The Thought Factory

In the last four years my meditation practice has taught me about the extent to which my mind is like a thought factory.  My mind works day and night to churn out as many thoughts as it possibly can in one day.  It works over-time. It works nights and weekends to think, think, think which has shown me the truth of the quotation by the 14^th Century Persian Mystic and Poet Hafiz: “You yourself are your own obstacle, rise above yourself.”

I imagine this thought factory as a Dr. Seuss-like book similar to The Lorax where inside the factory sits a little funny man, I’ll call him Roy, who just cranks out thought after thought after thought from a whole menu of thought possibilities.  These would be a few of his top-selling hits: worry thoughts, bizarre thoughts, concrete thoughts, tangential thoughts, circumstantial thoughts, and linear thoughts.  

Roy would also offer a whole line of other products from the thought factory that help us accessorize and specialize our thoughts like: 

-Worrying 

-Problem solving

-Obsessing

-Fixating

-Ruminating

-Racing

-Contemplating

-Pondering

-Daydreaming

-Remembering

-Scrutinizing

-Analyzing

-Criticizing

-Judging

-Devaluing

-Idealizing

-Over-generalizing

-Debating

-Considering

-Creating

-Comparing

-Witnessing

-Minimizing

-Catastrophizing,

-Viewing, 

and (the two I get duped into buying more frequently than I’d like to admit)

-Wallowing &  Dwelling.

It’s like Roy never got the memo from Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield where it is written in his book The Wise Heart that “thoughts are often one-sided and untrue. Learn to be mindful of thought instead of being lost in it.” 

For Roy, the goal is just more, more, more because he is a total work-a-holic.  He is like the guy who puts in an 80 hour work week and never takes a vacation, and though he’s ancient, he refuses to retire.  Roy won’t even sit down for a 10 minute coffee break at 9 a.m. because all he does, night and day, day and night, is produce thoughts.

Though, I feel a need to say here, despite my trash-talking of Roy, I do abide by these words by Author, Scientist and Mindfulness teach Jon Kabat-Zinn: “There is nothing wrong with thinking. So much that is beautiful comes out of thinking and out of our emotions. But if our thinking is not balanced with awareness, we can end up deluded, perpetually lost in thought, and out of our minds just when we need them the most.”

Like in the children’s book The Lorax, I believe the lesson is not to eliminate thinking all together. The lesson is to use our limited mental resources more wisely; which was my exact intention when I began a meditation practice.

Four years ago this month I started a practice designed in part to help me balance the art and practice of taking a hold of my mind.  And I must tell you, not surprisingly, Roy is completely bewildered and flustered with this wrench thrown into the once well-oiled wheels of his factory which was my habitual and automatic thought process. 

So much so, that he has had to up his game. Once I developed enough skill to be able to stop a thought mid- track, just like an Amtrak train from New Haven to New York stopping suddenly in Greenwich, Roy pulled out his slick, used-car-salesman-techniques to entice me back into thinking.  He would persuasively say: “That problem is just terrible.  I bet if you just keep thinking about it, you will be able to solve it.” “You could be missing something very important...” “ You might forget that thought if you let it go!” Or, if nothing else works, he might even stroke my ego a bit: “That thought is brilliant! Keep thinking about it. No one on earth has ever had a thought like that.” And so on.

This extra challenge in meditation has led me to need to up my game as well; where sometimes, my usual technique, of labeling a thought as just a thought and coming back to the breath, is not enough. Sometimes Roy can catch me with his savvy ways , and I  find myself consumed and preoccupied, particularly with negativity.  Like a fly in a spider web, I can get all caught up in negativity and have trouble finding my way out.

This obstacle in my meditation practice has brought me back to something I heard about a year ago when I was taking the 8-Week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course.

In MBSR, a course originated at the University of Massachusetts Medical School by Jon Kabat-Zinn, I was taught by my teacher Kate that a part of our brain is actually hard wired fixate on the negative.  Because our brain has evolved over millennia we still have what some refer to as “old brain” or, on the more crass side, “reptilian brain.” In its hay day, this critical part of our brain was constantly scanning our environment for danger, and this was fantastic for the goal of not being eaten by saber toothed tigers, but has been less helpful in our current fight against our more modern 21^st century threats to health and well-being like depression, heart disease and cancer.

Remembering this tidbit from MBSR has helped me to get unstuck from that spider web of negativity.  But not by the usual means of judging or criticizing.  We’ve all heard someone say to us or someone else (or maybe we ourselves have said it) that “that person is too negative.” I’ve come to believe that the technique of blaming/shaming someone into changing just does not have much sustainability.  Maybe you get an immediate change, but for most, if the change has not been organic and voluntary, it won’t last. 

But why does any of this matter? So what if our minds produce hundreds of thoughts a day? So what if Roy can sell me a whole shipment of negative thinking that I binge on for an entire weekend?

To this I would respond, for some, maybe it does not matter at all. Maybe some folks are just not hard-wired to have thoughts precede emotions and actions.  Maybe some folks don’t have trouble turning off their minds to go to sleep.  Or don’t struggle to concentrate when they are going through something difficult.  But sometimes I do.  And I think a lot of other people do too, like most…And learning to hand select our thoughts as we would the clothes in our closets each morning andtraining our still restless and unruly puppy minds, can be a game changer that reflects these words of the Buddha fromThe Dhammapada:

                The thought manifests as the word;

                The words manifests as the deed;

                The deed develops into habit;

                And habit hardens into character;

                So watch the thought and its way with care,

                And let it spring from love

                Born out of concern for all beings…

                As the shadow follows the body,

                As we think, so we become.

So I will continue to encourage the foreman of my thought factory Roy to: take breaks, not come in  to work on the weekends, and take long extended vacations to Bermuda.  And there will be times that he continues to refuse, but because of the miracle of neuroplasticity, I know he can change. We all can.