Toward a simple practice for dealing with thoughts

Here’s a handy little image to help you deal with thoughts and the emotions that are wrapped up in them: Treat them like leaves floating along a gentle brook. You may watch them pass, and on occasion, lift one out of the flowing stream and examine it intently. But always put it back again. This little practice puts the you who thinks the thoughts and feels the feelings, back in charge.

You may be driving your car, and you notice you’re driving faster than you should. You’re in a hurry for some reason. Or maybe you’ve been so wrapped in your thoughts for the past ten minutes that you hardly know how you’ve gotten where you are. Your emotions and thoughts have gotten the best of you.

Don’t criticize yourself. Criticizing or judging yourself for being captive to your thoughts and emotions only leads to more thoughts and emotions that aren’t helpful. Instead, congratulate yourself on waking up to the fact that you’ve fallen into the river instead of sitting on its banks and have been floating along, going who-knows-where. Simply take charge of yourself, climb back onto the bank, sit down, and watch the stream of thoughts and emotions pass by. Identify one thought or feeling that stands out to you—the argument you had with your spouse, or the project your boss just asked you to do—and study it for a bit. Then set it back down again in the stream again and let it go until it’s appropriate to pick it up again and give it the focused attention it requires.

Soon, you’ll find yourself dripping wet again, sloshing around in the river, overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and emotions. When you do, smile at yourself and pull yourself back up on the bank and start watching all over again.

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Stop following where they wish to lead you

To bring your mind into a right relationship with your heart you’ll have to stop following your thoughts and emotions wherever they want to lead you. The point is not to be passive about your thoughts and emotions, but rather to learn to examine them—gently though, for I’ve seen people become so serious about them that they just deal with their thoughts with more and more thoughts. You need to remember that your thoughts and emotions too (especially the ones that you obsess over the most) have ruled you for a long time and won’t willingly play second fiddle to anything else, even God. In fact, they want you to treat them as God, and you probably do so without realizing it. Think about how much time certain thoughts spend in your consciousness, how long particular emotions hold power over how you feel. The attention you give them really robs you of a lot of living. Obsessing over them siphons off the spiritual energy you could use to transform your life into a living prayer.

Down the road, I’ll help you learn to exchange this habitual obsessing over thoughts and emotions for the experience of unceasing, interior prayer. That will bring you a freedom you never thought possible.

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There's a you that's not your thoughts

The fact that you can think a thought and observe it means that there must be a you that’s not the thought. Try this: think of an elephant. Now notice that you can actually notice and observe your thought of the elephant. The you who thinks the thought and can now see it, is the you who can take it captive.

Follow me? Maybe you think this is just a little trick and of little practical use. It’s no trick, no silly exercise. Most people are ruled by their thoughts and are driven by them. They also never really pray—they think, even nice thoughts about God. Living includes thinking, of course, and so does praying. But living and praying are far more than thinking. And as long as most of what you’re doing is thinking (living mostly in your head), you’ll stay lost in your own little mind-made self, distant from God, and probably not living very well to boot. You’ll remain a victim of the tyranny of your thoughts.

You’ve spent most of your life living that way. It’s time to be set free.

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Free from your mind's tyranny

You want to know how to handle your thoughts. The other day, you carved out a little space away from the busyness of your day, and sat down to pray. You got still before God and before a minute was up your mind was racing in forty different directions at once. I don’t know what you expected—some radiant, holy light probably—but your mind did just what I figured it would do. Totally predictable. You can make your body quiet on the outside, but inside there’s a riot going on in your head. Honestly, sometimes my brain feels like its a cage full of monkey’s on crack; my thoughts screech and chatter and swing to and fro and aren’t about to stop just because I want them to.

Very few people can be thought-free even for a few moments. And thought-free isn’t your goal. You’re not to be thought-free, but free from their tyranny. Your aim is to transform the way you relate to your thoughts (Romans 12.2).

You’ve probably never really stopped to think about your thoughts, and because you haven’t, you’re more slave to them than owner. If you’re like most of us, your thoughts rule the roost and you’ve never given them another thought despite the fact that you’ve probably read St. Paul words, “we take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10.5). Who is this “we” who can “take every thought captive”? Answer that and you’re on your way to real freedom in life and a life of true prayer.

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Wanting to want is desire enough

Mary Magdalene’s your teacher in all this. She went to the tomb “the first day of the week, while it was still dark” (John 20.1). Empty she walked there. She’d gone to grieve. She wanted only to be near Jesus, even in his death. But she got far more than she wanted, more than she dared dream. Jesus, risen from the dead, stood before her and called her by name. Ecstatic, she ran to embrace him, then he sent her sprinting back up the path, the first to announce the gospel. Forevermore, she’ll be known and the “Apostle to the Apostles”—she got more than she every dreamed of getting (Matthew 28.8). Follow her. Like her, you’re probably pretty empty. You’d like to be able to pray with real desire the words of the Rule—“Oh, my love, I run toward you with all my heart and soul, and mind and strength”— but you tell me you don’t feel all that. Pray them anyway. They’ll keep you wanting to want what you’re saying. And wanting to want is all you need to stay on the path.

Christ will come to you soon enough. I promise. What’s more, Mary Magdalene—so abundantly rewarded for her perseverance—guarantees it.

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