Mindstuff

So the night before last, I was awake all night.  I had a headache and it wasn’t letting me sleep.  One of the interesting things I noticed was about the “thoughts” I was “thinking.”  My husband and I had spent the whole evening talking about a job-related decision he had to make—we had covered all the ins and outs and ups and downs.  Then finally we went to bed.  I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be sleeping because of my head and that he wasn’t going to be sleeping because of this decision.  All through the night, the main activity I would notice in my mind was “thinking” about all of the various things my husband and I had been talking about.  I keep putting quotation marks around the word thinking because what I realized was that I wasn’t really thinking.  It was just words and phrases and images flashing through my mind.  I wasn’t producing them or doing anything with them, they were just there.  But I could see how easy it could be to label it as worry or anxiety—if it had been my own decision rather than my husband's, I surely would have called it anxiety and I think I very well might have jumped right in and started wrestling with those “thoughts,” trying to go over everything one more time and sort things out.  But instead it was just what my mind was doing and really wasn’t very different at all from the pain I was experiencing physically.  Both the thoughts and sensations were just happening, moving, fluctuating, with nothing at all to do with “me.”

Patanjali’s definition of yoga is something like the “restraint of the modifications of the mindstuff.”  You always hear this term mindstuff.  I always thought it was kind of funny and maybe sort of understood why people would use this term, but I feel like I get it a little bit more.  "Mind" sounds like an entity, an object (though it isn't really), but "mindstuff" is the stuff of the mind, which is all this activity that we usually call "thoughts" only that doesn't seem like the right word because it implies thinking (which to me is a more active process than what's happening all the time in the mindstuff).  I’ve also heard an interpretation of this sutra (maybe from Jivamukti?) that says yoga is disidentification with the modifications of the mindstuff.  I think that’s what I got a clear taste of lying there in bed—not just not engaging with these thoughts but really seeing them as something completely separate from me.  Which is why, I guess, Patanjali goes on to say that when we do this, we know our own true nature.  I’ll leave you with this really great quote I just read by Wei Wu Wei:  “Why do you suffer? Because 99.9% of everything you think and everything you do is for yourself and there isn’t one.”

Process Update

So right at this moment, I am basking in the amazingness of what happens when we don’t think we already know what’s going to happen or that we have to make something happen or that things have to hurry up.  Things will unfold and, because as a human I am so limited, chances are that they are going to unfold in ways I don’t expect or couldn’t even really imagine—life is so much bigger than me.

In class this week, I was framing my current experience within the context of brahmacharya, which has a lot of meanings from celibacy to moderation.  What I have been thinking about is the idea of restraint, of not following the first impulsive idea that comes into my head—refraining, which is maybe something like containing, which I suddenly realize as I am writing this is related to continence, which is, in fact, another term used for brahmacharya (in case you thought I was making this up).  In practicing refraining from following my habitual patterns or just trying to get out of discomfort, I make room for something bigger to happen and don’t spend a lot of extra energy trying to clean up the messes I make when I react impulsively or regretting my actions.

Now, maybe the most interesting part of all this is that I don’t really think of myself as someone who has trouble with restraint.  On the spectrum of possibilities, I am closer to restrained end than the impulsive end.  So what I am talking about here is not holding back, suppressing or not acting in order to wait something out so it will be over (all of which I do sometimes).  I think it’s more about containing the behavior of the small “s” self (the individual, separate person), so that more possibilities become available.  I am refraining from doing something to get out of this moment that I am in right now.  I realize that restraining/refraining/containing may not sound like that much fun, but I’m telling you it’s good.