I'm Trying To Decide What To Give Free Rent Inside My Brain

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I could see it as soon as I sat down at the kitchen table. It was fussing with something on the ground, perched slightly above on a piece of decayed branch. I immediately ran for my birding binoculars. A hawk so close to my view, a busy one at that, possibly perched there for longer than a fleeting second? What luck!

I skid back into the chair and slammed the binoculars onto my face.

Check it out. A hawk fiddling with something. What is that thing?

I watched, waiting, hoping to get a sense for what the bird was focused on, and it didn’t take long. The hawk lifted its bent head with a slithery, long, skinny creature hanging from its beak.

Whoa! A snake!

This was something to see. I might have seen a bird eating a snake only once or twice before. This bird was on the large side, and that snake was a little dude, so it made logical sense size-wise, but still, it’s a rare occurrence that I would catch a glimpse of such a thing. I was mesmerized. As I watched, it was clear the snake had no chance. It was going to be lunch.

It was. After the hawk spent twenty seconds of dedicated time twitching its head left, right, left, right — ensuring all was safe — it slurped that skinny thing down in less than a second. Then, off it flew.

Birds are cool. Snakes? That depends on your viewpoint. They’re as cool as any other creature out there, but a lot of humans wouldn’t get cozy with one if you paid them. I wouldn’t have gotten cozy with a snake if you paid me a million dollars, though that was back in the day when I was terrified of them, when I had no control whatsoever over my phobia of them — or I assumed I didn’t. Today, I could hold one fairly easily, but I don’t seek out such an opportunity, but I would, but you’d have to pay me a billion dollars because times have changed.

This past weekend, I went to my third all-day silent meditation retreat. I’m getting the hang of these quarterly events that my friend and I now seem to gravitate towards. This time, I went there prepared. The topic was “True to Your Heart”. The idea was to search within for what is true for you, what is best, rather than the slithery ideas and assumptions we give free rent inside us. We’re the landlord of ourselves, even though sometimes it doesn’t feel like we are, and it can easily appear as if the slithery ideas and hard feelings are outside our control. They’re not.

This was the truth I prepared to explore as I arrived at the meditation retreat. What do I want to let live inside me?

These retreats are inclusive in terms of religious beliefs or social background. The woman who leads them will do a guided meditation, give a talk on a common human struggle or journey, then invite us into an extended silent meditation. Then we get a break, then do it all over again. This time, I planned to use the space for sitting with specific intentions and see how it all played out. You go with the flow with these things.

When we take our regular breaks throughout the day, I use the time to go for a walk outside. It was during these walks that I decided to synthesize what had just transpired during our time inside. Two things happened for me.

One, I constructed “The Team”. The Team consists of me as a baby, me as a five-year-old, a middle-schooler, a high-schooler, a younger adult, and me now. We were all involved in constructing various stages of slithery thoughts and assumptions. Every member of my team constructed them to survive being human in the world. I have my team to thank for getting me here, and now they have me to thank for deciding which of these slithery thoughts is not getting its rental agreement renewed.

So, welcome, Team.

The second thing I constructed was a question I now want to ask myself when hard emotions or assumptions pop into my body and brain. What emotion do you want to be feeling right now? Or, what thought do you want to think?

The current thinking on emotions is that they’re not “wrong”. They’re simply our body’s predicted response to stimuli. It would be like saying your arm is wrong to feel pain when you bang it in the doorway. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have the choice to slowly change the way we feel about certain things, or rewrite what we assume about the world around us. To extend the analogy on the arm, we can beef up the arm with bicep and tricep curls, and soon the doorway whack isn’t as painful as it once was. We can also be more mindful when we pass through the doorway.

Already, I’ve practiced this new strategy several times. I was surprised at how easy it was to simply ask myself what I wanted to think and feel. It wasn’t as hard as I’d assumed it would be to notice I had choice — and there’s assumption for you. The stakes were low when I was doing this, and I figure that’s the best place to start. It gave me a bit of confidence in my role as landlord of the flow of perspective through my brain. A bit of confidence stands at the beginning of the road to skill.

My foremost goal for the silent retreat was to open awareness around how I might change the thoughts in my mind so that I can sleep better at night. I have many people in my life right now commenting on the stressful world events out there. I’ve heard countless times that people are trying to shield themselves from the world’s stress so they can function better. The common strategy seems to be to separate oneself from the stressor, or to decide what stays in the mind and what won’t get its lease renewed.

Bravo to that, I say. We have this beautiful brain to guide us through our one pass in this wild world. We might as well live with the best tenants we can. Anyway, gotta go. I’m throwing a pizza party for The Team.

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Hope you're well, friends.