Think Like a Monk

by Jay Shetty

  TRY THIS: WAKE UP THE SUBCONSCIOUS

  Write down all the noise you hear in your mind on a daily basis. Noise that you know you don’t want to have. This should not be a list of your problems. Instead, write the negative, self-defeating messages your mind is sending you, such as:

  You’re not good enough.

  You can’t do this.

  You don’t have the intelligence to do this.

  These are the times when the charioteer is asleep at the wheel.

  INVEST IN THE CONSCIOUS MIND

  Just as you are not your mind, you are not your thoughts. Saying to yourself “I don’t deserve love” or “My life sucks” doesn’t make it a fact, but these self-defeating thoughts are hard to rewire. All of us have a history of pain, heartbreak, and challenges, whatever they may be. Just because we’ve been through something and it’s safely in the past doesn’t mean it’s over. On the contrary, it will persist in some form—often in self-defeating thoughts—until it teaches us what we need to change. If you haven’t healed your relationship with your parents, you’ll keep picking partners who mirror the unresolved issues. If you don’t deliberately rewire your mindset, you are destined to repeat and re-create the pain you’ve already endured.

  It may sound silly, but the best way to overwrite the voices in your head is to start talking to them. Literally.

  Start talking to yourself every day. Feel free to address yourself with your name and to do it out loud wherever you’re comfortable doing so (so maybe not on a first date or a job interview). Sound is powerful, and hearing your own name grabs your attention.

  If your mind says, “You can’t do this,” respond by saying to yourself, “You can do it. You have the ability. You have the time.”

  Talking yourself through a project or task enhances focus and concentration. Those who do it function more efficiently. In a series of studies, researchers showed volunteers groups of pictures, then asked them to locate specific items from among those pictured. Half of the subjects were told to repeat the names of the items to themselves out loud as they searched, and the other half were told to stay silent. Those who repeated the items were significantly faster than the silent searchers. The researchers concluded that talking to yourself not only boosts your memory, it also helps you focus. Psychologist Linda Sapadin adds that talking to yourself “helps you clarify your thoughts, tend to what’s important and firm up any decisions you’re contemplating.”

  Let’s consider some ways you can find a new perspective to shift your mind in a productive way.

  REFRAME

  If you’re like most other humans, your intellect excels at telling your mind where it goes wrong, but rarely bothers to tell your mind where it goes right. What kind of parenting is that?

  Nothing’s going to get better

  Nobody understands me

  I’m not good enough

  I’m not attractive enough

  I’m not smart enough

  We look for the worst in ourselves and tell ourselves that it will never change. This is the least encouraging approach we could pick. There are three routes to happiness, all of them centered on knowledge: learning, progressing, and achieving. Whenever we are growing, we feel happy and free of material yearnings. If you’re unsatisfied, or criticizing yourself, or feeling hopeless, don’t let that stall you out. Identify the ways you’re making progress, and you will begin to see, feel, and appreciate the value of what you are doing.

  Reframe your self-criticism in terms of knowledge. When you hear yourself say, “I’m bored, I’m slow, I can’t do this,” respond to yourself: “You are working on it. You are improving.” This is a reminder to yourself that you are making progress. Build a relationship with that pessimistic child’s voice. Your adult voice will get stronger as you read, research, apply, and test. Turn up the volume on recognizing what your mind gets right. Rather than amplifying your failures, amplify your progress. If you managed to wake up early two days out of seven, encourage yourself as you would a child who was just beginning to make a change. If you accomplished half of what you planned, call it a glass half-full.

  In addition to amplifying our growth, we can use “positive direction” to reframe unwanted thoughts. Our monkey mind often creates chatter like “I can’t do this.” This can be reworded to “I can do this by…”

  “I can’t do this” becomes “I can do this by…”

  “I’m bad at this” becomes “I’m investing the time I need to get better”

  “I’m unlovable” becomes “I’m reaching out to new people to make new connections”

  “I’m ugly” becomes “I’m taking steps to be my healthiest”

  “I can’t handle everything” becomes “I’m prioritizing and checking items off my list”

  Putting a solution-oriented spin on your statement reminds you to be proactive and take responsibility rather than languishing in wishful thinking.

  We can take action instead of using words alone to reframe our state of mind. A simple way of overcoming this is to learn one new thing every day. It doesn’t have to be big. You don’t need to teach yourself how to code or learn quantum mechanics. You could read an article about a person, a city, or a culture, and you’ll feel a burst of self-esteem. You have something to contribute to the next conversation you have. Even if you just learn one new word… here’s one: the Inuit word iktsuarpok refers to the feeling of anticipation you have when you’re waiting for a guest and you keep going to the window to check and see if they’ve arrived. Just sharing a new word in conversation can bring richness to the dinner table.

  Many of the frustrations we endure can be seen as blessings because they urge us to grow and develop. Try putting negative thoughts and circumstances on the perspective continuum. The same way doctors evaluate pain, I ask people to rate an individual concern on a scale of one to ten. Zero is no worries. Ten is the worst thing in the world, something as awful as: “I worry that my whole family will die.” Actually, that’s probably an eleven.

  Problems of all sorts can feel like they deserve a ten rating, especially in the middle of the night. Not getting promoted feels like a ten. Losing a treasured watch—another ten. But if you’ve ever experienced the pain of losing someone you love (and we all have or will), the scale shifts; your whole perspective shifts. Suddenly, losing your job is not great, but tolerable. The watch is gone, but it was just an object. Your body may be imperfect, but it’s given you some great experiences. Use the awareness of what deep pain really is to keep smaller disruptions in perspective. And when you must face a truly devastating ten, own it, take the time to heal it. This is not about reducing the impact of all negative experiences; it’s about gaining a clearer view of them. And sometimes a ten is a ten.

  SLOW IT DOWN

  Sometimes reframing works best on paper. Imagine a monkey swinging from branch to branch at full throttle. It takes effort to grab its attention and force it to focus. When your mind is anxious and racing, when your thoughts are repetitive and unproductive, when you feel like you need to press pause, take fifteen minutes to write down every thought that enters your mind.

  For a study, a group of college students spent fifteen minutes a day for four days writing their “deepest thoughts and feelings” about the most traumatic experience of their lives. Not only did the students say they found the experience to be valuable, 98 percent said they’d like to do it again. But they didn’t just enjoy the writing, it also improved their health. Students who’d written about traumatic experiences had fewer visits to the university health center after the study. The researchers concluded that one of the benefits of the writing may have been helping students render their worst experiences as a coherent narrative. Distancing themselves from the moment in this way allowed them to see the experiences objectively and, one hopes, to conjure a happy ending.

  Writer Krysta MacGray was terrified of flying. She tried white knuckling it. She tried logic. She even tried having a few drinks. But every time she kn
ew she’d have to fly, she spent weeks in advance imagining what her kids’ lives would be like after she went down in a fiery crash. MacGray started blogging about this fear as a means of trying to gain perspective, and it was then she realized she was on track to become her grandmother, who refused to fly and missed out on a lot because of it. So MacGray started listing everything she wanted to do in her life that would be worth flying for. Though she hasn’t totally conquered her fear, she did manage to take a bucket-list vacation to Italy with her husband. Writing by itself doesn’t solve all of our problems, but it can help us gain critical perspective we can use to find solutions.

  If you don’t like writing, you can speak into your phone, then play back the audio file or read the transcript (many phones can transcribe spoken words into text). Recording yourself puts you in an observer mindset, making you deal more objectively with yourself.

  Another option is to simply repeat an ancient samurai saying that the monks use: “Make my mind my friend,” over and over in your head. When you repeat a phrase, it quiets the default mode network—the area of the brain associated with mind wandering and thinking about yourself. The monkey will be forced to stop and listen.

  FIND SELF-COMPASSION

  When the anxious monkey mind stops to listen, you can tweak the internal monologue with self-compassion. When anxious thoughts arise, instead of indulging them, we respond with compassion. “I know you’re worried and upset, and you feel like you can’t handle this, but you are strong. You can do it.” Remember, it’s about observing your feelings without judging them.

  With my friends at the branding company Shareability, I did an exercise with a small group of teenage girls and their sisters. I asked the girls to write down negative thoughts they had that affected their self-esteem. They wrote down things like “You are scared,” “You are worthless,” “You are unimportant.” Then I asked them to read what they’d written to their sisters, as if it were about them.

  They all refused. “It’s not very nice.” One pointed out that it was normal in her head, but completely different when she spoke it.

  We say things to ourselves that we would never say to people we love. We all know the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. To that I would add: Treat yourself with the same love and respect you want to show to others.

  TRY THIS: NEW SCRIPTS FOR THE CHARIOTEER

  Write a list of the negative things you say to yourself. Next to each one write down how you would present that idea to someone you care about. For example, these are the negative thoughts the sisters wrote down about themselves along with how they might have presented them to their sisters: “You are scared”

  “It’s okay to feel scared. How can I help you through this?”

  “You are worthless”

  “You feel worthless—let’s talk about what you love about yourself.”

  “You are unimportant”

  “These things make you feel unimportant. Before we talk about how to change that, let’s list what makes you feel important.”

  Imagine you found out that your child or best friend or cousin or someone who is dear to you was getting a divorce. What is your first reaction? What would you say to the person? What advice would you give them? You might say, “I’m sorry, I know this is a hard time.” Or “Congratulations. I know you’re going through a lot, but people rarely ever regret getting divorced.” We would never tell a loved one, “You’re an idiot. You must be a loser if you married that loser.” We give love and support, maybe offering ideas and solutions. This is how we should talk to ourselves.

  We are defined by the narrative that we write for ourselves every day. Is it a story of joy, perseverance, love, and kindness, or is it a story of guilt, blame, bitterness, and failure? Find a new vocabulary to match the emotions and feelings that you want to live by. Talk to yourself with love.

  STAY PRESENT

  It can be hard to know what to tell your monkey mind when it’s dwelling on the past or spinning into the future. Father Richard Rohr writes, “All spiritual teaching—this is not an oversimplification—is about how to be present to the moment.… But the problem is, we’re almost always somewhere else: reliving the past or worrying about the future.”

  We all have happy memories that we enjoy revisiting and painful memories that we can’t let go. But both nostalgia and remorse can be traps, closing us off from new experiences and keeping us locked in the unresolved past and/or the good old days. Just as the past is unchangeable, the future is unknowable. A certain amount of planning is useful and good preparation for the various scenarios ahead, but when these thoughts tip into repetitive anxiety and worry or unrealistic aspirations, they are no longer productive.

  Whether it feels like the world’s falling down around you or you’re just having a bad day at work, the challenges to presence abound. Realistically, you’ll never reach a point in your life when you’re present 100 percent of the time—that’s not the goal. After all, thinking about good times we’ve had or valuable lessons we’ve learned in the past and planning for our future are excellent uses of our mental bandwidth. What we don’t want to do is waste time on regret or worry. Practicing presence helps us do as spiritual teacher Ram Dass advised and “be here now.”

  When your mind continually returns to thoughts of the past or the future, look for clues in the present. Is your mind seeking to shield or distract you? Instead of thinking about what mattered in the past or what the future might hold, gently guide your mind back to the moment. Ask yourself questions about right now.

  What is missing from this moment?

  What is unpleasant about today?

  What would I like to change?

  Ideally, when we talk to ourselves about the present, we look back on the negative and positive elements of the past as the imperfect road that brought us to where we are—a life that we accept, and from which we can still grow. And, ideally, we also think of the future in context of the present—an opportunity to realize the promise of today.

  NOTHING OWNS YOU

  When we talk to ourselves as we would to a loved one, just as when we observe the argument between the child mind and the adult mind, we’re creating a distance between ourselves and our own minds in order to see more clearly. We’ve discussed this approach before; instead of reacting emotionally, monks gain perspective by stepping out of a situation to become objective observers. In Chapter Three, we talked about stepping away from fear, and we gave this action a name—detachment.

  The crane stands still in water, ignoring the small fish as they pass by. Her stillness allows her to catch the bigger fish.

  Detachment is a form of self-control that has infinite benefits across every form of self-awareness that I talk about in this book, but its origin is always in the mind. The Gita defines detachment as doing the right thing for its own sake, because it needs to be done, without worrying about success or failure. That sounds simple enough, but think about what it takes to do the right thing for its own sake. It means detaching from your selfish interest, from being right, from being seen in a certain way, from what you want right now. Detaching means escaping the hold of the senses, of earthly desires, of the material world. You have the perspective of an objective observer.

  Only by detaching can we truly gain control of the mind.

  I’ve remixed some Zen stories, introducing new characters so that they’re more relatable. One of them is about a monk who arrives at the entrance to a palace. She’s a known holy woman, so she is brought to the king, who asks the monk what she wants. “I would like to sleep in this hotel for the night,” says the monk.

  The king is rather taken aback at this unexpected lack of respect. “This is not a hotel, it is my palace!” he says haughtily.

  The monk asks, “Who owned this place before you?”

  The king folds his arms across his chest. “My father. I am heir to the throne,” he declares.

  “Is he here now?”

  “He i
s not. He is dead. What is the meaning of this?”

  “And before your father, who was the owner?”

  “His father,” the king shouts.

  The monk nods. “Ah,” she says, “so people who come to this place, stay here for a while, and then continue their journey. Sounds like a hotel to me.”

  This story gives a window into the illusion of permanence with which we all live. A more recent window is Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, the show where Kondo helps people “declutter” their lives, and at the end, over and over again, you’ll see people weeping with relief and joy at having purged so much. That’s because they’ve just dramatically decreased the number of things they’re attached to. Attachment brings pain. If you think something is yours or you think you are something, then it hurts to have it taken away from you.

  A quote from Alī, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammed, best explains the monk idea of detachment: “Detachment is not that you own nothing, but that nothing should own you.” I love how this summarizes detachment in a way that it’s not usually explained. Usually people see detachment as being removed from everything, not caring. Marie Kondo isn’t telling people to stop caring—she is telling them to look for joy. Actually, the greatest detachment is being close to everything and not letting it consume and own you. That’s real strength.

  Like most monk endeavors, detachment is not a destination one arrives at, but a process one must constantly, consciously undertake. It’s hard enough to detach in an ashram, where monks own almost nothing but our ideas and identities. In the modern world we can strive for detachment—particularly when we face a challenge like an argument or a decision—and hope to achieve it fleetingly.