As many of us are aware, one of the biggest sources of suffering in life is negative thoughts, specifically self-criticism. As with so many other forms of pain, mindfulness meditation practice can help us to find more ease with this.
As perhaps you have experienced, mindfulness meditation has us cultivate an attitude of friendliness, acceptance, warm-heartedness, and spacious non-judgmental matter-of-factness, both for what we pay attention to when meditating, and for ourselves as meditators. This is counter to an inner critic’s character of hostility and rejection.
Also, for many people, the uncomfortable painful feelings that arise in the body (like tightness in the chest or heat in the face) when we feel shame, hurt, fear, and other challenging emotions often automatically triggers physical experiences of collapse and inner conversations that attack others or ourselves. Practicing mindfulness of the body can help us to simply tolerate these somatic feelings, letting them be deeply and openly felt with care, while decoupling them from extra suffering-creating steps.
The heightened awareness of mindfulness can help us to notice the first signs of negative thinking – for example, tightness or pressure in the body, or a harsh tone or familiar critical concepts in our mental talk – and be aware that they are happening before they escalate and become overwhelming. And because practicing mindfulness meditation means cultivating the ability to be more intentional about what we pay attention to and in what way, it can help us when negative thoughts do pop up to stay conscious, to chose to be guided by values and intentions, and to redirect our attention to something more positive, rather than, again, getting hijacked into an escalating loop of automatic destructive thinking patterns.
When we pay close attention to our bodies and minds, we directly experience how exhausting and painful negative thinking can be. We observe how we can allow such thought to arise and pass without getting lost in them, and we have less of an unquestioned assumption that our inner critics must be listened to in order for us to function, improve, or stay safe. We notice that we can actually be effective, get results, make good decisions, and grow while also staying spacious, easeful, and self-friendly. And, thankfully, these realization arise not from moral or intellectual struggling with ourselves, but from simple mindful observation of what works and how.
When we don’t play close attention to negative thinking, it seems real, compelling, dominating, important, and compressing, like a heavy and solid brick weighing down on us or pressure pressing in on us. We often find more spaciousness, clarity, and freedom, however, when we look directly at negative or critical thoughts in our minds with meditative awareness. They become less something inside of and driving us, and more something in front of us to simply be aware of and examine. We can start to notice that our self-critical thoughts arise on their own, without our conscious deliberate intention or choice.
Instead of believing “I am a failure” as an unquestioned truth, a person being mindful can instead just be aware, “I am having the thought that I am a failure” and experience some more spacious ease with the judgment.
When we do this, we don’t mistake our self-criticisms for Truth with a capitol T, as something permanent, defining, or inescapable that we must take seriously. We start to see negative thoughts more as passing events that are impersonal, as just a “blah blah blah”, as simply a flow of electrical activity happening in the brain. We can start to treat our negative verbal thinking like any another sensory experience, like feelings in the body that come and go, or like listening to ocean waves outside of ourselves or a repetitive song on the radio. This disidentification also helps us reduce secondary self-judgment for negative thoughts existing at all, “Other people don’t have thoughts like this, only me because I do poorly at life”.
In general, often when we look closely at difficult, painful thoughts, they pop like a bubble. Even the harshest of thinking can evaporate or dissipate as easily as steam or smoke, and come to seem as transparent as clouds in the sky. We learn that negative inner conversation are not like words written in stone, as they at first seem – they are not even words written in sand – but they are actually more like words written on water, gone in a second if we allow them to be.