Working with Difficult Thoughts
It has been just over a year since I began my private practice of spiritual teaching and companioning. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that just as I am learning a new way to work with individuals around healing developmental trauma, more people are coming to work with me to explore their inner lives, their sense of spirituality and the obstacles that get in their way. By far, the most common “obstacle,” the greatest source of suffering, comes from the world of thoughts: unworthiness, fear, grief, anxiety, and so on.
I recently came across a beautiful teaching about thoughts that strongly resonates with what I am learning about healing trauma and with what I know from mindfulness. The teaching comes from Me’or Eynayim, the late 18th century book by Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl. (Rabbi Art Green just published an extraordinary translation and commentary on this beautiful book.) The Chernobyler says that when we have distracting thoughts, we should remember that there is something pure and holy in their “root.” Instead of trying to push away the distracting thought, we should try to “elevate” it to its holy form.
This is a common theme in early Hasidic thought; if everything is a manifestation of Divine Oneness, then even something seemingly difficult has a holy spark hidden within. But other Hasidic masters described these unwanted thoughts as tests, designed to see how spiritually advanced we are and how adept at dealing with obstacles. Rabbi Menahem Nahum sees it differently. He says (in Rabbi Green’s translation), “The distracting thoughts come along, seeking to be uplifted (my emphasis). They have not come to confound you, God forbid. You just have to raise them up to their root.”
What does this really mean? The natural response to thoughts of self-criticism, anxiety, and other unpleasant feelings is to push them away. If they would only go away, we tell ourselves, we would be happy and peaceful! But these habitual thoughts have something very important at their “root.” They are patterns, actually strategies, that we developed in earliest childhood to help us make sense of a world in which our needs were not being met, for all kinds of reasons. For example, rather than think their caretakers are bad and thereby jeopardize the bond that is literally essential for survival, children will almost always assume that they themselves are bad. Those assumptions stay with us into adulthood and manifest as difficult thoughts. But the difficult thoughts, as Rabbi Menahem Nahum said, are not there to confound us. In fact, it is the opposite – they came to protect us, to keep us safe. The fact that they do not do so any longer does not erase the goodness at their root.
So how do we lift them up? Perhaps the most important step is to see if it is possible to come into a non-adversarial relationship with the difficult thoughts. This is where mindfulness can be so helpful. Through mindfulness, we can get curious about the experience of the emotion beneath the thought. What is the emotion? Where does it show up in the body? Is it possible to just observe it, be with it, without getting snagged into the stories and judgments about it? (Sometimes it won’t be possible, but sometimes it is.) And most essentially, can we bring compassion to it, knowing that it doesn’t intend us harm, that it may just be seeking to be uplifted through compassionate connection?
This is, of course, a practice and one that can ever be refined. But it holds out tremendous hope for healing through connection with our own holy sparks and what a blessing that is!
PS. For an extra treat, here is a wonderful new song about hope and healing by the Bengsons.