Introduction…
Last week, I was working with a student on the value of taking control of one’s distracting thoughts, and we got onto the subject of the Monkey Mind. That made me recall that I’d based a Sunday morning meditation around that topic, and a little digging turned up the notes I’d prepared for that meditation. It’s still interesting to ponder, so I thought I’d present it again here in text form. I hope it’s useful for you.
Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021
I know that this is Easter, but when I asked JC whether he wanted me to speak to the topic of the Resurrection, he didn’t seem to have a lot of enthusiasm for it. I got the distinct impression of boredom, like he was saying, “Thousands of ministers will be talking about rising from the dead, and interpreting what that means, and how indescribably wonderful it is, so why don’t you do something more…practical?”
I said, “Like what?” and he said, “Like how you work with your Monkey Mind.”
I’m sure you’ve all heard about this thing called, the “Monkey Mind.” To Buddhists, the “Monkey Mind” is the term that refers to that unsettled, restless, or confused part of your consciousness that jerks you around and distracts you—chittering away in your internal landscape like a troop of gibbons hooting down at you from the treetops—especially when you’re trying to “quiet your mind” in meditation.
Zen meditation would have you “think of nothing,” to quiet the Monkey Mind, but frankly, I’ve never been able to pull that off. I’ve managed to “zone out,” and leave my body, but that’s just choosing to place one’s self in a trance state and go unconscious. Personally, I’ve never found any long-term value in this technique, although there’s a long-standing joke that says that guys have a lot easier time with this dynamic.
I once heard a—male–comedian talk about how guys cheerfully compartmentalize their psychological experience of life. He claimed that men actually have a place, in their minds, where they can think of nothing and do nothing. He noted wryly that it drove his wife insane when he’d sit and—literally–do nothing. His mixed-gender audience roared with laughter—because it’s true! Women often find it intolerable when men go to that place of deliberate idleness, because female psyches developed, over the eons, to keep children alive. And yeah, these are broad generalizations—that’s what makes it humorous—but if you have a female brain, it developed through the hunter-gatherer days, where there was always something to “worry about” or a “next step” to plan, in order to keep your children alive. Female brains had to function like this. Back before grocery stores and fast-food chains, they couldn’t wait until the baby was starving to start to think about going out to hunt for food. That’s the survival imperative built into the Monkey Mind. It’s part of what kept humans alive.
A lot of meditation teachers suggest that the monkey mind is the “inner critic;” the part of your brain most connected to the ego, which, in an effort to force you to compete effectively, puts you into instantaneous competition with the people in your sphere and contends that you can’t do anything right. It’s also been suggested that it’s the part of your brain that “stifles creativity,” and “locks you in internal battle with yourself,” preventing you from “moving forward with your passions.”
I got those quotes from a series of articles in Psychology Today, and I hope you weren’t allowing those definitions to move into your mind as “Truth,” because personally, I think it’s a load of tripe. One article went on to say that, “The Monkey Mind insists on being heard, and sometimes it takes a lot of self-control to shut it down.” They also said, “if you want to get anything done in life, your challenge will be to shut down the Monkey Mind.”
Codswallop.
When I first began my journey into meditation, I encountered my monkey mind just SCREAMING to make itself heard. My monkey mind sometimes tried to dangle the choice of Martha in front of me (Luke 10:38-42), the “work first, pleasure later” mindset that suggested that it would be much easier for me to relax and meditate if I got the dishes out of the sink and the laundry folded. The trap, of course, is that the business of housework is never done, and that there would never be a time when there wasn’t SOMEthing that “needed” doing. I got an entirely new appreciation for that Bible passage while working those old programs; an entirely new perspective of the idea of one’s life direction being a “choice.”
For a awhile, I tried to “tame” my Monkey Mind, or “silence” it, or “shut it down.” But here’s the thing; for many of us, it just doesn’t work. It’s like wrestling an anaconda—and I began to realize that I was doing violence to myself, and obviously not honoring a powerful dynamic in my psyche that needed to be expressed.
It helped that I was born in the year of the monkey, so I have a tendency to be kindly disposed towards primates. In high school, my science teacher kept a couple of monkeys—a spider monkey and a Capuchin—and she’d let them out to play with us during class. I sensed that same restless playfulness in the Monkey Mind aspect of myself. I also felt that, since God didn’t make mistakes; there had to be a reason for all of that chatter.
So instead of trying to squash this aspect of consciousness, I made the assumption that God wouldn’t have installed a program that insistent if it didn’t have a pretty important function, and I engaged it in conversation.
The one thing that article got right is that the Monkey Mind DOES insist on being heard—and for a reason. It’s arguably your most powerful tool for mastering focus. In most people, their Monkey Mind is like a loose cannon. But that’s not because it’s being deliberately rude, it’s because you’ve never trained that aspect of your consciousness to work with you.
I began to realize that when I listened closely, without an agenda from my analytical mind, my Monkey Mind was actually asking me, “What now? What now? What now?” and was very much living in the present moment. Being a teacher helped; because, just like with my students, I started answering those insistent “What nows?” with directions like, “Get your crown to gold,” and “Check your grounding,” and “Take a deep breath of relief.”
And it worked!
Much to my delight, I found that my Monkey Mind was a very quick learner. Pretty soon, she was reminding ME to check my grounding and breathe deeply, evincing the “monkey see, monkey do,” behavior which is how we humans (for good or ill) develop our personal habits. She was zipping around, checking on different aspects of my energy system and reporting her findings to my analytical mind. And no, it’s not an instantaneous thing; not a simple pill, to cure all that ails you; not a “quick fix.” It took me years of patient, inner conversation to understand what I was being “told” by that pesky inner voice. It took dedicated time to clear my bad-habit “chatter.” It took a willingness to honestly allow myself to contemplate the shadow side of my psyche, to let myself see and accept what I was distracting myself from; what I was afraid to allow myself to look at; and why. But it was well worth it, because while an untrained Monkey Mind can be an irritating little burr under your saddle, a trained one can be a magnificent consciousness and focusing aid.
In time, I taught my inner primate to identify more body cues, like, “Where is my calm center right now?” and my Monkey Mind would instantly show me where in my body there was a pocket of calmness into which I could tap. I taught it to identify mood states, asking, “What am I feeling in this instant?” and hanging out with her to put word-labels to the sensations. I’d ask, “What stimlated the emotional response I’m feeling?” and “What does that tension I sense mean?” Because I knew that there would always be emotions arising in response to life events; there would always be tension in one form or another, and it would be useful to identify my habitual patterns of thought—so that I could bring them to consciousness and change them.
So, in essence, I trained my Monkey Mind to be my assistant coach, to help me dig out things that needed to be addressed in the moment, and to change my perniciously negative, persistent thought-habits in order to replace them with more forward-thinking, more expansive perspectives.
Is the communication perfect? Of course not. These two aspects of my consciousness are growing their communication skills all of the time. But do I appreciate finally knowing why that insistent, nattering loop of dialogue just won’t shut up? Do I appreciate that vigilant little chatterbox having my back?
You betcha. You go, Monkey Mind!