Monkey Mind on Fire
As I got ready for our online Anxiety Management group to begin, I smoothed out my hair and put on deodorant which was unnecessary but also very necessary. I wrapped a fuzzy rainbow scarf around my neck because I thought it made me seem both professional and cozy. I waited for my people to show up. My people? I’m not a cult leader. What do I call them? My students? My participants? A bunch of humans who were as terribly anxious as I was?
It was March of 2020 and only our second time meeting — so the group hadn’t quite gelled yet. I kept my camera off and watched, like a creeper, as they waited for the class to start. They were not talking to each other, or even acknowledging that anyone else was on the screen. Everyone suddenly found their cuticles to be fascinating. Hydration became the utmost priority. I finally clicked my video on and waved like a Muppet, intensify the impact by waving with both arms.
(Damnit, why can I not be cool for one single second?)
“Let’s breathe for a moment shall we?”
I guided them through a meditation. I pretended this was for them, but really taking time to breathe at the beginning of class helps my nerves to settle. I talked them through each inhale and exhale, and we practiced compassion for ourselves when our minds ran off to obsess about something.
“I am excited about the topic of this class,” I said when they opened their eyes again. Bridget stretched and opened a yogurt. Denise grabbed a notebook, poised to take notes.
“People have long described their Monkey Mind - imagining it as this scrappy monkey who is swinging from one thing to another, screaming with little provocation, and refusing to sit still without screaming and picking at her own fur.”
They nodded at me. Relatable content.
Beyond this being an adorable image, what happens with the term Monkey Mind is that it incites compassion. We don’t blame monkeys for being loud and scattered. We don’t get mad at them. It’s part of their charm, we adore how wild they are. We don’t expect them to have the emotional constitution of a tree sloth. This is simply how it is. And so we try to do the same with our minds. We commit to working with the wildness of it.
About ten years earlier, I had been sitting in my therapist’s office when she said something that changed everything. She was sitting in her swivel chair and I was across from her on the couch, clutching a tasseled pillow to my chest with the full knowledge that my body language was sending some sort of therapy Bat-signal: I’M REALLY FUCKED UP.
Which I was. I was hounded by anxiety, spending much of my life in a panic about what would become of me. I was having three or four panic attacks a day. I was rambling to my therapist about how my mind was all over the place. I could not control it and that it was torture to live with. She pushed up her glasses and said to me:
“You know that you are separate from your thoughts, right? That you don’t have to react to them, you can just let them go on by. They are a different thing than you.”
I almost dropped the pillow. No, I absolutely did not know this. My mind felt so overwhelming, so dangerous, and so essential to who I was. But if I wasn’t my thoughts, who the hell was I? I wasn’t sure, but that seed of an idea changed everything.
Back in our online class, Pete unmuted himself. “So yeah, the mind is going to swing from branch to branch because we have, in many ways, trained it to do that. I’m a Marine and we have rewarded the mind for doing that. That’s how we stay alive, how we keep our team alive. We’re watching for the enemy. That hyperawareness means that we have avoided danger and death. So it’s a good thing.”
I’ve worked with Veterans for about five years now, and I love it when they challenge me. It’s the importance of realizing that things are not just black and white, good and bad. Life is nuanced and complicated.
“Exactly,” I said. “And that’s why it’s so hard to create new mental habits for ourselves. Because multi-tasking can be incredibly helpful. You kept the rest of your platoon alive. You submitted that presentation and bought a birthday gift and remembered that your cousin’s girlfriend is allergic to shellfish. You’ve stayed alive by wondering if that situation is safe and if that person is trustworthy. We’ve been rewarded over and over again by thinking our way through challenging situations. We’ve indulged the worry and the obsession with the past and future. The monkey is useful, but even monkeys get burned out.”
One way to give that monkey a break is to meditate and let her sit and count beads or breaths. She’ll scamper away every seven seconds because she’s a monkey, but you are brave and persistent enough to call her back. You can train her with a new trick — the trick of being in the present moment.
We can choose to shift our frustration with our wild mind to understand that is simply How It Is. Many religions talk about the such-ness of things. Mahayana Buddhism calls it Tathata. Meister Eckhart the Christian theologian talks about the Isness - the way to see the inherent sacredness of everything that exists. But this isn’t about any religion. It’s simply the way things are. The mind swings. Let’s not attach judgment and instead, accept that essential nature. From that point of acceptance, we can work with the reality in front of us.
I looked at the reality in front of me - and saw people in the squares on my screen. Was I making sense? This is the painful part of doing things online. I can only read body language from the shoulders up. Were they actually interested? Or is there a YouTube tab open and they are actually just intrigued by how Bre Larson makes overnight oats? I kept going.
“This is why we are here — we need to understand the ways in which we stand in our own way before we can let ourselves move forward. Because yes, there are absolutely real problems that we face every day. And then there are those ways in which we make life harder for ourselves. We can’t usually do much about the cancer and the pandemics and the unexpectedly high car repair bill. But we can get out of our own way so that we don’t make all of that worse. And that’s what we are doing here.”
The term Monkey Mind comes from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. It’s an ancient text, written in 400 CE. Patanjali calls it Chitta vritti in Sanskrit. I find reassurance in this ancient text because it means that our minds have always been scattered like this, even before the modern obstacles of Twitter and YouTube.
This is just the normal state of the human mind. It swings from branch to branch, wild and energetic, chattering and screaming. But we can work with those cute little primate assholes. We can train the monkey to focus and strengthen our muscles of attention.
Sam had been quiet, taking it all in. Eventually, he unmuted himself and said, “yeah well, I definitely feel like my mind is a monkey who is swinging from branch to branch - but these days, that monkey is also upside down and on fire.”
I watch everyone on-screen light up with smiles and laughter and profound recognition. Something clicked. Because that’s exactly who we are, this group of us who have chosen to gather together on this screen on Tuesday nights. We are Fire Monkeys.
We come in hot and we burn bright.
I grinned at them, and I thought: yeah, but at least we are on fire together.
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