A friend of mine, who lives in a Brooklyn apartment, used to wake up in the middle of the night because of a noisy upstairs neighbor. When the neighbor moved out, he still woke up in the night. It turns out it was his thoughts that were waking him up. Even if it was the neighbor who woke him up, it was his thoughts that kept him up.
We all have a noisy upstairs neighbor who bothers us. Our minds constantly chatter about this and that and, if we are bothered, it is coming from our head. With a real neighbor we can bang on the ceiling with a broom and let them know that people are trying to sleep downstairs. With the neighbor in our heads, we have to first see that they are a neighbor, and then we can get them to quiet down.
It is not easy to see our heads as our neighbors. We tend to think of all those thoughts as our own selves. That idea is constantly reinforced as the thoughts we think keep saying things about “I” and “me” and “mine”. To all appearances, those thoughts are us. Yet, at the same time as we think those thoughts, we are watching those thoughts. We experience those thoughts. We can influence those thoughts by how we pay attention to them.
How we interact with out thoughts determines the quality of our experience. If we are angry at our thoughts, we will experience anger. If we are afraid of our thoughts, we will experience fear. If we are neighborly with our thoughts, we will experience kindness.
All of that shared experience with our thoughts feeds into the idea that those thoughts are who we are. If our thoughts tell us we are smart, we think we are smart. If they tell us we are stupid, we think we are stupid. If they tell us we are ugly, or beautiful, we believe them. They tell us all of those things, and we have to be careful about how we listen to them and know when to tap on the ceiling with our broom handles.
The handle that we have that can quiet our thoughts is our attention. When our thinking is distressing, we keep our attention on the distress, which makes us feel distressed and think more distressing thoughts. To grab the handle on our thoughts, we take our attention away from our thoughts and put it on our breath. We take our focus out of our heads and put it in our hearts or in our bellies. With our attention in our heart, the upstairs neighbor, the head, loses some steam. If we take our attention down two floors to our belly, the neighbor is even quieter. It may still try to demand our attention, but when we have a handle on our perspective, we can let the thoughts come and go.
We can be right where we are, exactly who we are, breathing the plentiful air that keeps us alive and we can let our thoughts be quiet for a while. The thoughts will always come back, the neighbor is always at home, but we need peace and quiet and calm and kindness from time to time, which our neighbor doesn’t always remember. We do our neighbor a great service by being quiet and letting them relax.
As we take care of our neighbors, both upstairs and downstairs, we create harmony in our homes. We drop old habits and heal past problems. When we have harmony in our home, we can be kind to all of our other neighbors around the world.
Recent Comments