Treating the mind with kindness
Out of an article from Tricycle Ajahn Brahm says we should treat our mind with kindness. By doing so we are more likely to stay in the moment and not try to run away from my thoughts or feelings. Definitely sounds like a good idea to me. This reminds me of all sorts of mental exercises. We can do to calm our mind and also to tame it to wear. We don’t become scared of our minds. Becoming scared of our minds means that we separate voices and those voices become darker and darker and sometimes they separate fully if you’re psychotic.
Any voice in our heads that we have anything that we are scared of terrified of hate, can’t stand we can hold and treat with kindness. Love the hell out of it if you will. So much of the things that we need to do for ourselves sound almost flipping if not corny. I think some of that comes from our vulnerability and doing everything we can to also escape from it. The mind is incredibly complex and we do everything we can to trick ourselves. I’ll have to look this up, but it’s either auto rank or who thought about character armor and how we do everything to protect ourselves and the ways that we protect ourselves actually cause the darker voices or things we can’t stand about ourselves to be heightened.
Allan Watts wrote a book called Art of Zen. In that book, I recall him saying and completely bastardized in my paraphrasing that Being OK with whatever state we’re in eases the mind as well. So for instance, if you are in a very horrible state and you come OK that you’re in that horrible state the state eases. It is only when you try to run away from it that the monkey on your back gets larger and larger. Our minds do not tame it easily when we try to force things. Think about trying to not eat ice cream if you really love ice cream. You might be able to force yourself a naughty ice cream for some time, but then it all comes back full force, and you eat the whole tub of ice cream. I suppose a better approach is to take that metaphorical ice cream and eat a little of it but take that voice that tells you to eat the whole tub of it and also take the other voices in your head that are selling. You need to be healthy, you need to watch what you put into your body, you need to get on your exercise machine and be kind to all the voices. Have them work together and harmonize. Have them be kind to one another. Have them love one another.
