Daily Buddhist [Wednesday Wisdom]

By Brendan Barca & Pema Sherpa

Age-old Buddhist wisdom for modern living. Weekly insight loved by over 17,500 practitioners. 🙏

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When the Mind Makes Things Worse

“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.” — Pema Chödrön

As soon as an event takes place in our lives, we’re quick to analyze it, replay it, or guess what it will mean for us in the future. We’re so accustomed to interpreting everything that we have a hard time letting things simply be what they are.

If someone sends us a rude or angry email, we may turn it into a whole story about how they don’t like us and how, maybe, nobody likes us.

Or if we lose our job, we may jump to the conclusion that we’re not as good at our work as we thought, that we’re unemployable, or that we’ll never find another job and will eventually go broke.

This is what the mind can do. One difficult event happens, and before we know it, we’ve added layers of meaning, prediction, and fear to what actually happened.

Much of our suffering doesn’t come from the event itself, but from our thoughts about what the event means about us or our lives.

But we don’t have to live this way. Through practice, we can learn to recognize these thoughts without immediately believing them. We can notice when the mind is replaying the past, predicting the future, or turning one difficult moment into a much bigger problem than we actually have.

The moment you begin to notice this happening, something changes. You’re no longer completely caught in the thought. You’re aware of it as a thought. And in that awareness, there is a little more space between you and the suffering.

This week, work on raising the level of your awareness. Try catching your mind in action: making predictions, dwelling on what happened, or creating stories about what something says about you. You don’t need to stop these thoughts or force them away. Just notice them. The more you practice noticing, the less power these thoughts can have over you.

To free yourself from the trappings of the mind, start simple: notice when you’re caught in them.