Yeah yeah, next

A new friend recently told us how hard being at a retreat had been for her. Her mind had just gone on and on. She then told us about a mutual friend who had told her that when she complained to her Tibetan teacher about her own struggles with her mind he had simply turned to her and said one single word - “Nyam”. Translated: no more than an experience of her meditation practice.

This reminded me of an experience I had had during a short personal retreat while in my late twenties. The retreat was tough and demanding and each day my mind was continuously all over the place. Wall to wall thoughts and emotions. Several days in I fell into bed exhausted and then had a dream. The door to my bedroom opened and my own teacher, Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, walked in and, looking down at me in the bed, said, “Not nyam, bak chak”. Translated: not an experience of the practice just my ordinary habitual thoughts. So that told me.

And this got me thinking about … well, thinking. A member of our sangha reminded me how Tsoknye Rinpoche talks about four ways we experience ourselves. He calls these the ‘four ‘I’s’: the social I, the reified I, the needy I, and the mere I. (Spoiler alert, the last one is the good one.) So social I is our persona, the face we generally show to the world. The reified I is the feeling of being a seperate and solid person. The needy I is what Buddhism usually calls the ‘self-cherishing’ I, which means the almost continuous need to protect ourselves from threats to our illusionary reification. And finally, the mere I that really, deeply knows not to take itself too seriously. After all, every single part of this lightly held sense of self is forever in a river of change.

So I wondered how do we actually evolve from our reified and frankly slightly paranoid sense of self to something more open, more relaxed, less defended. Something where we don’t take what goes on in our minds as actually that important?  Now here I just want to pause and put in a caveat. What I am about to say does not include a quality of self-reflection or communication that is tender, vulnerable, real, something that has an emotional authenticity to it. Something that is not about defending our reified - concrete - sense of who we are. That said, the answer to my question - what brings an end to our fascination with our own thought processes, our habitual self-absorption - is perhaps boredom.

This insight comes from another experience, this time one that came after probably far too many years in psychotherapy. One day I just heard myself going on and on about something and then I just stopped. It was that moment that Philippa describes as having read Gone With the Wind fifty times and its just no longer gripping. We’ve heard it all before. Or as Sophie says in Why Can’t I Meditate?, “My mind goes, blah blah blah”.  It’s not interesting to ourselves or anyone else. In that moment I no longer found myself fascinating. It was just the same old me with all my well worn justifications, opinions and excuses. I’d suddenly heard it. It was not a moment of shame or self-criticism. It was actually funny. But it has left me sometimes able to hear myself and mentally say, “Yeah, yeah, next”.

NW. 23 August 2024 With thanks to JL for planting the seed for this piece.