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Why does my mind try to hurt me
I wake up and I can literally observe my mind blabbering on about the same crap everyday. It's full of negative self-criticism, worries, pessimism and dissatisfaction about things in my life.
Logically, I feel like my life is completely fine. I've got good friends, good family, good schooling and so on. Yet, my mind constantly chatters about how everything is wrong. I wanna go and kill my mind if I could.
I feel rather alienated from my mind and sometimes get sucked into the negativity it spews. It's like having a nagging friend next to you 24/7. This is rather getting tiring!
Will it ever get better? What to do?
Logically, I feel like my life is completely fine. I've got good friends, good family, good schooling and so on. Yet, my mind constantly chatters about how everything is wrong. I wanna go and kill my mind if I could.
I feel rather alienated from my mind and sometimes get sucked into the negativity it spews. It's like having a nagging friend next to you 24/7. This is rather getting tiring!
Will it ever get better? What to do?
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Comments
When you find yourself ruminating like that, simply stop the tape, and insert a new tape. You're already mindful of the situation, that's half the battle. You can develop new and healthier mental habits with effort. If there's any childhood baggage, you may have some anger or grief issues to resolve, first.
Best wishes
Counseling may help you to breathe easier. And if you don't already, you might consider a meditation practice.
Buddha taught that our minds are uncontrolled and filled with various delusions that cause us to generate our Samsara. In order to remove them it is reconmended to first become familiar with them via observation so you know how they arise and can see the futility behind them doing such we we apply the rememdy of morale discipline to help calm the mind and developing virtuous minds such as love compassion and Bodhichitta to imprint the mind with strong good qualities that will help remove our delusions. Finally we meditate strongly upon the emptiness of self and other phenomena in order to uproot these minds from our mental continuum.
The practise of Buddhism is specifically mind training.
http://www.noble-buddhism-beliefs.com/buddhist-meditation.html
a war against the mind is a never ending war.
we learn to relate to our minds whether we are blissing out or our minds are racing out of control.
it isn't that we develop something or improve our ability to concentrate. all those are great, but sooner or later we have to deal with the mind. we can run away all we want.
real meditation begins with letting go of the controller. it begins by letting everything be as it is. then meditation becomes a process of exploration and curiosity rather than another thing we have to do.
from such exploration we can examine and ask ourselves the real questions. all questions center around what am i or who am i? this is examining the personal will or one who is in control.
i'd like to assert that meditation is your natural state of being. not something that is produced, but rather it is our innate wakefulness that we all already have. so in essence all meditation to just stop striving and then stopping the stopping of striving. thus we are just being. in such being we can watch all the phenomena arise and fall. from this we learn to create distance or rather space between thoughts and feelings.
and in doing so we learn what we are by learning/seeing what we are not.
but we begin by allow everything to be as it is. monkey mind or blissed out mind. all are observable. all come and go.
Firstly you have made the first step in realizing how the mind actually operates in an ignorant state, which is common to everyone without a deep amount of practice. It seems that the mind is stuck on 'auto-pilot' and just rushes around like a mad dog. Now you have seen this, you can begin to control it through meditation if you so wish.
Secondly, you pointed out all of these positive things in your life that many many people are not fortunate to have, so try to focus on the positive aspects of your life.
Everything that you experience and feel emotionally or physically in life occurs in the brain, nothing external should control your thoughts, everything is mere perception and you create your hell or your bliss in this life just by the way in which you think. It doesn't happen over night and takes a lot of effort, but you have realized something many people never do in their lives, the brain is one untamed wild animal.
How would i go about resolving past issues in my childhood? How do you develop new mental habits?
If you go on letting the past rule your present life, how can abide in peace? let go of that burning hot coal and focus on the now. look around you at what there is now, what goodness there is in your life.
So many people live thinking about the future or the past, placing time, emotion and energy into the future or past that they suffer and miss out on life as life only exists in the now.
Someone told me after I left a negative situation that went on for years that once they stop beating on you (emotionally, verbally, etc) then you take over and do the job for them. That is the real problem of abuse honestly. So the meditation will help, looking at things objectively will help and counesling will help.
And i can say that even with our monkey mind it CAN get better.
“Seeing thus, bhikkhus, the instructed noble disciple has revulsion towards the mind, towards mind-objects, towards mind-consciousness, towards mind-contact, towards feeling that arises with mind-contact as condition – either pleasant, painful, or neither painful nor pleasant.
“Having revulsion, he becomes dispassionate; Through dispassion [his mind] is liberated."
Fire Sermon
"Logically, I feel like my life is completely fine. I've got good friends, good family, good schooling and so on. Yet, my mind constantly chatters about how everything is wrong."
You can choose to engage in them and suffer or dispassionately watch those thoughts come and go. These thought patterns should lose their grip on you and you gain freedom as a result. Just leave those thoughts alone.
I would suggest beginning a meditation practice; maybe visit your local Buddhist centre?
All the best pain, maybe you will one day soon look at your name on this forum and chuckle to yourself, I hope so anyway with metta
What happens next is your mind says "I DON'T LIKE THAT." That's called craving.
Then comes a bunch of thoughts about why you don't like it. This is called clinging.
What you need to do is recognize that you can fight this process, and you can feed this process. These two options are extremes that will both proliferate the whole mess.
How do you feed it? You think a bunch about why you don't like the thought that arose.
How do you fight it? You think a bunch about why your upset that your mind is reacting to the thought.
What do you do? Take the middle way. Let it all go.
You just saw that your mind encountered a thought and it reacted with aversion (unwholesome state). Now you say THATS OK!! And you let it go.
You just saw that your mind encountered a thought and an unpleasant feeling arose. Now you say THATS OK!! And you let it go.
The whole point is that there is absolutely NOTHING that should allow your mind to become upset. Even if you see that your mind is upset, that is NOT cause to become unhappy. OPEN UP to the experience of being upset. LET IT GO, LOVE IT!!! ITS OK!!!!!!
This experience is what I seek to bring into my life, into every moment of my life, through the practice of meditation. Meditation for me is simply practicing or teaching my brain to realise that reality is not what this chatter says it is, reality just is what it is.
When you are reading this post, just read it. After all, its just reading. These colours on a computer screen cant "make" you feel anything. Just be who you are and do what you are doing and love every moment of it.
Thats my aim.
It's self-sabotage.
And trust me. Not one of us is innocent of this. To one degree or another - we have all done it. And still do, more often than not.......
I must say, in my pre-Buddhist days, when I was still very much on the path of self-discovery, and wrestling with a painful history, if someone had tried to explain the stream of thoughts not being who I truly was, I think I'd have lost what few marbles I had left.
in Buddhism, in my opinion, we first have to learn to put the sandals on, let alone walk before we can skip....
I was addressing the basics.
There are so many idioms and sayings relating to mind, and being in the right one, or out of it, making it up and giving someone a piece of it, that to ascend to a level where we then have to decide what it is at all, is a momentous one for someone in Pain's position to do.
First things first. let's address matters at a level of comfort which might be painful but familiar. Then, one can move on to stripping away the egoistc layers, and get to the nitty-gritty.....
Thoughts, mind, me .... it is easy to understand that our thoughts are not identical to our mind, since our thought processes change all the time, and we perceive our minds as being stable and "made up". A thought in itself does not yet influence the mind. It takes acceptance (involuntary through experience or by agreement) for that to happen. And maybe this is where confusion sets in.
Yet knowing that "we" eventually change along with our perception does not really address the problem. Everything is in flux.
But how is this realization a relief from the pain experienced *in the moment*? We *feel* the pain & frustration, it is real. It is not an *illusion*.
All I read here is that @pain is hurting. Now. (or whenever he wrote the post).
The question of whether we think the mind is separate or not seems to be secondary.
Maybe the "why" in the OP's question is misleading. The mind doesn't have an agenda.
@pain - IMO you have come to interpret your life experiences a certain way. Maybe you had other, more recent experiences that are not quite in synch with that perception, and yet, your original interpretations are so strong, or you have not wanted to question them, that there is a conflict in your rationalization and so you end up in limbo.
This is where you ought to strip away layers of your original interpretation of reality - double check, if it still applies. You change, others change - and sometimes for the better. *Looking* for verification is the first step to working on a reality check. When you, as you do, realize that things are not half bad, then you need to constantly remind yourself of adjusting your opinion from outdated to current. If you don't, you get stuck, and in your case, with a painful sense of isolation that is counter productive to your potential in life.
Taking time out in meditation will eventually allow you to adjust. It seems that these few minutes of daily practice are our only chance - after calming our minds - to double check our perception of reality.
When the pain/frustration hits, remember to acknowledge it, but also try to lessen it by remembering that the cause can be removed - at least to some degree - slowly but surely..... if you want that.
Hope you are feeling better!
You have stated that a person is their mind, the mind is a person, and the person and the mind are the same thing. This completely contradicts the teachings of the Buddha.
The buddha declared all aggregates (the mind falling into is category) to be impermanent, and subject to continuous change.
He declared that all that is subject to continuous change is unsatisfactory and bound up with suffering.
And finally and most importantly he declared that all that is impermanent and unsatisfactory is not to he clung to as one's "self."
When one clings to an aggregate as their "self" then when that aggregate changes, the mind is effected and suffering arises.
Renouncing clinging to the aggregates, and seeing them properly as they are (as not one's self) leads to non-suffering.
All my best!!!
Its not a quick or easy process though but if done regularly is inevitable. There's a story I vaguely remember about some past meditator who was getting upset about his lack of progress. One day he went for a walk and came across a man rubbing an iron bar with a piece of silk. When the meditator asked the man what he was doing the man responded, "I'm making a needle". Meditation practice can sometimes feel as slow and agonizing as making a needle by rubbing an iron bar with a piece of silk, but without doubt change will happen if effort is applied.
I personally feel that giving the OP that piece of information is contrary to their well-being, and it's not what they most need right now.
if a man has a broken arm, and is in some considerable pain, are you going to lecture him on detachment, Not-self and the 5 aggregates, or are you going to call an ambulance and help him feel better?
Don't analyse the arrow. Pull it out. Then move towards construct. But first - heal.
I can understand that the arrow of suffering needs to come out ASAP, and you are right about pulling it out rather than analyzing further whether there is a "person" ( self ) or not.
I my own experience, when I heard that the Buddha taught that there was no personal self, and that all that was happening in my head was an over active thought producing mind, it was a tremendous relief. I had previously thought there was something wrong with ME which added to the delusional thinking i produced. So to go with your analogy of pulling the arrow of suffering out, without analyzing, with that one piece of information, i pulled the arrow out almost all the way, then after months of meditation my mind calmed down. I do not think the Buddha taught that there was no personal self in a philosophical or frivolous manner. Everything he taught was a direct means to relieve suffering. IMO the OP expresses that this person believes in a personal self and is suffering because it affects them personally. Learning that this view is a mistake ( Right View ), will enable this person to begin to realize that they are not their thoughts and can much more easily begin to eliminate the caustic effect they are experiencing from their production. It does take Right View ( understanding ) to pull the arrow out.
pain@,The mind that exists in your physical manifestation is "minding" just the way it was wired to do - similarly to the metabolic functions over which you have no control - your body digests - respirates - eliminates - secretes - "thinks" as the evolutionary organism it has developed into over eons. In other words - mind is clunking along just as it should - processing up to 60,000 thoughts daily - 80% of which are about personal "needs" and "wants". Now, this doesn't take into account the massive amount of information streaming into the brain from the environment of which a major portion is filtered out through "inattentional blindness" in this minding process.
The unobserved mind's function is to look for problems to solve - and can - to our great pain - lapse into creating problems to fulfill its function. Minding has survival as a prime directive - however - when delusion convinces the mind of the "story" of "self" complete with history - memory - regret - bliss - pain - a pathological survival instinct can clamp down on mind, hell bent on ensuring the survival of that "identity".
None of this is bad - it is normal. It can be abnormal - but those classified as such - clinically - have absolutely no awareness of the difference between delusion and reality. Meditation is about training the mind - like body building - repetitive application of technique to shape and control - to a certain degree - never fully (except at death/cessation/nirvana) - but to the degree that one can be "friendly" with mind. Self compassion. Self awareness.
So, as painful as a chattering, seemingly problematic mind can be - it is a great teacher - a great gift - once recognized as a servant instead of a tormentor. You are on the right path - inquiry - do not give up. Seek counseling - seek a teacher - consider our excellent members' compassionate suggestions here.
May you know mental and physical peace.
May
But if you teach inform them that the thoughts they cling to so adamantly are not really theirs to cling to, then they let go of all that emotional attachment, their mind then becomes inwardly peaceful, and they are no longer experiencing suffering.
I see nothing wrong with these combined efforts. Intention is all, and the results will show.
The standard advice is that one must let go of one's thoughts,which works just fine when one is dealing with minor trivialities and annoyances of the day.
In the case of an unresolved major karmic issue, however, another step is required. Unresolved major karmic issues will continue cycling through one's mind and one's life as a pattern until such time that they are clearly and fully brought to mind, sorted out, processed, and resolved. It is only at that point that they can then be properly and fully let go of, released, and healed.
For resolving and releasing major karmic issues:
1. Get a notebook and write a timeline of the significant events of every year of your life and its issues
2. Write down a list of everything you can think of that you have a dramatic reaction to, things that really bother you to the core of your being
3. Write side by side timelines of significant life events in the lives of your grandparents, parents, siblings, and of all very significant figures in your life.
4. Write down what each of them seem to have dramatic reactions to, what issues set each of them off.
You will eventually begin to see significant issues and significant patterns running through the pages of your notebook. Human beings are united in this world by their karmic issues, and generally any group of people will in one way or another represent various aspects of the same karmic issues.
When you can identify the issues that keep repeating in various forms, then you will be able to identify, process, resolve and release those karmic issues such that they will cease recycling through your mind and your life.
best of luck
with metta
Aura
It's also pretty futile.
because the crux of the matter is this:
If you wish to look at what brought you to this point, look at your body now (it's human. That in itself is the topmost bonus).
If you wish to see where you go from here, look at your Mind, now.
Then Choose.
Until one eventually sits down and takes a look at those issues cycling through the extended family/household-of-origin system, one is very inclined to re-enact rather than resolve those karmic issues. In a worst case scenario, one will attempt to bail out of the system via suicide, only to end up repeating the entire system from the beginning in the next lifetime attempt.
Besides, it's a distraction, in many ways.
Then, may be significant, but the more importance you give to yesterday, the less you take personal responsibility, for your today.
Too many people will have the tendency to use the past as a crutch, and conveniently forget they have a choice.......
Children who try to kill themselves are facing karmic issues, most often involving serious abuse.
Adults who are in pain, who unsuccessfully tried to kill themselves as children, who feel their minds are trying to hurt them, are attempting to deal with karmic issues, often involving serious abuse, which subsequently became an internalized pattern.
Detail is unimportant. Judgment of the "tendencies" of other people "to use the past as a crutch" is worse than useless.
The recognition of the repeating pattern, the repeating issue running through one's own life experience, is vital.
When children are raised within a dysfunctional repeating karmic pattern, in many cases that dysfunctional pattern is the majority of what they have experienced and been taught of life. It is ridiculous to judge that they somehow "conveniently forget they have a choice" to think, act, feel, and live completely differently as adults from everything they personally experienced and had been taught of life as children.
The identification of the dysfunctional karmic pattern recycling through one's life is the necessary first step in developing the ability to think, act, feel, and live beyond the re-enactment of that dysfunctional karmic pattern.