What keeps you up at 2am?

Sometimes we have serious stuff on our mind and it’s difficult to escape.   Teaching and practicing mindfulness I often explain how we can choose what thoughts we engage with.   So when I noticed I’d been triggered, I absolutely, categorically decided that it was a temporary situation and really wasn’t worth worrying about.

Having sent that specific instruction to my brain, what part of the mind then came back and decided to pencil in a 1.30am discussion?  I didn’t set an alarm to contemplate it, I was literally awoken to witness an endless streams of thoughts.

With the knowledge that our true experience is often found in the body, I tuned into the sensations to reflect on how I was experiencing the situation.  Locating a type of nausea, I wondered whether I was stressed or anxious and this prompted the age old question of the difference between the two.   Maybe a question for another 1.30am session.

However, as I pondered the experience of emotions, the mind presented me with a couple of memories that looked very similar to the current situation.   I realised that the really simple answer was that someone had hurt my feelings.   However, I wasn’t acknowledging or dealing with this, I was wrapped up in the fallout of the bruised ego.  Patterns of striving to prove myself, maybe to win back the approval I thought I’d lost.  At the same time I was experiencing patterns of wanting to withdraw like a petulant child.

One of the principles of mindfulness is that when we see these patterns we know that the mind is bigger than the issue we’re contemplating as we’re able to hold it in awareness.  This is very different to dismissing it.  

What’s really clear to me on reflection is that as the classic book states, the body really does keep the score.   So can the mind tell us that we just need to move on or do we need to acknowledge our experience.  It seems to me that if we don’t honour our experience, the 1.30am meeting is inevitable.