Why did I say that? What was I thinking?
We’ve all had this experience. Maybe you get caught up in the emotion of the moment and you say something you regret. Or maybe it was an action that you took without thinking. Habits are like that.
One minute you are sitting firmly in the driver seat, in charge of all the controls and the next it can feel like you are a passenger in your own body, along for the ride.
In this post we’ll talk about a practice you can use to build the mindfulness muscle to take back the power in your life and get off of autopilot.
A thing named is a thing tamed.
Though it’s been around for ages in mindfulness practices, the name for this practice came from my reading of the book, The Gospel of Loki, by Joanne Harris. The novel is a survey of Norse mythology told from the perspective of its most “misunderstood” god, Loki the Trickster. Throughout the book, they repeatedly use the phrase, “A thing named is a thing tamed.”
The magic that the Norse gods use to shape the world is the use of runes, which contain the true names of things. This is the idea that just by knowing the real name of something or someone, you can gain some measure of power over them.
This principle isn’t confined to just Norse mythology, though. In myths and fairy tales, we often see reference to the power of names. Rumpelstiltskin, for example, comes to steal the queen’s first-born child according to their deal, unless she can name give his true name within three days.
So what’s going on here, is this power of naming just a thing of myth… or is there more to it?
The Power Of The Pause
With Halloween around the corner, I came across the movie The Exorcist. I find the idea of demonic possession fascinating. For ages, cultures around the world have believed that external entities can take over a person’s body and make them do all sorts of naughty things.
While I don’t believe that there are demons in the world, in the sense that there are external entities that can come into our bodies and take control, I do think that there are useful similarities between this idea and strong emotions or addictions.
Similar to demonic possession, when strong emotions come they can seem like they take control of our body (though it’s been years since I’ve projectile vomited). Also similar to demonic possession, these emotions do respond to intervention.
Let’s talk about the limbic system. This part of my brain can be a bit like a possessing demon, I suppose. To (over)simplify a complicated piece of neuroanatomy, the limbic system makes interpretations of our sense data and determines whether our experiences are pleasant or unpleasant.
When I have strong emotional responses to the world, I have my limbic system to thank.
Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search For Meaning, has a powerful quote: “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.”
This pause is what allows the space for the exorcism of our emotions to happen. It’s our young priest and our old priest, as it were. The practice of naming our experiences cultivates that pause.
Putting it in practice
In the Buddhist tradition, there is a practice of naming or noting, to maintain mindful awareness in the presence of intruding thoughts. In meditation, you might say to yourself “thinking” or “feeling” in order to notice a thought and maintain presence of mind.
This creates a powerful distinction that there is a difference between the thoughts and the thinker who has those thoughts. This is the power to stand up against “possession” by emotions.
This Buddhist practice of noting can be applied off the cushion in a wide variety of experiences with great effect. Similar to the use of runes for Loki, simply noticing the experience of anger, or sadness, or craving grants the namer great power over their experience.
This unlocks the power to respond, rather than to simply react.
Sure the ability to name anger (for example) gives us time to do something about that anger if we want to, but the power of naming the anger is instantaneous and requires no additional action.
It comes from creating a separation. With a simple statement like, “I’m experiencing anger right now,” or even, “I’m feeling angry,” you draw your awareness to a powerful distinction: that you are NOT your anger. That you are the entity experiencing the anger.
This is no trifle, and it’s different from the more common utterance, “I am angry” which is a statement of identity. By saying “I am angry,” you are telling your subconscious that you are defined by anger, just as two and two is four. It blurs the distinction between your self and your experience.
The great thing about the practice of naming is that it doesn’t remove the validity of the emotions, or deny their experience. It just gives us more power in our lives.
Cultivate the pause by practicing the names in your life, and begin noticing the epic effects.
