When a Problem is Disturbing You

Another major shift in perception comes when you understand that your mind is an amazing tool for maneuvering through reality. But it is not reality. If we think it is reality, we get caught in a seemingly endless game of struggle.

I invite you to imagine a vast plain with lush vegetation and snowcapped mountains off in the distance. Such a beauty! But even with all this beauty, your mind is drawn to a loud and smoky factory right in the middle of it all. This factory represents our minds, which are little problem factories, constantly judging, fixing, trying, and resisting.

If you watch carefully, there is a conveyor belt coming out of this factory and sometimes the problems are so small they’re hard to see. But sometimes they’re so big that the conveyor belt groans and creeks under their weight.

I’m not asking you to take my word for it. Spend a day committed to noticing what your thoughts are talking about at any given moment. Maybe set a timer on your phone and when it goes off, be curious. Is your mind struggling with something big or small? Is it grateful that a problem is finally solved, and you think it will never come back? Is it playing in the land of regret? Is it trying to make life be what you think it should be, believing you will finally know the peace you long for?

Because we are conditioned to believe that our thoughts are reality and they always speak the truth, we stay caught in a world of struggle, cut off from the expansive beauty and intelligence of life, represented by the plain in our metaphor. I am not saying thought is bad or wrong. It is a wonderful tool for maneuvering through reality, but it is not reality!

How do we unhook from our addiction to struggling with life so we can use our minds rather than being lost in its contents? When a problem is disturbing you, the first step is, bring your attention out of your mind and ground it in something right here like the rising and falling of your breath or the sounds arising and passing away. This will help you to unhook from your mind’s addiction to fixing the problem.

After you ground here, rather than getting seduced into the belief you have to do something about your problem, ask, “What is tightening inside of me?” Your body will tell you the truth more clearly than your mind. Every time you notice how your body tightens, you will be able to see more clearly the voice that is showing up as a contraction. Maybe it’s a lump in your throat and you begin to be able to see the grief you have tried to stuff from the loss of your little dog. If it is a knot in your stomach, you may be able to see how hard your mind is trying to do life right. If it is a crick in your neck, you may be able to see how much you unmercifully judge yourself.

The more you get to know how your mind struggles by noticing the tightening in your body, the more you can unhook from the quicksand that comes from using your mind to solve the challenges in your life. As Mickey Singer once said, “We gave our minds a task they were never meant to do – be in charge of life.”

The more you unhook from your problem-generating and problem-solving mind, the more you recognize a benevolent intelligence that is always with you and that will guide you every step of the way. So rather than going to your mind to fix your problems, ground right here, notice what is struggling and ask an open-ended question of the intelligence at the heart of life. It is always with you even if you have never noticed and it is much, much, much smarter than your mind!