Inner Work - Intentionally and Consciously Paying Attention
Working with mental states, sensory experience + our frame of mind = consciousness, and how paying attention is just as important as eating your veggies.
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In popular Western culture, we are taught that the way to achieve happiness is to change our external environment to fit our wishes. But this strategy doesn’t work. In every life, pleasure, and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame keep showing up, no matter how hard we struggle to have only pleasure, gain, and praise. - Jack Kornfield
I think you can derive most problems from people not flourishing as humans
I can't think of anything more important than helping people flourish or thrive. The reason I think it is critical is that I believe you can derive most problems from a lack of flourishing. Specifically, I think things like regional conflicts, climate change, and obesity while very different on the surface share a common thread in that they are driven by humans and a result of humans not flourishing.
The above quote is from a book called "The Wise Heart" which breaks down Buddhist psychology into easily understandable chunks. I've sometimes struggled with putting into simple terms why I think practices like meditation, journaling, wisdom coaching, reading about Buddhist psychology, and any practice that dives into our inner worlds are so fundamental.
What makes inner work so important?
I think inner work, at its core, is about freedom. I think when humans are able to feel truly and fully free, they are more alive, and able to experience life in whatever way brings them lasting joy.
I think in our culture, we've been pushed an idea that to be happy we need to achieve, when we get certain things then we will be fulfilled. When we make a certain amount of money, or reach a certain status level, or get to a certain stage of proficiency, then we will be happy and that's just not true.
I don't think that means achievement has no place in our lives or is unimportant. I think achievement can be for many people a means of having fun, engaging their strengths, and cultivating positive virtues like curiosity, confidence, focus, attention, mastery, etc.
But when we define ourselves by our external environments we leave ourselves tremendously vulnerable, subjects to the whims and transience of life.
Buddhism offers a practical psychology we can apply to flourish as human beings
Buddhist psychology offers a different approach to happiness, teaching that states of consciousness are far more crucial than outer circumstances. More than anything else, the way we experience life is created by the particular states of mind with which we meet it. - Jack Kornfield
A lot of people think this is BS or at best a delusional approach to living. What we think and how we look at life does not change what we experience or our reality.
While superficially that idea makes sense I think our perception and states of mind with which we meet life not only change how we feel in the moment, consequentially they also influence how we behave, which I strongly believe in turn affects our reality.
Even if that were not true and our external circumstances stayed the same there is something extremely compelling about a game that you can actually win - doing the right inner work to cultivate healthier states of mind, meet life on your own terms, and just feel better on a daily basis.
Inner work starts with understanding the mechanics of how we experience life
Pure awareness becomes colored by our thoughts, emotions, and expectations. With every sense impression and the consciousness that receives it, there arise qualities of mind such as worry, pride, and excitement. They arise between the senses and consciousness, and add their color to experience. These mental qualities and what they bring to each experience are critical for our happiness. - Jack Kornfield
What I've started to find pretty fascinating about Buddhism, is its started not as a religion, but as practical psychology with very specific guidelines that can be followed to cultivate flourishing. In Buddhism they specify a few different things:
Sense Impressions - This is how we receive information into the body. Either through touch, taste, smell, sense, sight or thought. There are six total sense impressions.
Mental States - There are 50+ (or 100+ depending on who you ask) mental states that can arise and color our experience. Mental states are how we frame our sensory impressions (i.e. getting pinched "hurts", or waiting in line is "boring").
Our conscious experience - The combination of our sense impressions and our mental states as we experience life in each moment.
Paying attention to our internal world teaches us a lot about ourselves
To work with our mental states, we have to acknowledge how rapidly these states can change, often disappearing without our noticing. Because we are not aware of our inner states, we feel controlled by outside influences. The world will alternately please us or be at fault, and we will be caught in habitual grasping or frustration. - Jack Kornfield
The first big thing this practical psychology espouses is paying attention to our inner world and those mental states. What mental states we are in, what thoughts show up, when they show up, etc. The theme is we are observing what is going on inside us without trying to analyze it or judge it, simply notice it.
The practical result of paying attention to our inner world, at first, is twofold:
We realize the noise is random and constant - The first thing I think that becomes apparent is that the internal chatter or noise is extremely random. Thoughts arrive seemingly out of nowhere, metal states are fickle, disappearing as easily as they came, and there is an almost never-ending flood of thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
We realize that we are separate from the noise - We also realize that we are not our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The more we pay attention internally, the more it’s like when you're watching a movie and you are distinctly aware you're in a theater vs. the alternative which is when we get caught up in thoughts, it’s like being engrossed in a movie and forgetting you're in a theater. When we pay attention we start to become aware of the theater and treat our thoughts, emotions and feeling as separate - something we are seeing on a screen.
Observation leads to awareness and awareness gives us the ability to strengthen our mind
Inner work is critical because mental states affect our well-being. We can work with our mental states, but only if we are aware of what mental state we are in, and how different mental states arise. Observation and understanding are crucial to any type of inner work.
Training in mindfulness, we learn to be aware of our own mental states without being caught in them. This capacity for self-reflection is the key to Buddhist psychology. When we look at our own mind, we can notice the mental states that predominate, as if we were noticing the weather. - Jack Kornfield
To become your own psychologist,” says Lama Yeshe, “you don’t have to learn some big philosophy. All you have to do is examine your own mind every day. - Lama Yeshse
Meditation and mindfulness are some tools we can use to start paying attention. Similarly, journaling, walking in nature, carving out time for reflection, engaging a coach, reading about wisdom traditions, are all approaches we can take to bolster awareness and deepen our understanding of what is going on internally.
Seeing clearly the varied states of mind you will then have a choice. With practice, you can acknowledge the difficult states with compassion and then incline your mind toward positive qualities like loving-kindness and peace. In the midst of any circumstance you can invite courage and goodwill toward yourself and the world around you to return.
This is critically important because just like eating vegetables and developing the right nutritional habits is fundamental to your health and well-being, paying attention to your mental states, and cultivating healthier ones is fundamental to keeping your mind strong and alive.
A mind neglected is more likely to get sick. A mind exercised is more likely to flourish.
Mental states like fear, anxiety, greed, anger, frustration are natural human emotions that come up, the same way fatigue, sluggishness, disease, sickness, physical injury, weakness, are normal physical realities we deal with as humans every day.
However, when we move our bodies either through activity or exercise and we nourish it correctly we develop a body that is fit, less prone to disease, and full of energy.
Similarly, when we observe what is going on internally and approach inner work intentionally (the same we approach physical work) we develop an intimate understanding of our mental states, which allows us to skillfully build healthier ones.
I've seen too many people I love that are actively hurting from either anxiety, fear, anger, insecurity, doubt, laziness, and a variety of other mental states that don't help them feel good, feel free or flourish.
More than anything this newsletter is trying to articulate the importance of inner work in a very specific and tangible way because I know this stuff can feel fuzzy sometimes. This kind of work is real, practical, and dramatically impactful.
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