A positivity technique that I sometimes lead is asking questions adapted from Byron Katie’s “The Work”, first introduced in her 2002 book Loving What Is. With this technique, we take a belief that we hold and examine how certain we can be that it’s actually true, and what effect believing it has on our life. One of the sections that I go through when I lead this contains the questions, “Is this thought my friend?”, “Is this a friendly belief?”, and, “If someone was outside of me were saying this thought, would they be being a friend?”.
After guiding this technique a couple of months ago, those questions in particular have stayed with me, and, at times when I’ve noticed myself having a thought, I’ve asked myself one of them. It’s felt like a powerful practice, and it seems to have tangibly led to more of a feeling of comfort and openness.
One thing I’ve often noticed is that I frequently speak to myself with a desire to be helpful – to help me avoid embarrassing myself, making unnecessary mistakes, and so on – but more roughly and more commandingly than is necessary. The voice in my head has had a friendly intention, but has not fully been speaking in a friendly way. Not surprisingly, I think this mirrors the way my parents often spoke to me when I was young. When I’ve noticed myself speaking to myself that way, I have said, “Thank you for the good intentions, and no thank you for the tone.”
There are two obvious ways I see this practice as connected with mindfulness meditation. The first is that my ability to even notice that I am thinking has been made possible by my history of meditation practice.
When people are new to meditation, it seems common to believe that noticing a lot of thinking – while trying to meditatively focus attention on the breath, the body, external sounds, or whatever – means that something has gone wrong and that a person is “meditating wrong.” I have often explained that spacing out and getting lost in thought is “bad meditation,” but realizing that we have started thinking and returning to what we’re trying to pay attention to is “good meditation.” It is actually useful to begin becoming more aware of when we’re thinking, and one reason that awareness is helpful is that it enables a practice like asking whether our thoughts are being our friends.
I also often emphasize that the mind state we are aiming to cultivate in mindfulness meditation is one of accepting and patient friendliness with what we’re aware of as we meditate, with ourselves as meditators, and with the whole process of meditating. Setting that warm-heartedness as a goal makes it easier to notice experiences that fall short of it, like thoughts that are not friendly.
For me, the simple friendliness check in questions have been both a product of meditation practice and a natural extension of it.
If any of this resonates, I’d invite you to try it yourself – the next time you notice that you are thinking, simply pause and as yourself: “Is this thought being a friend to me?”