I’ve not gotten to writing up Part II of my transcript (see Part I) but I don’t seem to be making much headway in the past week. My busy, noisy mind just keeps working overtime. And while I thought I was on top of the negative noise, I was surprised to find myself in a bit of a funk yesterday, triggered by my struggles with my new laptop and switching all the apps and files. I eventually caught myself and spent 20 minutes getting my head resituated. And it may have served a purpose to not get so cocky about how easy this shit is.
I heard from CJ: “In a curious coincidence, at the urging of another friend, I bought the CDs of Tolle’s Practice of the Power of Now and listened to them while driving from airports to gigs in California and Texas over the last month. I do find myself intrigued. He captures, even through his obtuse rhetoric, my situation. The minds works all the time, overtime, overtaking and overruling other sources of direction and energy. So, it is fascinating to think of getting outside the mind and thinking of it as something that might be observed, rather than consistently serve. You can characterize me as your workaholic, Type A, ENTJ (Myers Briggs) colleague who thinks entirely too much, and sometimes not too well. The trick for me is to get that non-thinking second to expand into a minute or so. That’ll be big.”
This week I’m going to redeploy the 555 technique as a way to reign in the noisy head, while continuing to WWMNTIGTB – wonder what my next thought is going to be. And I’m going to explore “echoing” described in this article How to Echo Talk by Shinzen Young. “Without a doubt the biggest challenge facing most people in the early years of their practice is dealing with obsessive internal chatter, also known as monkey mind. Among the coping strategies commonly adopted are attempting to sooth the chatter through a mantra (as in T.M.) or carefully observing it (as in standard Vipassana). The echoing process combines the strengths of both these methods in a clever way. (My motto is, “If you can’t be disciplined, be clever!”)
And a tip of the Real Joe hat to Norm who corrected me on two items: one fills a humidifier, not a dehumidifier; and the actor in The Last Samurai was Tom Cruise, not Brad Pitt. I told my wife that I probably wouldn’t make a similar mistake with, say, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts.