Unpleasant emotions are a fact of life. Sometimes they strike us and disappear, leaving only echoes. At other times, it feels as though we are caught in a storm. The mind leaves the ground, taken by anxiety or anger or longing, and whirls through the air on hurricane winds of talk and imagery, periodically seared by strikes of pain & distress. For a time, we find no purchase anywhere, as though thrown in a stormy sea without land, at the mercy of our cycling patterns of thought and feeling. All our wisdom and will seems to be ineffective. At these moments, our inner weakness is made clear to us: the mind itself can create an inner hell.

There is a way out. Armed with a lightning rod, one can draw down the energy of the storm until the whirling ceases and the mind clears up. The solution is to ground the mind in the body.

There are three steps:

  1. Step Out. Forget about what your thoughts are saying, focus on what they are doing to you, and solve your state of mind first.

  2. Open up. Relax your body and wake up its sensations.

  3. Settle in. Place your attention within your body, keep it there, and get comfortable.

This method works for all people: If you have a body, you can do this. It works at all times: before a storm arises, while it is gathering strength, and when a storm is in full flow. It can be applied at every scale: a big episode to a momentary disturbance. Not only that, it works for any topic, any emotion. Don’t believe me? Go to the Exercise section and try it.

To understand why the method works, we need to ask: where do storms come from?

Dissecting a Storm #

We all have feelings and strategies for managing those feelings. Those strategies are not totally reliable, and when they fail, you can enter a storm. The mind is in a storm when it is looping over the same unpleasant topic so powerfully that even an act of will does not prevent it from returning to the topic. A storm requires only two things: thoughts and feelings.

Thoughts here can be any kind of mental object: talk, imagery, a vague sense. Examples: “I can’t deal with this.” “Not again.” “What’s going to happen to me?” Whether verbalized or not, these are experiences that require thinking. Without thoughts a bad feeling is just a bad feeling; with thoughts it can become something more.

Thoughts in Motion #

Thoughts tend to lead from one to another in a chain. These chains do not travel freely; their path is warped by the gravity of narratives we carry around. Whatever our original intention, this warping can derail it. As a result, we tend to wake up from our musing to find our minds in familiar territory.

Chains can get trapped and loop around: we revisit the same topic over and over like a planet orbiting a star, thinking variations on the same thoughts we had moments or minutes ago. These are cycles. A cycle can be loose, the topic re-appearing only after many minutes, or very tight, in which you can’t seem to think about anything else.

Try it: If you find yourself cycling on some topic, start a count. Every time the topic reappears in your mind, add to the count. You might be surprised how large it gets.

Cycles are Traps #

You cannot have a storm without cycles. Cycles have a way of picking up energy until you’re zipping along that infuriating conversation for the 10th time barely noticing yourself fly by. Feelings come and go, but a strong cycle can take a mildly unpleasant feeling, trap it in place, and amplify it into an intolerable mental angst, demanding relief through distraction or lashing out.

If you accept that cycles are the real problem, half the battle is won; to get out of a storm, you need to want out badly enough to leave those tempting thoughts unfinished. You might tell yourself the topic is important and you need to think about it right now, but this is a trap! As long as you're cycling, your mind is not your own.

Here's an amazingly common experience: Meet a problem that seems unsolvable and unbearable. Cycle until exhausted. Repeat. Eventually meet the problem with a good mood and a clear calm mind, and surprise! You quickly find an acceptable path forward.

Shortcut the process, save your energy. Fixing your state of mind is the first step to success. Even when you want to get out, however, you may find yourself getting pulled back in. To solve that problem, let us enter the theater of the mind at the moment one thought is mysteriously replaced by another.

The Storm's Core: A Hidden Hand #

Have you ever had a thought, and then it just goes away and leaves you in peace? Not likely. There’s always more thoughts. This is the essence of the process called proliferation: the tendency to compulsively follow one thought to another. Instead of purposeful & limited, proliferation makes thinking compulsive & endless. Why does proliferation do this?

Proliferation the Thief #

Proliferation is a thief posing as an entertainer. It invites you into the mind’s theater and pretends to be a simple projectionist showing you the movie you choose, but its goal is to steal your attention, and with it, your energy. It does this in two ways:

  1. Distraction: it continually generates thoughts to absorb your attention and slips from one thought to another without you noticing.

  2. Compulsion: it pulls on your attention when you try to disengage, making it uncomfortable for you to look away.

Proliferation cooperates with narratives to supply its content. It doesn’t care whether they are healthy or unhealthy, or even contradicting each other. Anger, desire, or fear, it’s all the same to proliferation - it just wants them to be compulsive, to absorb your attention forever. A classic proliferation trick: it offers you a harmless fantasy, and once the hooks are in, switches the film to a less innocent but more compulsive old narrative.

You may ask, how on earth do I not notice this? Proliferation has a secret partner in crime: constriction - the mind-closing magician.

Constriction the Magician #

Constriction sits in the control room, turns up the sound and dims the lights. By closing your awareness, it produces a special kind of selective blindness:

  1. Spotlighting: Proliferating thoughts appear more solid, more convincing, more important, and more real.

  2. Insensitivity: It’s difficult to perceive anything else, including what proliferation is doing to you.

  3. Forgetting: It’s difficult to consider alternative possibilities & perspectives. You can’t see the exits.

If proliferation is annoying, constriction is terrifying: its greatest trick is to convince you that you would be thinking this way if you were really free. Cycles suit constriction’s needs: the tighter the cycle the smaller it can make your world. The sick irony is that while your feelings are being manipulated, your mind has so little awareness you can’t even feel those feelings clearly.

A Dynamic Duo #

Proliferation attacks your attention, constriction attacks your awareness. While proliferation has you distracted, constriction gets the lights, giving proliferation cover to pull you even harder. They pump back-and-forth, putting you in the squeeze, all the while telling you this is your idea. Eventually the lights get so dim and the images so bright, you can’t imagine where else you could be or what else you could be doing. Even if, in pain, you wake up, the pull is so strong now you can no longer look away.

Now you know how bad feelings are whipped up through thoughts into a storm. You also see why it doesn’t matter what kind of feeling it is. To stop it, you need to stop proliferation & constriction. If you succeed, you will achieve their opposites: stillness & awareness. How do you fight off these cunning characters?

To Ground a Storm #

You are probably well-versed in two common methods of fighting proliferation:

These methods don’t end proliferation, they just change the topic to something less damaging. Unfortunately, as long as you use thoughts to fight, proliferation will have a great advantage over you for two reasons:

  1. Thoughts are just slippery: Thoughts are fundamentally unstable, they naturally slip all over the place. That’s what makes them useful for reasoning, but it makes them unreliable.

  2. Proliferation plays dirty: It doesn't care about the content of the thoughts, and it works fast. It can argue with you, distract you, or deceive you, anything that grabs your attention.

To win this battle, we have to target the weaknesses of our enemies.

1. Step Out #

Secret Weakness #1. Proliferation doesn’t just want attention. It needs the energy of attention to construct a chain of thoughts! Starved of attention it panics, frays, stutters, and dissolves. Thus your primary goal is to free your attention.

Try it: Tell your mind, “If an elephant could talk, what would it say?” Once the elephant starts talking, pull your attention back to this word by force of will. Keep pulling it back - notice how this interrupts the unfolding of the train of thought.

This is why you need to step out. Forget about what your thoughts are saying, focus on what they are doing to you. Recognize proliferation for what it is, and stop giving it your attention. There’s an act of will there, but to make that effort count, you need to use the opportunity you’ve created to target constriction.

2. Open Up #

Your moment of clarity will go nowhere if you can’t fight constriction for those controls. But where are they?

Secret Weakness #2. The control room for constriction’s magic is in your body! You can feel constriction at work in the patterns of tension and insensitivity in your body. If you wake up the sensations of the body and open up that tension, you will replace constriction with open awareness.

Try it: Watch your awareness. Relax all around your head & face. It might feel like your brain is expanding. Check your awareness. Does it feel more open, spacious, or clear?

If you're really tight or numb, you need intense relaxation. Like polishing a mirror, you need the right grit of sandpaper to make a difference. When it's working you'll gain enough freedom and awareness to control your own attention.

3. Settle In #

The body is a world of sensations with feelings. Sensations aren’t like thoughts - they don’t lead from one thing to another, they don’t exist in the past or future, and they aren’t capable of narratives. They’re just here, in the present moment, feeling good or bad or neutral, always changing.

Secret Weakness #3. Internal body sensations are proliferation’s natural enemy. Proliferation cannot build a chain out of sensations - it needs to jump back into the mind first! All you need to do to deny proliferation energy is to keep your attention on your body sensations.

Outside The Theater #

The body is truly the perfect battlefield for taking control of your mind: simultaneously the control room for constriction and proliferation’s kryptonite. Outside of the mental theater, proliferation has only three tricks to get you back:

  1. Teleporting: When you’re less experienced, proliferation will be able to teleport your attention instantly onto a thought, and you’ll need to notice and come back to the body.

  2. Pulling: As the mind settles, it won’t be able to teleport and will instead pull on you - make you feel a strong urge like you “need” to listen to this thought.

  3. Pinching: The whole time it will pinch you - little hits of unpleasant feelings and emotions like boredom or anxiety to knock you away from stability.

Getting temporarily distracted is no problem. Constriction can only try to desensitize & tighten your body while you are momentarily distracted. All you need to do is: disengage, find the patterns of tension, relax, and stay in the body. You are unwinding proliferation & constriction in the same way they tag-team: disengaging leaves you undistracted to fight for the controls, which helps you catch proliferation better next time, in a virtuous cycle. As time passes, without your attention, the thief and magician both, and all cycling, lose their power and eventually must stop.

Alright, we’ve done as much thinking as is useful. Let’s put those thoughts into action!

WARNING: If you skip the exercise, you are missing the real good stuff.

Exercise: Fishing for Proliferation #

Short Version - 25 minutes #

First, review the long version - we’ll be doing a selection from there. Begin by putting yourself in a place where you are comfortable and undistracted. Set aside 25 minutes. Select one topic: a topic which you habitually get stuck on negatively, something that really gets you going. Go to the long version, set up a timer, and do this selection:

Long Version - 90 minutes #

Begin by putting yourself in a place where you are comfortable and undistracted. Set aside 90 minutes. If you can’t find 90 minutes, set an alarm and get up 90 minutes earlier than usual - the relaxation will end up energizing you. Select two topics:

  1. A topic which you habitually get stuck on negatively, something that really gets you going.

  2. A topic which you habitually like thinking or fantasizing about, something enjoyable that you get caught up in.

Apply some judgment here: you want a topic which will be a challenge, not one which will overwhelm you completely.

  1. Intentionally cycling. Place your attention on topic 1 and allow yourself to get somewhat absorbed in it. Try to observe how it unfolds in your mind, but allow it to rev up and get your mind cycling. Spend a few minutes there. Feel the compulsiveness and discomfort. Get it cycling to the level where it sustains itself, having a life of its own.

Now we will begin a series of grounding steps (30 min.). During each step, actively allow your body and mind to relax. Observe the behavior of your mind as you do the steps.

  1. Shocking the system. Take a shower. Hot or cold, whatever relaxes you. Alternative: do some intense exercise for 10min.

  2. Relaxing deeply. Do three rounds of breathwork (Wim Hof). Guided session here. Tingling or mild light-headedness is normal. Alternative: If you have trouble with breathing, do 10 minutes of foam rolling (myofascial release) or stretching instead.

  3. Relaxing & sensitizing. Do 10min. of yoga nidra. Guided session here. Alternative: If you get too sleepy, do qigong standing meditation and repeatedly scan the body.

What is the mind doing? Is there still any activity associated with topic 1? How quiet or loud is it? Now we’ll further settle the mind. Set a timer for 10 minutes.

  1. Settling the mind in the body. Sit comfortably or lie down (if you don’t feel sleepy). Breathe comfortably and get interested in the sensations of the body. What are the different sensations? How are they changing? Pay attention to any sensations that are pleasurable. As if you were taking a bath, allow relaxation and comfort to grow and spread through the body. Let the mind settle among these sensations and become clear.

Once the timer goes, check-in with your mind again. Is there any activity associated with topic 1? Check-in with your body - where is any tension located? Now we’ll explore the proliferation process.

  1. Playing tag with proliferation. Prime yourself: you’re here to observe and learn. Like trying to hear sounds that are very faint, you need to be very quiet and attentive.

    1. Intentionally, very gently, touch your attention to topic 1. How does your mind react?

    2. Take your attention away from the topic and go back to your body. Let any tension relax.

    3. Remain in your body and note any repeated urges from the mind. Wait until the mind settles.

    4. You can repeat this process as many times as you like, playing with your contact with the topic. Observe the changes in your body associated with the activity of the topic - look for which areas grow tense or uncomfortable. They may be very subtle.

  2. Turning the tables on proliferation.

    1. Now give the topic your sustained attention and watch how it unfolds and grows for a few breaths. How does it feel?

    2. Take your attention back to your body and again note the changes.

    3. Remaining in your body, allow the sensations to relax and become comfortable again. Resist any urging from the mind to return to topic 1. Take as long as you need. Watch the proliferation lose energy as you remain comfortably with the body. Observe your awareness open as you relax. As the tension drains away, watch from the safety of your body as the proliferation you created dies. How does it feel?

  3. Exploring enjoyable proliferation. Repeat steps 6 & 7 with topic 2. Observe and ask yourself, in what ways is the experience around topic 2 different from topic 1? In what ways is it the same? Pay particular attention to how enjoyable proliferation affects awareness and your sense of stability. How safe and reliable is this kind of mental activity?

  4. Review. Finish by reviewing what happened through the entire exercise and what you learned. Seeing your own mental activity more clearly might make you feel rather silly. Remind yourself that everyone gets caught up in the same process: this is what minds are like. Recall the most comfortable feeling you had during the exercise - wish yourself more of that good feeling in your life, and extend that wish to everyone else with a mind.

Dealing in Feelings #

You’re in step 3 of the grounding procedure: settling in. You’re in your body, the world of sensations and feelings. Now what? Well, this is going to be your home base. Your main job is to make this a nice place to live.

The more comfortable you feel in your body, the less tempting those proliferating thoughts are going to look. Once you learn how to do this alone & undistracted, you should make it a habit in your daily life. That way you'll build a fortified home base: able to feel good inside even when surrounded by a bad situation.

This possibility is available to you because body sensations are more stable and reliable than thoughts. It takes more work to change them–you can think a pleasant thought in an instant–but once you succeed sensations stay pleasant. You’ll make your body nice in three ways: developing comfortable feelings, releasing painful feelings, and cultivating skillful attitudes.

Feeling Good #

Doing this will require plenty of learning, experimentation, an open mind and a can-do attitude - you’re in a control room and the dials and switches are unlabelled. You don’t know what all is possible. To develop & spread comfortable feelings, investigate different areas of the body and play with:

Find ways to relax tension and wake up sensory dead zones: if you can’t feel, then you can’t feel good. This all involves thinking and that’s fine - just keep it constrained to what you’re doing right now.

In the beginning it may feel like nothing in your body is comfortable. You might get frustrated and bored. There’s no reason to be bored, there’s actually a LOT to do. You’re trying to renovate a great old mansion you’ve inherited that’s fallen into disrepair. Don’t be discouraged, this is a long-term investment: you live in this place! Don’t underestimate even a tiny bit of comfort, it’s like a little glint of gold under the grime. Once you’ve found it, you know there’s going to be plenty more if you keep going.

Tip: The hands are often a good place to relax to find something pleasant.

Feeling Bad #

Coming out of a storm, when proliferation stops you’ll be relieved, but you may still feel pretty bad in your body. Or you may feel pretty bad in general. There’s three steps to deal with uncomfortable feelings:

  1. Stay in the comfort zone: leave the bad feelings alone, and find some comfortable ones and stay there. This will develop a sense of control that helps you deal with painful feelings without feeling victimized or compelled by them.
  2. Make friends with the discomfort: get to know the feelings and sensations, without needing to run away or destroy them. Engage that analytical mode. What “exactly” is uncomfortable?
  3. Let go: eventually you will find that these feelings aren’t just happening to you - you are participating in them. See them differently, allow them to change, and you may find they evolve, relax, flow through you, or “process” in some other way. Or they just remain there and that’s fine, you can leave them in peace.

Feeling Attitudes #

Comfortable body feelings are intimately connected to positive emotions. In fact, emotions and even mental attitudes create body feelings and are also dependent on body feelings. You can adjust these in either direction:

  1. Brighten the body using the mind: Stimulate the emotion/attitude in the mind while feeling it in the body.
  2. Brighten the mind using the body: Work on the feelings associated with an emotion/attitude from within the body, using relaxation, breathing, posture, or expression.

Attitudes such as goodwill, happiness, calm, confidence, curiosity and determination can all be helpful in creating a comfortable body-space. Conversely, you can use the body to maintain these mental attitudes more reliably out in the wild.

Get Out of Jail Free #

Your actions are ultimately caused by your thoughts. If you compulsively cycle on some topic, that aspect of your life is probably frustratingly frozen in place. A strong cyclic narrative can feel like jail - you have to “finish your sentence” to leave, but this is an illusion - the cell door has been open the whole time. You can keep looking for a “solution” in your thoughts, but it’s like a gambler chasing another jackpot at the casino: the only way to win is to leave.

The ability to ground yourself is a skill. If you practice it well, you will develop the ability to ground any storm. As you become faster and more aware you will catch proliferation earlier, and eventually you will stop cycling at all and storms will be a thing of the past. Your body will become your friend, a remarkably reliable source of well-being regardless of the external circumstances. As you find a home in the body your relationship to your mind will change, and even proliferation will have no choice but to become helpful if it wants any energy.

Think about the worst problems of your life. Exactly what proportion of your time is spent experiencing the actual sensory contact of those sights, words and pains? How much of the misery is made before and after the event, anticipating, replaying, and avoiding it? What might it be like to experience that intimidating & unpleasant thing and then watch it go past, and be gone right there, finished without an encore from your thoughts? What might it be like to walk into a difficult moment without carrying every possible outcome on your shoulders, without even simulating it, simply knowing that you considered the options with goodwill and chose the best one?

Storms are intimidating. Some people can’t move past them, others avoid them entirely. Learning how to avoid storms is not the same as learning how to sail into and through them safely. If you think of yourself as a person who doesn’t get caught up in negative thinking, are there perhaps topics you avoid thinking about, because you sense danger there? Are there conversations you don’t have, options you don’t consider, places you don’t go? Like an expert sailor, which paradise islands might you sail to if you didn’t fear the storms standing in your way?