Tinnitus And The Heat

In this talk I use the heat wave where I live to make a point about how we relate to any unpleasant experience, tinnitus included. I explain the difference between an unpleasant experience and the extra layer of suffering we add through the stories we tell about it, and why simply telling yourself a different story is not the same as training your attention. I describe practicing noticing a thought, letting it go and coming back to the experience, and share a short story about how our troubling thoughts may not be true. This content is educational and is not a substitute for one to one professional care.

Transcript

It's about day 212 of the heat wave here in Tucson, The desert southwest. And although I'm no fan of the heatwave I wanted to make a video outside to make a point about tinnitus. It's a point I think the weather that we're experiencing helps to make about the relationship between any experience and how we relate to it, Whether it's the heat or our tinnitus or really anything. So, Essentially the idea is that The heat's not pleasant. I'm outside to really get a sense of what it's like to be 111 degrees when I say it's not pleasant. This is not. . . Pleasant. But there are two different ways of relating to it. And relating to any unpleasant experience. You can experience it as unpleasant. And that's the end of it right or you can have all these thoughts, How terrible this is, How awful, I hate this. Brutal! You know, What about all those people in the Northwest with 70 degrees? I hate them, And I hate my life. God, I'm stuck in this heat, And I can't go anywhere without them. You know baking and this is just brutal and I hate it and you can add all this baggage to the basic experience. Or you can just experience it. And the thing is, It doesn't make it any less unpleasant. But it does reduce the suffering. And this is the point which I've made before about the two arrows. Very famous. Story is someone gets shot with an arrow a soldier shot with an arrow and yeah it's painful. But then that same soldier starts thinking how awful this is, And how the infection might lead to something else, And how is he going to continue his career if he has this wound and he might be out on the street without and what's his family going to do and all these thoughts. We call these the second arrow. Of suffering. And the point is, That's voluntary. We do that to ourselves. And the catchphrase here is, Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. So. With any experience, This is going to be something to work with. And have the experience, Be with it. And not tell the story about it. Not let thoughts run rampant and make things catastrophic. It changes the way we relate to whatever is going on, Including our tinnitus. Now, I'm not saying that you just tell yourself the heat's not that bad and that's the end of it. That's the fallacy of second wave CBT. That you can just tell yourself things and tell yourself another story, And you can believe that story. That's not how mindfulness works. You're not telling yourself anything. You're just being in the experience now This is a training. This isn't something you just turn on like a light switch. This is why we meditate when we sit. In practice, A thought arises, We notice it, And we come back to the thought. We don't come back to the experience, Come back to the breath. We don't get caught in the thought. And we practice this every time we sit down, 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes a day. And then we do the same thing in what's called informal practice. We're taking a shower. The thought arises, Oh, I have X to do. I notice the thought. And I let it go and I come back to the experience. I brush my teeth, Thought comes up, I come back to the experience. We focus on the experience instead of the thought. We can change the situation, As I said, It reduces the suffering in this case. And that's the training, To be in the experience and not in the thought. Now, It doesn't mean thoughts aren't good. We want to think, We want to plan, And there's a time and a place for using our thoughts and focusing on solving a problem. But when we're out in the world, That's a time when this thought just becomes an addition to our suffering. And the practice is that we can let the thought go and come back to the experience. And there's a lot of value. In being able to do that. But again, Not something we tell ourselves to do, It's something we train ourselves to do. There's a little story I want to tell to kind of Serve as a bridge between just focusing on a thought and coming back to the breath and taking a specific a particular Attitude with respect to our thoughts and that is if we can't just let them drop we can at least, We ought at least to be skeptical of them. Just notice that there are not always necessarily true. And that as well can create distance between us and the thought. So the story comes from, I heard it from a Tara Brock podcast. The story goes there was a woman who was coming back from a 10-day silent retreat and she was in the groove, Feeling pretty good. Coming at the airport and I was a little hungry, Went to one of the places to get food. The tables were all crowded, So she got a box of cookies, Sat down at her table with a guy, Just kind of nodded to each other, And she sat down and she started reading her book. She went to grab a cookie and. . . Don't you notice the guy took a cookie? And she started thinking, Hmm, Well. I'm not going to say anything. I just kind of got back from this retreat, Loving kindness, Yada, Yada, Yada. And woman takes a cookie again. A few seconds later, The guy grabs a cookie and she's getting a little irritated, But you know, She's working with it, Feeling what's arising and noticing it and not really a, I'm trying to focus on that edge of things rather than just saying leave my cookies alone. And this goes on for a little while, Finally there's one cookie left and the guy takes it, Breaks it in half and gives it to her. She thinks, Well, That's really rubbing it in my face. And she takes a cookie and smiles, And he leaves. And then she realizes it's time for her to go as well. And she goes to grab her ticket and her purse. And she noticed, Well, There's the box of cookies she bought. Her thought that was generating all this energy was completely mistaken. We never know. And this is another thing we do in mindfulness, Is we want to step back from our thoughts and observe them, That they may not always be true. Even if, You know, Especially if they're troubling. So that's just the. That part has nothing to do with the heat, But the idea is that in the heat, And any experience. We don't want to get caught in the story our thoughts are telling us. And we can let that go. And part of the process of letting go is really developing this skepticism with respect that our thoughts might not be true. This might not be the worst thing in the world. I might not You go crazy. Just holding those thoughts in abatence and just coming back to present moment experience. Not easy to do. Not something we tell ourselves to do, Something we train ourselves to do, But it is something that as you proceed in the training, You do get better at this and it does have consequences. So hopefully this will be something to work on in your own practice and I hope it helps.