Taming the Monkey

One of the obstacles to practising mindfulness is learning to still the mind. In Buddhism the mind is described as being like a drunken monkey playing havoc swinging from tree to tree. 

 Do you multi task? find yourself thinking about what you need to do next? Or perhaps you are critical of not being a good enough mother?

 If so, you are not alone, most of us are so busy over thinking we don’t notice there is a self separate to your thoughts. Our noisy mind churns out roughly 85,000 thoughts each day, often with great repetition.

Monkey mind is dominating when we are not in the present moment. Monkey thoughts swing from one worrying, criticising or comparing thought to another. We feel on edge and are letting our lives pass us by. So, let’s get training that monkey to know whose boss.

Learning to observe your thoughts without judgement and let them pass by without hooking in, is hard to do but well worth practising. You could try visually placing each thought on a leaf floating by on a stream or just label the thought as “thinking” without analysing it.

Our breath is a useful anchor. Focus on the breath, notice the physical sensation of the inward and outward breath, perhaps count the breath or use a mantra such as peace. By doing this, you calm the monkey. Now try pausing for a few slow deep breaths. The messages to the brain change from panic to it being okay. Still your eyes onto something and soften your facial expression. By reducing visual information and relaxing your face, you can also induce calm.

If you think of the monkey as being behind all those intense times of stress, self-doubt, restlessness, can’t sleep and so on, it makes sense to learn to draw attention to what it is trying to tell you but hold off on reacting, by checking the accuracy of it.

I recommend you start by simply noticing when your monkey mind is dominating. You’ll reap the rewards each time you do so.