3 Ways Your Mind Messes with You (And What You Can Do About It)
As worldlings, our minds can run wild. The riot of mayhem and madness in there includes listicles and insecurities, uncertainties and grudges, memories and regrets.
And so it is that these minds of ours become Godzilla, wreaking havoc, when all we really want to do is go about our daily lives and not be crushed by expectations; not skulk amidst the ruins of our coulda, woulda, shouldas; not live in terror about what might happen next (but in truth, rarely ever does).
In Buddhism, this tendency of our mind—to let our thoughts snowball and crush us with their sheer velocity and mass—is called papancha.
Papancha messes with our minds in three ways. The first is that our thoughts have the tendency to spread out, to proliferate. We’ve all probably experienced this—how, no matter how hard we try, our thoughts grow out of control. And just like the nuclear arms race, our thoughts can become weaponized, ready and aimed at ourselves or others.
The second thing papancha does is to turn our thoughts into obsessive illusions. In other words, we become addicted to ghosts—things that aren’t really there, but that still have a terrifying hold over us. This is when we get “wrapped around the axle” of what has been or what might be, of what we are sure will bring us happiness, of what we are sure everyone else is doing and we aren’t.
Lastly, papancha morphs these thoughts of ours into obstacles. So while they are illusions, they can, in fact, block us as surely as a brick wall.
Papancha is what the mind does. It’s how the mind, unchecked, functions. It proliferates our thoughts like gremlins in water, and those thoughts play endlessly like ear worms and prevent us from moving forward and living this life right here, right now.
Unless.
Unless we stop.
And center.
And become curious.
When we do that, we can realize our minds love drama, playing the juiciest tidbits over and over. Our minds continually make shit up just to keep things interesting.
And, just like Alfred here, they blow everything out of proportion. Our thoughts can feel huge . . . and like there’s always something with claws lurking in the background ready to shred us into pieces.
When we stop and center, we can realize we do not have to get hooked by the tempting, wriggling bait. We have the power to choose. We do not have to pick up that thought or feed the fear or live out worst-case scenarios all the time.
When our thoughts threaten to take over our world, we can right-size them. See them for what they are—often empty threats that disappear in the light of day.
To do this takes intention and practice, courage and kindness.
More than that, it takes persistence. In many cases, these thoughts have run amok for years, decades even. They will “not go softly into that good night.” They will fight to stick and stay.
So, we choose again and again.
We practice again and again—doing our best to name what’s going on, to see these thoughts for what they are—hungry ghosts that are never satisfied and that block us from living how we want to be living.
We change our perspective. We become the fierce Chiweenie, ready to take on whatever’s next, and we have this strong and roaring energy that’s got our back.
The more we can do that, the more we can quiet the riot and trust our selves and center, the easiest will be to live light and shine.
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