I host Ted Talk Lunch & Learns occasionally at work, and today we watched Matthieu Ricard’s talk “The Habits of Happiness”. It’s an old talk from 2004, but a good one about training your mind into habits of well-being.
Here’s one of my favorite parts:
Usually, when we feel annoyed, hatred or upset with someone, or obsessed with something, the mind goes again and again to that object. Each time it goes to the object, it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance. So then, it’s a self-perpetuating process. So what we need to look for now is, instead of looking outward, we look inward. Look at anger itself. It looks very menacing, like a billowing monsoon cloud or thunderstorm. We think we could sit on the cloud, but if you go there, it’s just mist. Likewise, if you look at the thought of anger, it will vanish like frost under the morning sun. If you do this, again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. So this is the principle of mind training
When I first started meditating they (my app, Headspace) taught me this same metaphor for the mind: Clouds, rain, or even a tornado, above it all is blue sky. We can always return to it and the quickest way to do so is to name the storm (name the anger, the fear, the emotion). It’s comforting to remember even when I am all tangled up in my emotions — I feel like I have started to trust more and more that I will find that blue sky again.
With love,
Natalie