It’s Just a Thought

Tom’s first book is called The Practicing Mind.

I just LOVE that definition of it: “The practicing mind is the skill of learning to love the process of becoming mindful.”

I ALSO really love THIS sentence: “To reiterate, learning a skill, any skill — whether it be physical in nature, such as your golf swing, or emotional, such as how you handle a particular person or situation — in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of effort, without a sense of struggle, and while being in love with the process is a skill in itself.”

As Tom says, learning the skill of HOW to learn how to do something with elegant efficiency, without a sense of struggle, while, very importantly (!), “being in love with process itself” is immensely self-empowering.

Note: This is the essence of George Leonard’s book Mastery.

It’s why Leonard says things like this: “A practice (as a noun) can be anything you practice on a regular basis as an integral part of your life—not in order to gain something else, but for its own sake... For a master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey. Ultimately, the master and the master’s path are one. And if the traveler is fortunate—that is, if the path is complex and profound enough—the destination is two miles farther away for every mile he or she travels.”

So... Once we have mastered the skill of being fully engaged in what we are doing, Tom asks us, where should we aim that skill?

This book is an answer to that question. In short, he tells us that we should consider mastering the ULTIMATE skill of life so we can create “Emotional Freedom through Deliberate Thinking.”

P.S. Although Tom leans on ancient EASTERN wisdom to make his point, he could have also leaned on ancient WESTERN Stoic wisdom.

As the preeminent Stoic philosopher A.A. Long puts it in How to Be Free: “Freedom, according to this notion, is neither legal status nor opportunity to move around at liberty. It is the mental orientation of persons who are impervious to frustration or disappointment because their wants and decisions depend on themselves and involve nothing that they cannot deliver to themselves.”

That’s from a chapter called “Are You Thinking or Being Thought?” in which Tom makes the point that our current mode of thinking is driven by countless old, habitual responses. As you may have noticed, those old, habitual responses aren’t always helpful.

What do we do if we want to create true FREEDOM?

First, we must KNOW that, as we discuss in Viktor Frank’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

(Note: As we discuss in Massimo Pigliucci’s great book How to Be a Stoic, Viktor Frankl was deeply inspired by Stoicism.)

Then, we’d be wise to remember Tom’s wisdom to PRACTICE developing the SKILL of stepping in between that stimulus and your old response and CHOOSING a new, better response.

Tom encourages us to step back and view the situation from what he and many Eastern teachers call “the observer” position. From THAT perspective, you gain an ENORMOUS amount of potential power and freedom.

The Stoics had a helpful frame as well.

In The Inner Citadel, another leading Stoic scholar, Pierre Hadot, tells us: “In order to understand what Marcus Aurelius means when he says that things cannot touch the soul and are outside of us, we must bear in mind that ... when he speaks about ‘us’ and about the soul, he is thinking of that superior or guiding part of the soul. ... It alone is free, because it alone can give or refuse its assent to that inner discourse which enunciates what the object is which is represented by a given phantasia. This borderline which objects cannot cross, this inviolable stronghold of freedom, is the limit of what I shall refer to as the ‘inner citadel.’ Things cannot penetrate into this citadel. ... When the guiding principle thus discovers that it is free in its judgments, that it can give whatever value it pleases to the events which happen to it, and that nothing can force it to commit moral evil, then it experiences a feeling of absolute security. From now on, it feels, nothing can invade or disturb it. It is like a cliff against which the crashing surf breaks constantly, while it remains standing unmovably as the waves come, bubbling, to die at its feet.”

And...

I absolutely LOVE this question Tom encourages us to pose to ourselves as we think about whether our immediate, conditioned response is reflecting our best selves: “If I had the choice to discontinue the thought, would I take it?”

If the answer is, “YES! I’d eliminate that thought if I could!” then the next question is simple...

What do you think the best possible thought would be in this situation? That’s your BEST self talking. Or, as we’d like to say, your DAIMON.

We’d be wise to check in and then follow THAT advice.

Then do it often enough to make that response your new default response!

That’s from a chapter in which Tom introduces us to the organization called HeartMath founded by Doc Childers.

When I read that passage, I thought of some parallel wisdom on the vagal nerve from Barbara Fredrickson’s Love 2.0.

She tells us:“That’s because people with higher vagal tone, science has shown, are more flexible across a whole host of domains—physical, mental, and social. They simply adapt better to their ever-shifting circumstances, albeit completely at nonconscious levels. Physically, they regulate their internal bodily processes more efficiently, like their glucose levels and inflammation. Mentally they’re better able to regulate their attention and emotions, even their behavior. Socially, they’re especially skillful in navigating interpersonal interactions and in forging positive connections with others. By definition, then, they experience more micro-moments of love. It’s as though the agility of the conduit between the brains and the hearts—as reflected in their high vagal tone—allows them to be exquisitely agile, attuned, and flexible as they navigate the ups and downs of day-to-day life and social exchanges. High vagal tone, then, can be taken as high loving potential.”

As I read about the heart’s own sort of nervous system and how NINE times more messages are sent FROM the heart TO the brain than the other way around, I also thought of some parallel wisdom on the neurons in our GUT and how those guys communicate UP as well.

Here’s how Alejandro Junger puts it in Clean Gut:“As the tiny nerve filaments that innervate the neighboring cells join with one another, they form nerves, which are bundles of axons, extensions of the neurons that live in the gut. Amazingly, if you were to isolate these neurons and clump them all together, they would form a mass of neurons larger than the ones in your head. In fact, the brain in your gut is way more active in the production of neurotransmitters than the brain in your head. Serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for the feeling of happiness and well-being, is primarily manufactured in the gut—90 percent of it, in fact.”

What do YOU tell yourself when you are in a situation that is creating a sense of struggle?

And... What would happen if you could reframe any potential negative interpretations into the POSITIVE frame that you are simply in the process of mastering something new?

I’ll tell you what would happen for both of us... We’d ENJOY the process of becoming our best selves a whole lot more than we do when we’re shaming ourselves for not ALREADY being where we think we should be! :)

How do we go about flipping that switch? Tom encourages us to DOC it. We want to Do, Observe, then Correct. DOC for short.

He talks about this in The Practicing Mind as well where he tells us:“With or without meditation, it is necessary to consciously work at shifting your alignment to the Observer. An effective adjunct method to meditation that I use for this purpose is what I call ‘DOC,’ which stands for Do, Observe, Correct. This technique can be applied to any activity in which you are trying to engage the practicing mind... What we want to do is make DOC a more natural way of how we approach life. If, for example, you feel you are someone who tends to worry too much, then try to apply DOC to your actions. When you notice yourself fretting over something, you have accomplished the DO portion. OBSERVE this behavior that you want to change. In your observation of yourself worrying, you have separated yourself from the act of worry. Now realize that the emotions you are experiencing have no effect on the problem you are focusing on. Release yourself from the emotions as best as you can - that is the CORRECT portion - and try to look at the problem as an observer.”

To recap: Do something. Observe it like a good instructor—objectively/without judgment/emotion/etc. Correct it without emotion—other than perhaps some enthusiasm for getting back on the practice track and knowing you’re cultivating the mojo of a practicing mind! :)

btw: Check out the Notes on Timothy Gallwey’sInner Game of Tennis for some parallel wisdom including this gem: “Since the mind seems to have a will of its own, how can one learn to keep it in the present? By practice. There is no other way. Every time your mind starts to leak away, simply bring it gently back.”

When I read that passage, I immediately thought of Michael Beckwith. In Spiritual Liberation, he tells us:“The transition from the egoic self to the Authentic Self requires discipline... The good news is that discipline eventually becomes what I call a ‘blissipline’ because it leads to playing our part with integrity, dignity, elegance, passion, and deep contentment.”

He also tells us: “We’ve all experienced how discipline sometimes causes an automatic rebellion or resistance within us. We don’t like the energy around the word discipline, perhaps because of the place it has occupied in our upbringing, education or religion. However, a healthy view of discipline keeps us on track in areas of our life where we’ve determined to make a change. Discipline is a practice of self-love, self-respect, and surrender that results in freedom.”

AND... This is the passage that I thought of when I read Tom’s line about how HE responds to people who complain that changing their lives isn’t easy...

“The gift of self-discipline is that it has the power to take you beyond the reasoning of temporary emotion to freedom. Think of how empowered you’ve felt on occasions when you haven’t given in to the ‘I don’t feel like it’ syndrome and honored your commitment to yourself. What does not feeling like it have to do with it? The combination of love for something with the willingness to do what it takes to practice it—discipline—results in freedom.”

The Stoics have an opinion on this subject as well.

In his Letters from a Stoic, Seneca tells us: “You have to persevere and fortify your pertinacity until the will to good becomes a disposition to good.”

Translation: We need the discipline to stick with something long enough so we can create new habits that eventually lead to a new way of being where doing the right thing comes naturally.

He also says:“How much better to pursue a straight course and eventually reach that destination where the things that are pleasant and the things that are honorable finally become, for you, the same.”

Translation: Discipline leads to blissipline when what you LOVE to do is what is BEST for you. :)

Tom dedicates a whole chapter to the subject of the importance of discipline. It’s called “Cheating Discipline Is the Pursuit of Emptiness: Joy Comes from the Process of Achieving.”

In that chapter, he tells us: “Practice and discipline are tied together. My jazz piano teacher told me two things I never forgot. One was, ‘The reason we practice is so that our worst performance is acceptable.’ And the other was, ‘In order to be free in the art, you must first be slave to the process.’”

Amen to that! Here’s to approaching all that discipline and effort we put into our lives with the right mindset so we can turn it into the joyful blissipline of actualizing our potential, Hero!