They say mindfulness meditation helps you increase your awareness of your own mind. I have absolutely found this to be true. It is certainly not the only way. Any good Cognitive Therapist worth her money should be able to do the same thing. But I have found the length of time it takes to identify, notice and untangle my thought patterns goes far beyond 6-12 sessions, and is more like 6-12 years. Therefore, a mindfulness meditation practice makes far more sense from a practical sense. For me, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
One particular thought pattern I have become more conscious of over the years is comparisons. On a regular basis my mind is calculating, as if in a GPS, where I stand in relation to something else. The comparison thought pattern is certainly not uniquely my own. In fact, I would argue it is dreadfully human. As common place as brown hair, which I also have.
Yet despite its epidemic nature, comparisons has continued to slink around into the confines of our minds without the CDC coming up with a new vaccine for this thought pattern that I believe causes a good part of the suffering in our lives.
Now, the suffering does not come with the comparison itself, the stating of facts. The suffering comes with how we interpretthose facts. I’ll give you some examples:
1.) I used to meditate every day, now I do it once a week. Translation: My practice is not good enough!
2.) At least I have a job, my friend just lost hers. Translation: What am I complaining about?
3.) My neighbor always takes her son on and off the bus, and I do not. Translation: I’m not a good mom.
4.) She has lost all the baby weight, I haven’t. Translation: I failed at that.
You don’t have to be Judith Beck, the famous Cognitive therapist, or Jack Kornfield, the famous Western Buddhist teacher, to see a pattern here. Not good enough. Insufficient. Not worthy or deserving. Unquestionably, this is notrocket science. It is hard though, and moving beyond our automatic thoughts and core beliefs about ourselves takes time. But the pay-off is huge for practicing, as is the cost of remaining stuck believing our limited thoughts are actually who we are as whole people.
In past posts I have written about author, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach who wrote Radical Acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha, and in it she talks about this very subject. She says:
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns. Entangled in the trance of unworthiness, we grow accustomed to caging ourselves in with self-judgment and anxiety, with restlessness and dissatisfaction.”
For me, it is enormously validating to hear that others, who I would argue are further along this path of waking up than I am (oh, there goes another comparison… It’s insidious!), have battled their own way through the same labyrinths with the same one-eyed monsters looking them down. If you do as well, I think this is important because validation can lead to a feeling of connection, rather than separateness.
Tara Brach says in particular reference to the thought pattern I myself struggle with, though I think it is true for most others too, “feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life. If we are defective, how can we possibly belong?” Which is why for me, historically, comparisons have been not at all benign, they were malignant. Analogous to a diseased tree that not only needed to be cut down to its stump, but also removed all the way to the root source.
The thing is, comparisons don’t have to go down this way. Noticing the space between myself and something else is not inherently harmful, it’s what I do with that space in my own head that’s the problem. In fact, comparisons, if navigated skillfully, do not have to prompt feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy at all, but could instead yield inspiration, compassion or gratitude, and every so often, joy or love.
In The Art of Happiness the Dalai Lama talks about this very practice. He says if we think of comparisons as “an ability to look at events from different perspectives,” then it can be a strategy that can be very helpful. He writes:
“If you can make comparisons, view your situation from a different perspective, somehow something happens. If you only look at one event, then it appears bigger and bigger. If you focus too closely, too intensely, on a problem when it occurs, it appears uncontrollable. But if you compare that event with some other greater event, look at the same problem from a distance, then it appears smaller and less overwhelming.”
Author Anne Lamott says basically the same thing, in her much more humorous and irreverent way, at the beginning ofSmall Victories when she says: “The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you.”
Of course she is being funny here, super funny I think!, but making the same point as the Dalai Lama all the same. Comparison, if used for good instead of evil (toward ourselves that is) can bring us to authentic gratitude, inspiration, compassion, joy and/or love.
I’ve experienced this myself a few times. Once, was similar to Anne Lamott’s observation, in the context of my auntie’s 5 year battle with colon cancer with all the fun stuff like a colostomy bag and a tumor (this is going to be gross, but it’s still true) on her behind. Sometimes, when I am going through something difficult or painful, I imagine my auntie’s experience and the integrity and honor she brought to it, and I have to say it helps. It truly does. More recently, I had a patient tell me about her struggles that are both very much based in poverty, one being bed bugs and a negligent landlord, and I couldn’t help but gain some perspective on my own current stressors.
What’s more, if Tara Brach’s observation is correct, that comparison has the potential to breed a sense of separateness, I have to say in both examples I described above I felt the opposite. I felt drawn to these individuals and my own life as a whole. Not a shame-on me-for-not-being-stronger kind of way, but more like, “okay, I havesome resources. I can get through this. I can do it.” Reminders of my own abundance versus scarcity. Reminders of my own strengths versus limitations. Reminders of our common human emotional experience versus our life differences.
So I ask you, what thought patterns has your meditation practice revealed to you? How have you been able to transcend these patterns?
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