Why would you need to befriend your own mind?
For many reasons most, if not all of us, don’t like some aspects of our mind. We worry too much. We prevaricate and waste time on things that are not helpful, even harmful. We tell ourselves off. We blame ourselves for all sorts of things, many of which we should carry no blame for. When we make a mistake, even a small one, we berate ourselves. If something bad happens that is out of our control we spend hours contemplating how we could have avoided it or prevented it.
To a large extent, this is all part of being human. Our mind’s first priority is to keep us safe. It is always on the look out for threats, and when it finds one it throws all its emotional energy into avoiding or preventing it. This is something that is called “negativity bias”. In fact this negativity bias is really important – in evolutionary terms it is important to escape a predator before settling down to eat a juicy piece of fruit.
However, the negativity bias can and often does go into overdrive. Even when things are going well, we can have a nagging fear that something bad is going to happen. Even the most trivial negative overrides our positive experiences. At its most extreme, it can lead us into anxiety and depression.
When we sit down and meditate, despite our aspirations to have a calm and peaceful experience, thoughts start to bubble to the surface. The usual guidance, when we have lost focus, is to pause and gently return to the focus without judgement. But switching off judgement is not easy. After 20 minutes of meditation where we have spent most of it worrying about a bill or our health or someone else’s health it is easy to think that we are useless at meditation. Invitations to not be judgemental are fine, but then the judging part of our mind starts to be critical of our inability to be non-judgemental (note the contradiction in that).
In mindfulness-based compassion there is a meditation practice, sometimes called metta practice, or loving kindness practice, or befriending practice. That invites us to treat ourselves and others equally, and to wish ourselves and others well (peace, ease, health, …). As a practice this is really helpful. Often it brings to light how much harsher we are on ourselves than on others.
In deeper mindfulness practice, whenever the mind wanders, the invitation is to pause and consciously acknowledge that the mind is doing its best to look after you, even if what it has thrown up is disturbing in some way. You consciously and intentionally thank your mind. Rather than pushing it away, you appreciate it. Then there are a couple of things you can add in: saying to yourself “it’s ok not to like this” and “no action necessary right now”.
Our normal response to something unpleasant (including an unpleasant thought) is to do something to get rid of it. Well, if you have a stone in your shoe, that is a perfectly sensible thing to do. However, it is not always possible to do something about an unpleasant experience, at least not immediately. So, saying to yourself in a meditation “it’s ok not to like this” is a way of acknowledging the unpleasantness without an immediate impetus to move away from or do something about the unpleasantness.
Having paused and noted the unpleasant experience and acknowledged it is ok not to like it, then there is a choice. For urgent matters, then maybe some action is needed – it is not wise to meditate through the smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. However, in a meditation where the house is not burning down, then we can quietly acknowledge “no action is necessary right now”. That is not denying the possibility of doing something in the future, but a wise decision to put it aside until the time is right to do something.
In a mindfulness meditation we may do this many, many times. The habits of our minds to rush to fixing things, and treating everything as urgent, take time to change. We are creating space to make more skilful decisions – dealing with the things that are immediately urgent and not over-worrying about the things that can only be worked on later.
Mindfulness meditation is meant to cultivate skills we can take into our daily lives. So when an unpleasant event happens, we can use the same tools. If it is not urgent, we can pause, thank your minds for bringing it to our attention, acknowledge it is unpleasant and that it is ok not to like it, then to decide if any urgent action is necessary and if not saying quietly to ourselves we can deal with it later.
This is all about the mindfulness principle of moving from reactivity to responsiveness. Reactivity is indiscriminate and sometimes harmful. Responsiveness is about perspective and doing what is right in the moment.
This is all a process of slowly befriending your mind. Friends are not perfect, but they look out for you, and you appreciate their little foibles even if they are annoying at times. It is a slow process, but one that over time can reduce anxiety and overthinking.