The Busy Problem-Solving Mind
Settling into meditation can be interesting when my mind is still trying to solve a problem first.
Image: Robert Pental
I settle into my meditation chair, take deep breaths, sit up straight but relaxing the muscles, start the meditation timer, and…
The mind begins crunching on a problem from yesterday. trying to find a solution.
Yikes!
The ‘monkey mind’, according to this article in Psychology Today, ‘is a term that refers to being unsettled, restless, or confused. Writer and Buddhist Natalie Goldberg, who teaches many writing workshops, suggests that the monkey mind is the inner critic.’
I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve thought about monkey mind being the inner critic. It would certainly explain a lot, though, like why almost every time I begin to settle into meditation, my mind loudly is trying to do some kind of problem-solving exercise rather than serenely meditate.
Have you had this kind of experience as well?
According to the PT article referenced above, the inner critic is ‘the part of your brain most connected to the ego, which contends that you can’t do anything right. It’s also the part of you that stifles creativity and prevents you from moving forward with your passions. The monkey mind insists on being heard, and sometimes it takes a lot of self-control to shut it down. It is also the part of your brain that becomes easily distracted, so if you want to get anything done in life, your challenge will be to shut down the monkey mind.’
‘The ego has the ability to create false thoughts, which is the inner chatter we hear most often. In fact, it is the voice in our heads that we sometimes tell to “shut up.” Otherwise, we can become overwhelmed by these thoughts or even lose touch with reality. This is one reason why during meditation it’s a good idea to let thoughts come and go, rather than becoming obsessed with them or focusing on anyone in particular. If we focus too intensely on our thoughts, there’s a greater chance that we’ll lose touch with the here and now.’
Meditation instructors like Fr Thomas Keating would say let the thoughts go like clouds passing over in the sky.
Or like boats passing by on the water. They come and go, but actually have little or nothing to do with the focus of the moment, which is the silent meditation.
The monkey mind can be extremely loud and insistent, though. It wants to control the agenda, be the chairman of the board, as it were. “I have the floor!” it insists, and helplessly, in spite of continuing to follow the breath, which is what I do when grounding during meditation, I feel in its steely grip.
Initially anyway. After a few moments, the roar usually subsides to a quieter mumble in the background. Time passes, sometimes surprisingly quickly.
Where did those 20 minutes disappear so fast?
Another article from PT suggests ‘meditation can change the way that we perceive the passing of time. Researchers published new findings in the journal PLoS One. The studies found that mindfulness meditation increased happiness, decreased anxiety, and also changed people’s perception of time… Researchers found that people who meditated underestimated short periods of time (i.e., they thought less time had passed than actually did) and overestimated long periods of time (i.e., they thought more time had passed than actually did). Regardless of short or long time periods, people reported that they felt like time passed quickly during meditation compared to people who were not meditating.’
This makes sense, though funnily enough when not meditating I generally have a pretty accurate sense of time.
Back to the article: ‘How our mind perceives time depends on a variety of factors, including … 1) how we are feeling (emotion), 2) how complex and how many events have happened 3) how demanding or how much attention the activity requires. The more a task requires of our attention, the more we tend to judge time to be longer and overestimate the passing of time.’
I don’t know about you, but feeling is huge for me in terms of how I experience the passage of time. And in combination with attention, it can have the opposite effect, in that when I’m deeply involved emotionally in an interaction with someone, extremely focused on them, I almost stop experiencing time passing at all, so that an hour can go by and it felt like a few minutes.
Interesting! Feels like there should be a lot more to explore here. But it’s time to do something else.