The Archetypal Distraction
La Distracción Arquetípica
A student reports feeling lost and scattered during meditation. The teacher explores how the mind's restless problem-solving often serves as a distraction from deeper pain we are unwilling to face, and shares a personal example of how childhood coping mechanisms collapse when we finally allow ourselves to feel what was too overwhelming to feel as children.
The Archetypal Distraction
A student reports feeling lost and scattered during meditation. The teacher explores how the mind's restless problem-solving often serves as a distraction from deeper pain we are unwilling to face, and shares a personal example of how childhood coping mechanisms collapse when we finally allow ourselves to feel what was too overwhelming to feel as children.
I see my brain trying to acknowledge the problem and trying to fix the problem. It's this recurring theme that comes up over and over again in every discussion: trying to fix something, trying to fix the fact that we're not okay.
And the mind is good at that. It is good at looking at a situation, creating a pattern, examining the pattern, finding a problem, and working on a solution. It's great. That's what it does.
But the problem I'm pointing to is that we use it for problems that aren't actually that helpful to try to solve. This is why I'm calling it a distraction. We project the problem onto something or somewhere, and it's actually a distraction, because the mind could look at anything as a problem.
I felt really lost during the meditation. My mind was just going all over the place. It didn't know where to settle.
The mind as servant, not master
The mind can't settle. All the mind does is, as our teacher would say: the heart pumps blood, the mind pumps thought. By that, I believe he was pointing to its nature, its healthy nature. Normal, healthy functioning is thought, thinking, thinking, thinking. The heart pumps blood, the mind thinks. What is it doing? Problem, problem, problem, problem. Or imagining. But I would suggest that a lot of the wakeful dreaming, the imagining, is a kind of problem-solving.
For example, right now I could imagine: if I were back in Mexico, I would feel warmer. If I felt warmer, I would feel better, and I would be okay, because right now I'm not okay since I'm a bit cold. And then I could find myself distracted: "Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, it was so nice." I start having fantasies and memories and "what ifs" about the future. "Maybe I could go to Mexico next month." It could feel like I'm just daydreaming. But actually it started from "I feel a little chill and I remember how nice it felt in Mexico. If only I were there, then I would be okay."
So I'm trying to reframe this for you: when the mind is daydreaming, it's actually problem-solving.
It's like this little experience, and our brain blows it up into this huge problem.
Mind versus brain
I would suggest you say "mind" instead of "brain," because you have a direct relationship with your mind but not with your brain. You don't know what your brain is doing. You know directly the experience of your mind. When you're describing what you see happening in your thinking, you're describing mind, not brain. Do you understand the difference? The brain is the biological, physical organ, and you may have an understanding of its mechanisms, but you really only have a direct relationship with your mind.
Right, the result.
What you're calling "the result" still starts from a theory of how the brain produces thought. But it's just a theory. I could suggest, for example, that the brain doesn't produce thought. Maybe it's a receptor.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I wanted to suggest that when you describe your experience with thinking, you refer to it as mind rather than brain, because that's what you're actually in direct relationship with. This matters because it's about coming more and more into direct relationship with your experience, rather than with beliefs. We can discuss theories of brain-mind interface; this is actually one of the biggest unsolved problems in science today, and it was the biggest problem in the past as well. No scientist in the world today knows how the brain and the mind interface. So when you describe the function as if it were the brain, it's detached from your current reality. We simply don't know how matter and mind interface.
From there, look at how the experience of your mind isn't simply something being done to you. I would suggest you see it more as being in a relationship with mind, with thinking. In a sense, mind is a servant. I could say, "I want to imagine being in Mexico. I want to imagine the sensation of warmth on the beach," and it's all happening as I say it.
The mind is a servant.
It's completely in my service. I could say, "I want to remember painful experiences of my childhood," close my eyes, and go there.
The breath and the mind
There is a relationship with the mind that is similar to the breath. The breath can function completely autonomously, or we can direct it. That's incredible. It's actually why so many meditation practices involve the breath. The mind works the same way. We could completely let it be, and it's going to think, think, think. Or we can direct it.
I'm spending time on these two points because I think they are very important. One: when you're describing your thinking, you're describing mind, not brain. Two: in your relationship with the mind, it's not always completely autonomous and outside of your control. You are responsible in that relationship. The mind is often called a tool for this reason.
Suffering as hidden strategy
When we feel like victims of our inner state and the processes of our mind, we are often actually engaging with our mind, asking it for a certain kind of experience, for a reason. And we often don't want to see that reason. I would say we never want to see it.
When we're going through an inner experience that is a form of suffering, we often don't truly want it to stop. On the surface, in our conscious experience, we don't want it: "I don't like this. This is unpleasant. I'm suffering." But on a deeper level, we are choosing it. I've seen this in myself, and I've seen it in others. It's pretty much always this way. What happens is we engage in a habitual process where we experience suffering as a consequence, but actually, that suffering is helping us deal with something we don't want to face.
You can go to the metaphor of a child who doesn't want to take a bath. We learn from childhood these ways of distracting from reality, distracting from our freedom and our responsibility. And when we grow up with those habits, they reinforce a kind of suffering.
How childhood coping becomes adult suffering
When we are children, we experience things that are too much, too overwhelming. So we develop internal habits of thinking in order to cope. In order to make it okay. One such process is repression. We stop feeling what we really feel, and we experience an inner mental state when that feeling is present but repressed. Over time, we grow up, and what we learned to do in order to not feel what was overwhelming, we later experience as suffering.
For example, my father was very demanding of me. There was pain in the relationship. I felt unloved, unseen. He was very harsh. There was a lot of fear and pain, because I felt intimidated by how he related to me. So I learned to create a certain kind of fantasy world where I did the right thing, where I was a good boy. I pushed myself to be how he wanted me to be. This identity of "I'm a good boy and I'm going to do what I have to do" took many forms over the years.
By my late teens, I was very contracted in this whole mechanism of doing the right thing while pushing myself relentlessly. I was very stressed. But this was my reality. I didn't think it was something I was doing. This was my identity.
At one point, it cracked open because it became unbearable. I was in so much distress and self-hatred, though I didn't know it was self-hatred at first. It started to crumble when I began to feel so upset with myself. I was blaming myself for not being able to make it work, because I was trying so hard, doing the right thing, trying so hard.
I'm summarizing something far more complex, because it also took many years and many twists and turns. But I was in immense suffering. And then I noticed the self-hatred. I was just angry with myself, angry with myself. And then I thought, "What is this?" I started to feel what this story was creating. It was the foundation of that identity, and all of it began to collapse.
Feeling what was too painful to feel
One way it collapsed was that I felt anger toward my father, which I hadn't felt before. Not like this. This was rage. I had never had the courage to feel rage at him, because if I got angry with him, even if I was just frustrated at the dinner table, he would bring his energy and intimidate me and ridicule me. It was not okay to express anger with him. So I learned to suppress it, and it turned toward myself.
But when this structure started to fall apart, I felt the rage toward my father. I was very surprised, but it felt very real, very releasing. Something about it felt good. I wasn't expressing it to him, but it was coming out. Now that whole strategy started to collapse, and the suffering started to fall away: the suffering of that contraction and self-hatred. I was finally feeling what was more real, which was that I was angry with him.
But then, even further, that anger burnt away, and I felt pain. Immense pain. This unfolded over many years, and after all of this deep, immense pain in many shapes and forms, that whole paradigm of the thinking and the identity, all of that world I had created, the stressing and the trying to be a certain person, all of it stopped.
This is just one example, but it matters because this is psychological work, and it is truly important. The pain I had as a child with my father, I couldn't feel. It was too painful, too scary. Once I grew up, I was able to feel it. But what I'm trying to point back to from the beginning of our conversation is this: what I experienced as being crazy, my mind going nonstop, contracted, suffering, "it's happening to me, I can't do anything about it, I'm a complete victim of this state," all of that was in service to me not feeling rage, pain, and fear. Once I was able to feel those things, the mental suffering was no longer needed.
That gives me more contact with those kinds of feelings in myself. It's a beautiful way to explain it. Thank you. I know it's hard, because you are expressing yourself so openly. It makes me be in contact with different stories about anguish and rage. Thank you. I feel that you touched my own history. A different experience, but the resonance is deep.
It's my pleasure. It's everybody's experience.
Seeing the other clearly
What also happened is that I stopped seeing my father as entirely bad. I was able to see the goodness in him, a different side. And then our relationship healed and changed.
I think this is one example of what Jesus referred to when he said, "First take the plank out of your own eye before you try to remove the speck from someone else's." Instead of focusing on what's wrong with the other person, what they should be doing, the problem with them: when one is caught up in that, it's because one is not seeing something in oneself.
It's so common for us to project the problem outward.
Yes. And that is what I was pointing to in the meditation as the archetypal distraction: "I will be okay when, if only..." and then fill in the blank. That blank contains all kinds of stories. It doesn't mean I don't have to work, take care of family, fulfill responsibilities. But "I will be okay when" is the archetypal distraction.