Jun 2
Managing thought and feelings
Mindfulness teaches us to live in the moment. We are taught to experience the world as it is occurring and to accept it without judgement as far as we able, to live lightly, not clinging, not resisting, but just accepting. This is of course an aspiration for most people and not a fact. However as with all spiritual teachings we have to understand it is the aspiration that counts, the desire to find something better than the life we have so far led. If this were not the case then why bother? A part of this process is understanding that we must begin to let go of the image of self we have developed over the years, to shed the shackles of memory we have held on to, to feel we are this or that person.
Growing
To become someone new you have to let go of the old you. You cannot be both. It is no use saying ‘I want to be me, but just a better version of me’. Not if you truly understand the meaning of non- self. This is a difficult concept and one some people do not want to, or cannot grasp.
Labels for the self
Why can’t you just be a better version of yourself? Well for a start I would question whether the majority of people know who they are in the first place. They may have an image themselves, for example, teacher, parent, son or daughter, socialist, vegetarian, cyclist, Buddhist, and these are all legitimate labels that serve to describe someone, and they are all verifiable descriptions of external facts about one, but they are only a part of who you are. So yes, no matter what happens you will remain a son or daughter, a vegetarian and a cyclist so do not worry non-self does not mean you cease to exist. What we are really talking about is the internal reference you have to that feeling of self. It is about your memory, it is about your self perception and how you relate to it.
If I can use one of these external descriptives as an example to try and clarify this further. Supposing we look at the term vegetarian. We all know (I hope) that this means the person in question does not eat meat of fish in any form. Now the vegetarian we are looking at may be a vegetarian because they don’t like the taste of meat or fish, or alternatively the may be someone who refuses to eat meat or fish as a matter of principle. The former may feel absolutely no moral self righteousness in remaining vegetarian whereas the latter may do. The second person is going to have a greater sense of self in relation to being a vegetarian than the former. It means more to them, it is a statement, a commitment, it takes effort. Ultimately if they want to let go of the sense of self they are going to have a harder time because they have created a strong attachment to a number of principles they feel they want acknowledged. Both people are vegetarian but their connection to the ‘label’ is completely different. This is true of all of the things previously mentioned. Son or daughter is something you are, but they mean vastly different things to different people because of the memories attached to them.
So achieving ‘a better version of me’ is more complicated than it first looks. It actually involves an awful lot of letting go, and in order to let go you have to have a pretty good idea of what you need to let go of in the first place. Are you the vegetarian who doesn’t like the taste of meat or fish or are you the one who has something invested in being vegetarian. Now, before you get the idea I have something against all vegetarians I need to own up I am one who doesn’t like the taste and I don’t have any issues with the principled vegetarian, my wife!
Internal self
Let’s move on from the external and take a look at that internal self for a moment. Here’s a thing you might be interested in. For a long while I looked back at my past and had a shudder or two at the way I had behaved. There were certain memories where there was a dull sense of regret / guilt that came across me. For a long time I used to think it was me, in the moment, reflecting on the past and as a result feeling bad about things. This went on for years and so I didn’t like thinking about the past. Why would you want to if it made you feel bad? Then one day I was meditating on this very subject and suddenly realised that no, I wasn’t making a judgement in the present moment, the truth was that the memories came loaded with the judgement and I inadvertently assumed that was how I felt in the present. I was in effect accepting feelings that I had had years ago, that were attached to the memories whenever I brought them to mind. As soon as I realised this I understood something fundamental about letting go, the reason I couldn’t let go was because my previous self had embedded each memory with emotional feelings i.e regret / guilt and I naively assumed it was how I was actually feeling in the moment. Not so, and once I recognised this and began to question the reality of my feelings I realised it was much easier to let go.
Who is responsible?
Perhaps you will permit me another thought experiment.
Do you think it would be right for you as a seven year old child to take responsibility for an action you as an adult took this morning? How about you as a thirteen year old? Or a twenty year old? No? So why does it work the other way? Why are you responsible for their actions? Clearly you are not because they were who there were at any given time and you are just the repository of memories relating to them. You are not them. This goes against a great deal of accepted thought and seems to imply I might be denying the principle of personal responsibility but here I am going to suggest you can only be responsible for your actions if you maintain they are still appropriate. As soon as you recognise and accept they were inappropriate, or in Buddhist terminology were unskillful and are prepared to take on board any reparation that might be due, then the arguments about personal responsibility fall away. It may be for example that you have long since lost the ability to say sorry to someone you have hurt because they are no longer in your life and that is regrettable but the fact you have recognised and acknowledged your unskillful behaviour is enough to release you. I should clarify that by saying you may still struggle to find release but I strongly believe that being humble enough to recognise ones unskilful behaviour is a great beginning.
What about things that have been done to us? These are often the foundation of much of our sense of self. Assuming you have accepted my assertion that memories are often if not always tagged with a basic emotional flags i.e. joy, guilt, pain, sorrow etc., then when you look back at your past are you doing so in the moment or are your feelings due to one of these emotional flags that arise with the memory? Do these flags actually make you feel the way you do without you knowing they are there? Take a moment to think about this. Ask yourself this question, when I look back and recall things that have caused me distress am I doing so as who I am today or am I actually dealing with the emotions attached to the memory that come from a hurt person in the past? Am I dealing with someone else’s emotions and hoping to get over their emotions? Maybe even the emotions of a child, or a teenager? In order to do anything about this we have to recognise this is what is happening. We have to accept that we are reacting to someone else’s trauma, someone else’s emotions. No wonder it seems impossible, because we are not in control of these emotions and we have no way of adjusting them because they are effectively hard wired into the memory. Every time we look back, there they are. This is how we feel!
In this case, what can be done? To begin with we need to continually tell ourselves if I am going to deliberately think about this or that memory or allow it to arise then I know for sure I will have this or that emotional feeling. The feeling is not mine, it is one I have always thought was mine but it belongs to someone who suffered distress long before I existed. I respect that persons feelings, I understand why they had them, but they have served their purpose, they are not protecting me, they will not resolve any outstanding issues, in fact they are causing me distress because I know they are not mine. How often have you thought ‘this is not how I want to feel’? The reason is because they aren’t your feelings. You know they are somehow alien to your current sense of being.
Sometimes the emotions attached to the memories are so strong they take over and we struggle to think beyond them. The body kicks into fight, flight or freeze and it is impossible to control what comes next. This is why meditation and especially insight meditation is important, it allows us that space where we can reflect on such things without being overwhelmed. We can reflect at a distance beyond the control of our emotional self. We begin to see the true nature of self, to understand these things, how we can so easily be fooled into taking on our previous self’s emotions and being a slave to the past.
Final words
Finally it seems to be we tend to dwell on negative memories rather than positive ones. For every negative memory there are probably thousands of positive ones that have been discarded. They do not register because they have not had any strong emotional response attached to them at the time. Think of your bad memories, how many are there? A few, up to hundreds perhaps? And how much time do they represent in relation to your total lifespan? When you really think about it how much of your life has really been that bad? Now consider how much of it has been spent dwelling on these uncomfortable memories making them seem as if they were the whole of your childhood your adolescence or whichever period of your life they relate to. Because we repeatedly think of certain things the mind believes we want to think of them and as a result sends them to us continually. So we need to ask ourselves whether we need to mull over the same old things or whether it is better to live in the moment and let go of the past.
As always I feel I must stress that the comments made in this article relate to those who do not have debilitating medical conditions such as PTSD. Although I would argue that the same premise applies in terms of ownership of past events I am well aware that dealing with trauma is a far more complex issue and would not want anyone to believe I am suggesting it is not.
I would like to thank anyone who has responded to previous articles and apologise if I have not acknowledged their responses. This is entirely due to my not being able to find a way of doing so on my IPad! Nothing more than that, so thank you if you have said anything in the past.