Now I See My Enemy

From Todaycollegetour

Thank you for setting up this extended final session, Dr. Sullivan. I have some things to share before I say goodbye.

Dr. S. – Sure, take your time, there is no time limit today. It’s been quite a ride, Marian.

(Nods) All week, I realized that I am doing so much better since we began. You know why? I’ve actually changed something, something real and substantial. I was thinking about it all week. I came to see that I hadn’t regained the dwindled happiness of my childhood until I recognized what was missing. I was on a walk in the park about six months ago. I’d caught a glimpse of that old happy state of being, on and off during the previous few weeks. And then, upon losing one long glimpse of it during that walk, I realized the scope of what was lost. I realized that attending only to “right now, this moment, without being distracted but, “later,” or the “past” was what I had done so well as a child, without even trying. Having been pulled away from “right now” so many times over the years, by insistent thoughts of lost love, regret, money or some future goal, I’d managed to lose “right now” all together. It was always about the past or the future. And I’d lost my life, me.

And in that realization, I saw that unless I was willing to fight for it, to defend against it being taken away, hijacked by thoughts and images of worry, shame or the anxieties of unfulfilled dreams; unless I was willing to pursue it with the relentless abandon with which I had been pursuing all those unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable dreams, it would remain lost to me. I say unfulfillable because, of course, to me, my dreams not only included some initial achievement like graduating from college or making money or ven doing good in the world, but an even deeper reason for their pursuit was that they also harbored my hopes for all of the love and adulation that I imagined came along with the achievement of the dream – my unspoken payoff. That payoff, though, I’d come to find, often did not come to fruition in any real way, even after I achieved the goal. Being loved by everyone isn’t even as great as it sounds.

(So I’d come to believe, accurately I think, that unless I fought to get my life back, my mind space and the behavior it produced would remain a patterned reaction to my anxiety de jour – de moment, actually.)

So, there and then, on that walk, I swore my allegiance to not only the observation of my thoughts, as I had learned to do from talking with you, and from all the books I’d read on mindful living, but also to actually recognize any thoughts I had that were responsible for beginning a cycle of emotional pain, as my personal and my only true enemy – and to wage my war against them. So, I actually took it one step further than you suggested. I swore to hate those stressful thoughts so much that I would never not see them when they arrived and tried to take the peace of this moment from me.

I know what you are thinking. “Hate” seemed a strong word to me too, initially. But, hating was the only motivator sufficient to the persistent call of the task. So, I resolved to hate those thoughts that stole my peace, my confidence, and in many moments of my days, my self. I hated them away by replacing their vilification of my mind with mental images of the vastness of space, or the uniqueness of life found in the ocean, or the infinity of the universe. That worked for me. I’d found that my mind was unable or unwilling to tolerate the hypocrisy of feeling anxiety about my small dreams or failures, or even expectations, when presented in contrast to the vast mystery I meander through, as does every other living creature, each and every single moment of being alive.

Soon after this hate story began, through the vigilant tracking of my thought patterns, I recognized that in any given day, week or month, I had very few novel thoughts or novel patterns of thoughts at all. I imagine that I had more than most people do. I’m quite sure that is true, because I am a creative person by nature. But, as it turned out, even I, in my creative peaks, had been thinking about very few things, in fact. And the patterned nature of these thoughts and the mood state that came out of them was strikingly simple. Really. Still, as simple as they were, it was a challenge to track them successfully because they were concealing themselves under the auspices of being me. But really, they were just bad habits – easy thoughts that had become bad habits – addictions even. Once I could identify them, it became clear that they amounted to predictable patterns that led to anxiety rather than to being alive in this moment, being my self. And while YOU could probably tell me how they developed, or why they made sense for ME to cling to as my own thoughts during some disjointed phase of my personal development or another, by now the thoughts had become worn. They had actually become, in a word, boring.

For example, a thought or image would enter my mind, perhaps because my eyes happened to catch a happy couple talking at lunch and then tenderly reaching out for each other’s hands. That image would moved me toward a sense of nostalgia for some past love, which would in turn lead to a thought of an obstacle that needed to be addressed in order to regain the conditions of the past, including that now absent love. The thought of the obstacle, in turn, generated anxiety about how to best overcome the obstacle in the most expeditious way – more work, more free time, etc., so as not to waste more time away from that “happy” time. This last thought, of course, generated additional anxiety related to he fact that I was commanding myself to strive not to waste more time in getting back to some better past or future. Of course, the worry and the wasted time were made of the same substance – distraction from the present moment - illusion. Nevertheless, the feelings produced by the worry had been sufficient to drag me so far from the peace of the vastness of life in the present moment that I’d dwelt in only moments before, that I could scarcely even recall that recent happy reality through the haze of freshly baked anxieties.

Ironically, I suspect that I originally developed this patterned way of thinking in an unconscious effort to control the uncontrollable, i.e., to take my mind off of the fearsome existential dilemma that can be the nature of life in this unknown universe – to feel safe from something scary or to feel more loved or more whole somehow. But finally, upon seeing their lack of grounding or coherence as ideas, now all of a sudden I no longer feared the unknown. I could instead embrace the beauty of existence anxiety-free now, each moment. As long as I escorted my bad thoughts away when they came knocking at my brain’s door, my state of mid is peaceful.

What I find in each battle of my personal war is that since my mind produces thoughts without ever resting, inevitably an image enters my mind and triggers some angry or pitiful or sad or jealous sequence of feelings. And that sequence can play out, over and over. I gave the triggers to these sequences a name so I could label them appropriately whenever one arises. I call them “Life Killers.” Or sometimes, I call them “a thought that is here to fuck up my otherwise perfect life.” I had a number of different patterns that I came to recognize and hate with deep passion. What? They deserve to be hated. They were raping the most precious possession of my lifetime - my life, my peace. I finally had identified the appropriate enemy for my life. It wasn’t the Catholics or the rich people, or blacks or Muslims. It was the anxiety provoking thoughts that I allowed to fester in my mind. And even worse, I’d left them feeling welcome enough to return whenever they pleased. I’d provided them sanctuary simply by tolerating them. Not any more. Now I exorcise them by treating them condescendingly, by putting them in the context of reality, and they retreat from my mind out of embarrassment at their lack of value in my life. I call them boring and they evaporate.

Now I notice what thoughts come into my mind, as they enter. I escort away the ones that take my attention away from being wherever I am right now. And, I welcome the ones that are consistent with the big beautiful unknown nature of the universe, and allow them to remind me that I am already a whole and perfect child of life. And when they are ready to leave, I watch them go, knowing that are welcome to visit again, anytime.