Here’s the biggest reason why you feel seduced to silence your mind.
Because you fear your emotions.
Because you don’t know what the hell emotions are.
Or from whence they came.
And why aren’t there scientific papers on emotions explaining what they are and how not to be so petrified by these forces?
“What is this bullshit named emotion and how can I stamp that shit down into a hole?!”
When you walk with Jesus,
He’s gonna save your soul.
You’ve got to keep the Devil
Way down in the hole.– Tom Waits
Well, you can’t. You’re not a self-castrating Catholic priest — you’re a person who is tormented by emotions because you don’t understand that your emotions come from your mind.
The super awesome blog, Mindfulconstruct.com, has a great formula for emotion that you should check out now. Here’s my slightly tweaked version of the same idea:
Sensation + Mind-Narrative = Emotion
Mind-Narrative is key to understanding what’s going on.
The mind is married to storytelling. It is committed to manufacturing narratives, mythologies, legends, campfire stories, lies, and on and on, and it’s been going on since the first guy “got up” on the wall of that cave with the doodle of that little guy hunting the bull.
Telling stories to yourself is what you end up doing all day long, everyday, since you were born, til the day you die — you will always do this — made possible only by your mind.
When you hear something, or feel it with your skin, or see something, or smell it or taste it, these sensations are sent to the story factory where the narrative is crafted. This narrative is consumed and attributed meaning — just like how you attribute meaning to a movie after you’ve watched it.
Sensation + Mind-Narrative = Emotion
The meaning is what gives birth to emotions. Sad stories produce tears. Funny stories produce laughter. Embarrassing stories produce flushed cheeks. Unacceptable and just-plain-wrong stories produce anger and rage. And on and on.
All of this happens at the speed of fucking light.
So fast that you feel like you’ve just been shot from a sniper two towns over. But even though emotions feel like they were caused by an external process, they weren’t.
No one made you feel your emotions. You made you feel your own emotions through the narrative you told yourself.
HOW TO CONTROL YOUR MIND-NARRATIVES
You can’t!!!
Your mind-narratives cannot be controlled. They’re automatic. Your mind tells you stories the way your eyes see stuff. The only thing you can do is change your beliefs about the reality of your stories.
Beliefs act as filters that allow you to think critically about the stories you tell yourself — to decide whether or not to take a story seriously or not.
I have a 15 month-old baby boy and every time I go out the front door of my apartment to take out the trash, he cries his eyes out and acts like the world just ended.
Somewhere in his mind the act of me exiting and shutting the front door is telling him a story. This story is obviously very tragic. Therefore, the corresponding emotions are felt and expressed.
As my son gets older, his belief in the tragic story will become less and less. The story may never go away, but at least his belief in its truth will.
And that’s how we gain some sort of power over the stories our minds tell us — by changing our beliefs about them.
When you were a kid, you told yourself a story about a deranged psychopath hiding out in the dark corners of your basement, and every time you went down there, you would freak yourself out about it. That story still runs through your mind when you traverse dark passageways, but your belief in the story has changed so that you don’t start running in a panic with every encounter with a shadowy nook.
Start becoming aware of the stories that you tell yourself. Most of them aren’t really beneficial to your well-being, and could be causing you unnecessary anxiety.
So now you know why emotions are such a scary thing–it’s because you’ve attached scary stories to them.
Sensation + Mind-Narrative = Emotion
Something from the outside comes in, the meaning machine churns out a mind-movie, and then you react with appropriate emotion.
Nothing to be afraid about, huh?
Seems silly that the current popular trend is to silence the evil mind (The Power of Now, anyone?).