enough that you can enjoy music or art or nature, then you can meditate. What you may not like is how fast your mind moves when you meditate. When you close your eyes, you will really sense the pace of modern life and you'll feel it in your nerves, the zoom of it all.

How Tension Resolves Itself in Meditation

You know how life seems to boil down to these impossible sets of opposites? Take that new job or stay in this one? Stay with this person or break up? Get married or stay single. Get divorced or stay together. Go back to college, or drop out of college. Stay in therapy or declare myself graduated? Start going to church, or yoga, or the ashram, or stop spending my time there. Have another child or leave it at one or two?

Often people come to learn to meditate when they are on the horns of such a dilemma. Their brains are percolating with conflicting desires, alternate routes, dreams and possibilities. This feels like noise to them, and they want relief. They want to be able to quiet their minds and see clearly. I usually ask people what brought them here, to a meditation session. What is propelling you?

They talk, and sometimes people need to talk for 45 minutes, an hour, or more, laying out the direction their life is taking, the choices ahead, with the subplot, "I need meditation to help me with this. I sense I need something to equip me for my journey."

At a certain point, which varies with everyone, they have said what's on their mind. They have told the story, run out of words. Their brain just stops doing what it was doing. They pause, and we just look at each other. We look out the window. The silence lengthens, and all I do is enjoy the silence, in a way that invites the other person to do the same.

Then I might ask something such as, "What are you experiencing now?"

Often the answer is something like, "I can see all the particles of thoughts, the elements of the story I just told you, sort of dancing in space. I feel peaceful, relaxed." Of course, no one says this so succinctly. It comes out in unique, individual ways, "I feel tingling," or "I feel like I am half asleep, but I am actually very alert," or, "I am just here, at peace. I feel like I can't move." It is usually difficult for people to talk at this point - they don't want to. I ask them to speak so that they themselves will realize what they are experiencing, as part of learning how to go there on their own.

What is going on here, part of it, is that the urgency behind the story, the tension the person has been under, has transformed just slightly, into electricity and space. If you look up the meaning of tension, all of them are relevant here, and you will see that one of the meanings is "voltage or potential; electromotive force." What was added, by them coming into the session, was a bit of relaxation and perhaps you could say space and time. I give them plenty of time to just be here. And with the addition of those simple elements, the person starts to go into meditation on her own.

Once you start to let the conflicts and tensions and polarities in your life have a home in your meditation, you are on your way. These very tensions provide the electricity, the power for meditation. All those rapid thoughts flying everywhere are the creative sizzling of your brain at work, your intelligence at work. When you breathe with the tension, relax into your worries, this is when the magic happens, and you start to turn your enemy - your problem - into your ally, your power source.

When we have a problem, the brain starts to generate solutions. Sometimes the solution isn't found on the level we are perceiving. So what the brain does is to rewire itself to have more processing power, so that the answer will become clear. The brain has many different areas, for each of the senses, for emotion, for self-preservation, for intellectual tasks, for moving muscles, regulating metabolism, activating sexual behavior, and timing your biological clock. And many other areas. Sometimes, in the way you are wired, the answer is not there. There may be too many walls or disconnections between areas, so you don't get it. You have left out too much of yourself. So, when you present yourself with a problem, the brain sets to work making new connections so that you become a person who can breeze through what previously was a problem.

When people meditate, the basic creativity of adaptation is at work, shimmering there in their awareness. I never ask people to "come up with an answer" during meditation. What I do is invite them to meditate, and then afterwards, I ask them to sense their bodies, re-bond with the outer world, and notice what they feel like doing.

The answers come when you are in action. That is where we need our creativity to be functioning, to come up with solutions to our dilemmas and paradoxes and problems. During meditation, the brain is tuning itself, making connections, taking care of business, changing the oil, sorting things out. It's after meditation that you see the benefits. That is why I say if you are wondering what type of meditation to do and if it is working, look at your life. If you are functioning better, then you are doing the right kind of meditation for you. If you are not functioning better - in your own terms - then you are probably NOT doing the kind of meditation that suits you. There are thousands of techniques - use only the ones that help you to thrive, and use them only in a way that really suits you. Not too much and not too little.

A Vaccination Against Stress

December 18 2002

Day in and day out, why does it seem like half of your meditation time is spent reviewing past, present, and future stressful events?

The short answer is, because you have a life, and meditation is a situation in which your body tunes itself up to perform at its best in that life. The purpose of meditation is that you live a full life, not that you have a groovy experience in meditation. Part of what the nervous system does when you meditate is to vaccinate itself against stress. It calls up a memory particle of stress, a weakened fragment of a stressor, and then allows the psychopsysiological immunne system generate a response, an adaptation to that stress.

Stress is a natural and protective response to situations of danger. It is really an exquisite total - body set of changes that prepare the body to deal with immediate physical emergencies - within the next few seconds. If your body was a car, the stress response would be revving the engine up to redline. Great for fast getaways, but causes unnecessary wear and tear if you do it all day.

Problems arise when we have our threat - detectors set to go AHOOOGA every time a dog barks or we even think of something that scares us. The stress response is not very useful if you are meeting a new person, an important client, asking for a raise, asking someone to marry you, talking to your kids, driving in traffic, or most other situations. The stress energy is only good for a few minutes of high - octane running or fighting, and then you are exhausted. In fact, many challenging and even dangerous situations we encounter can actually be dealt with better when we are relaxed.

The brain is designed to keep track of every possible threat and have a continually updated map of where danger is, where food is, where safe places are. But if you do not let your brain do its necessary maintenance, there will be a lot of random stress - firings during the day and night, which will reduce your quality of life and lead to stupid fights with people you love. Maybe to pointless fights with strangers.

Meditation is a kind of maintenance time for the brain and senses, in which the nervous system reviews everything that is bothersome, every threat signal, and then revises its approach. Nature loves elegance, and the body strives always to have the most elegant, economical approach to any challenge.

What happens is, meditation is a state of rest and relaxation deeper than sleep. An incredible resource for healing and renewal. In that sublime repose, your entire body and mind can review what the challenges are and practice dealing with them. This mental rehearsal is just as important as the inner silence.

This is why teachings developed by and for monks have only limited relevance for people who live in the world. Monks and nuns attempt to not have a personal life. They try to kill off attachments, and not be bonded to anyone on a personal level. They are bonded only to their tradition. They are very attached to their tradition, their robes, and their religious order. And the whole idea is that these do not change very much from century to century.