“As you go about your day, see if you can find brief moments to bring this kind of awareness to your experiences. It need take no longer than the space of an eye blink to puncture an ‘ordinary’ experience with clear seeing. Just remember that you are always confronted by consciousness and its contents, and that you can drop back and merely witness what’s arising before you react, before you grasp at what’s pleasant, or push the unpleasant away. Occasionally rest your mind in the midst of activity.”
Sam Harris – daily meditation 14th July 2020
Sam Harris here is hinting at something that we get into in quite a lot of detail in our courses when we look at stress and how we react to it. The whole of the above quote is great (and you should definitely hunt down some more Sam Harris if you don’t know his meditations or talks!) – but the particular bit I’m focusing on is the merely witness what’s arising before you react bit.
You probably already know about the amygdala – the “lizard brain” that is the oldest part of the brain – and how it controls our “fight or flight” response. It’s that moment where you’re out walking in the savanna, see movement in the tree-line and respond immediately, without really thinking. (I mean, we don’t do a lot of walking in the savanna nowadays, and our false need to respond in this way is exactly what we’ll talk about when we look at stress, but I won’t get into that now….)
The point is – when faced with many things (think people cutting you up when you’re driving, preset notions about how X type of person behaves, that person we don’t like at work did that thing again…. etc etc….) – we react, immediately. Our lizard brain jumps in, instinctively.
Sam Harris is asking us to do something differently – to stop, hold fire just for a brief moment, to look for the thinker. This sounds grand, but really it’s just noticing and attention, only from a slightly different angle.
Try to keep this idea in your head for the next couple of days. Let’s be clear – no-one is suggesting that you’ll miraculously be all cool and calm the next time someone drives at you like a loony – but see if you can just take a moment and notice what your inner reaction to things is. Say you smash a glass. Your normal reaction may be to get cross with the world (“damn that slippery new work surface!”) and annoyed with yourself (“I’m an idiot, I loved that glass, it was my favourite!”) for being so foolish.
Well this time, just try and notice the emotion that is arising, and see if you can bear witness to it before it takes you over. It’s hard, and you may remember to do this only after you’ve had the emotion. But that’s good practice, too – it’s all about a more examined life where you’re more in contact with you and your awareness.
Until next time.
