Where There's Stress, There's a Story

But there’s no real decision-making happening, no useful preparation, just another unplanned session of self-flagellation, as we demand more control and certainty from our experience than is ever going to be available to us.

Normally our minds are so abuzz with layers of dialogue, memories, fears and ruminations, that we barely notice we’re thinking at all. Our everyday experience is so saturated with ongoing idle thought that it essentially becomes invisible. We’re like David Foster Wallace’s proverbial goldfish—after an older fish asks him, “How’s the water today?” h... See more

When thoughts are as clear and far-between as they are on retreat, you learn what your mind is actually like—the events that send it spinning, the places it goes when you’re not watching, the trouble it gets into. You start to see the billiard-ball effect a single thought can have on you, how easily it sets off emotions, how those emotions shape yo... See more

When you notice stress rising at some random moment, find the story. It can probably be summed up in a sentence.

The basic idea of a silent retreat is to see how quiet the mind can get when you stop feeding it entertainment, conversation, and daydreams. Instead, you notice what’s happening inside you and around you, and come back to that when you get distracted.

The mind becomes so quiet that you notice the tiniest ripples in your feelings. Our experience is full of some very subtle feedback that normally gets drowned out—tiny gut feelings, emotional residue from thoughts about certain topics, faint attractions or aversions to tiny details like the way your food is sitting on your plate.

With so little noise, you can start to map out the mechanics of the everyday preoccupied mind—how thoughts make you worry and ruminate, and how unnecessary most of the resulting stress is.

Many times a day, we end up ruminating on stressful, unresolvable narratives for completely random reasons—such as remembering a bloody Kansas song—yet somehow it feels like important work is being done. Ostensibly, in each of these mental eddies, you are “preparing” for life by imagining or re-enacting encounters with co-workers, muggers, law enfo... See more

Just leave the narrative unfinished—not that they ever can be finished—and go back to what you were doing before the storytelling started. That’s where life actually happens.