Help! I Can't Stop Thinking: 10 Days To A Quiet Mind

Mark Twain once said, “I’m an old man, I have had many problems, most of them never happened.” Call it what you will - a busy head, a chattering mind - but overthinking is the cause of much suffering and distress in our lives. It creates many problems which don't actually exist, and so often exacerbates problems that do. The mind is a beautiful instrument creating many wonders in life, technology, art, poetry, great literature, cures for diseases. B ut it is out of control and as a consequence, it also creates suffering when not used wisely. During this session and indeed the course I want to lay out a simple and effective remedy for the affliction of overthinking which seems so common in todays' world. The session includes a short talk, a meditation, and tools and techniques for everyday life.

In this session I will show you in no uncertain terms just how you create much of your own suffering, and how to stop this. I will also clarify the difference between suffering and pain with the telling of one of the most simple and profound stories called the parable of the two arrows. If you understand this parable you will understand how you create many problems in your life and how to stop doing it. It is quite well-known now the difference between pain and suffering and that suffering is optional. However, what is less well-known is how to see this for yourself, and to drop all the unnecessary mental and emotional suffering. When we learn how to do this we move from a life of dissatisfaction and distress to a life of ease and joy. The session will include a teaching, a meditation, and suggestions for daily life.

How many conversations do you have each and everyday with people who are not actually with you, nor are with you on the phone? When you think about this you will realise you have lots of them. This is how many of us spend our time, thinking, thinking, thinking. We may be in a beautiful park but are lost in our head chattering away to ourselves about life, instead of experiencing it. These conversations may be anything from disagreeing with the boss, chatting to your partner, or planning a dream holiday/ vacation with a good friend. They may be regretting or yearning for the past, or may be fearing the future or hoping for a good one. We can spend our lives fluctuating between hope and fear - not a nice place to be. What many people fail to realise is that you cannot be happy and at ease if you live most of the time in your head chattering away with yourself. This is because your attention gets lost in the content of thought and is not available to be alive in the here and now to your seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. As I mentioned in session 1, the thinking mind is a great tool when used wisely. But, when not used wisely for practical and creative purposes, it can create much distress, restlessness, and often misery. This session looks at this area in a very direct way and explains what can be done about it. Included in the session is a talk and a meditation.

I use this graphic metaphor because you will remember it. Ever been fishing or watched somebody do it? The person fishing puts some bait on the hook and throws it into the water. Unfortunately, a fish swims along and starts eating the bait, then it bites onto the bait attached to the hook. It can’t get free no matter how much it struggles. In fact, the more it struggles, the deeper the hook goes. Then, the fish gets reeled out of the water and can't breathe, so it begins to panic. Get the message? Thoughts are like hooks. They come along and we “hook” onto them, often not knowing how to unhook ourselves and to be at ease. At some point when we are lost in some negative thinking patterns, we can get anxious or, like the fish, even go into panic. Overthinking in this way can affect our own breathing, making it very shallow indeed. It also adversely affects our physical health and mental well-being. During this session we are going to explore more deeply the wonderfully simple art of unhooking from negative thinking. Included in the session is a meditation on unhooking along with a talk.

If we are honest we will admit that we are self-obsessed. This is not a judgement, but a simple statement from years of observation. Most of us spend much of our lives not really living it, but watching a movie about it. I call it the "Me" movie. This “movie” is created by all the thoughts/ images that pass through our mind almost constantly all day long. The movie is often just the same old repeats of regrets or longings about the past, and future hopes and fears. But if we pay closer attention we come to see that the movie about the "me". At some point we realise that we are always somehow at the centre of this movie and that we are watching it too. This is what I mean when I use the term self-obsession. I don't mean we are willingly self-obsessive, but that we so easily get attached to thinking and believing the stories the "Me" movie plays on the screens of our mind. Included in the session is a meditation, an exercise around the “Me” movie, and a talk on how to pay attention, not just to thoughts, but to life itself, right here and now.

Most of us know that heaven (pleasant) and hell (unpleasant) are not real places we go to, but that they are states of mind. However, do we realise just how these states of mind are created? Do we realise that the mind is a storyteller and that heaven and hell depends on the content of that story? But, do we realise that it also depends on and how it is received by the audience - YOU? The problem we have is not thinking in and of itself, it's just that we believe almost everything it says. If the mind criticises us, telling us we are useless, we tend to believe it, because it tells us over and over again. The same goes for all other negative thinking, we tend to believe what it is saying. As it happens if we have a busy mind full of thoughts, they are often negative. We just need to look at our own experience to confirm this and be honest with ourselves. This session explores how to stop believing all that the mind keeps telling you and to free yourself from its tyranny. When this happens you live freely, lightly, and with much more ease and joy. What is also amazing is that the mind is then much more capable of thinking in more creative and purposeful ways.

Much of our overthinking is a way of protecting ourselves from feeling. When we live in our head and overthink in this way, some feelings and emotions which, we may find difficult can become "frozen out" of our experience, and become stuck or locked in the body, depriving us of our vitality and energy. I use the term frozen out because what these feelings need is the warmth of our attention to begin to flow again - just like ice begins to flow when the warmth of the sun shines upon it. Your kindly attention is just like that sun, it begins to melt away the resistance and allows the energy locked in those feelings to release again. This often leaves us feeling more alive and more empathic to others. In this session you will learn that what you feel, you heal. That taking your attention gently and kindly to these feeling/ emotional knots heals these long held feelings gradually and beautifully. There is a teaching on this and a guided meditation on what we feel, we heal.

Each morning we wake up and blow into a balloon. After five minutes, life comes along and bursts it. We reach for another balloon, then life comes along again and bursts that one. We do this all day long each and every day, and it’s exhausting. What do I mean? We all have a picture of life, expectations, and demands for the day ahead. We try really hard to get life to fit that picture. We often cling very hard to it. For example, my picture may be that people should be nice to me, always smiling. My picture may include that people must agree with me or that the day should be as I want it to be. My picture may not include my car breaking down, the train being cancelled, or being criticised by the boss. We all have a picture and cannot really live without one, the problem is how tightly we cling to our picture. When we get upset that is a pointer to us clinging to our picture. Often our clinging is unconscious. When we cling we lose our joy and ease because, we are tense and overfocused on what we believe should be happening. Life will always come along and burst your ballooon or contradict your picture. That is not wrong but it is a sign for us to let go. A talk and a meditation is included here.

What we all want is to live in the present moment. We intuitively know that this is where peacefulness, fulfilment, and happiness are. However, many of us are not sure how to be in the present moment, but yearn deeply for it and we instinctively know that this is what we want. Through a tantalisingly simple and everyday metaphor I want to show you how and why we rarely live in the present moment, as well as what we can do to reverse this habit, to live in the here and now. In the here and now we can taste life and experience the wonder of it. There will be a short talk and a “getting off the thought bus” meditation.

We only have this one life, as far as we know. However, we are rarely here to savour it. Instead of experiencing real life in the here and now, which is full of wonder and joy, we miss it because we are fixated on our mental world. When we wake up in the morning we often wake from a sleeping dream and slowly begin to experience being awake -the feel of the bedsheets, the room, and the sounds around us. We believe we have woken up and, in one sense, of course we have. But many teachers and traditions point out we only half-awaken because we tend then to fall into what can be called the "waking dream". The waking dream is the world of unconscious thoughts, images, and the stories which the mind hijacks our attention with. When this happens we are not fully awake to real life because our attention is divided. In this session I want to explore what it means to wake up to the wonder of each moment of your life, and waking up to who you are and to life itself is a place of wonder! There will be a short talk and meditation.