Personifying Your Thought-Generators

One of the most persistent challenges present in early meditation practice is the realization & remembrance that “you” are not the source of your thoughts, nor are “you” entirely composed of those thoughts.

Now technically speaking “you” a.k.a. the self doesn’t actually exist according to Buddhist beliefs. There’s no one specific part of you that, if replaced, would mean that you’re not “you” anymore in an all-encompassing manner. The body morphs over time as our cells constantly die and regenerate. Though the mind’s a good candidate for the source of the self, when someone enters a coma we don’t suddenly start referring to them as “the comatose body formerly called Jeff”. And the soul hasn’t been found or detected in over millennia of searching for it. Like when Car Talk once pondered where the essence of a car lives and the best answer they could generate was “the rear view mirror”, upon deep pondering we struggle to identify where the essence of “us” lives, and disprove the idea that we’re a collection of matter & energy slapped together through millions of years of cause-and-effect to create a living, sentient being that’ll eventually run its course and decompose back into the earth, continuing the cause-and-effect (known in Buddhism as karmic) cycle.

But this is really really hard for starting meditators to concretely wrap their heads around, and many non-Buddhist practicing meditators reject this notion for very valid reasons (philosophy (specifically metaphysics) is an ever-evolving debate between many viewpoints after all), so Buddhism commonly discusses two forms of truth. Capital-T Truth, and lowercase-t truth. Capital-T Truth is what’s laid-out above, with much more nuance and thoughtfulness than what I can muster. It’s considered technically correct in Buddhist teachings, but isn’t always applicable in day-to-day situations. Lowercase-t truth assumes a self that can be brought closer to reality through practice & study, which is much easier to work with day-to-day for non-arhats.

So back to the original point. Assuming the lowercase-t self, the first step for many meditators is to understand directly that their thoughts are not actually being generated from themselves, and instead appear on their own. As a result not every thought needs to be taken with the same level of seriousness. Thoughts that provide no value like rumination over past mistakes that you’ve already learned from, fears about a future that you’re already preparing (to the best of your ability) for, and non-constructive critical thoughts about either yourself or others are best let slide, for both your own happiness and to make room for genuinely useful thoughts that you can take action on.

Like many aspects of meditation, this sounds simple on paper but feels practically impossible in practice, especially when you’re starting out. The meta-awareness (awareness of where your mind’s focusing) developed by practicing mindfulness is quite weak at this stage. But to help remember the separation between the thought and the self, Dan Harris’s meditation podcast 10% Happier tuned me into a little trick.

Personify your Thought Generators

A technique I started practicing recently and have found some success in is when I identify an un-useful thought, I attribute it to one of the “personas” that I’ve developed through self study. My personal personas are:

• The Sniveling Self-Critic
• The Frantic Panicer
• Fearful Freddie
• Ruminating Rog
• Overserious Oscar
• Overstimulated Sam

In meditation (and increasingly during day-to-day life) whenever I find my mind churning over a past mistake that’s long been forgotten by everyone except me, I’ll go “ah that’s just Ruminating Rog making those thoughts again”. Suddenly by realizing that the self isn’t creating those thoughts and by attributing them to a third party, I’m able to analyze and deal with them with more clarity than when I was caught up in them.

For me part of the key (and fun) is making these personas caricatures, kinda like the personifications of emotions in the movie Inside Out. I picture Overserious Oscar as wearing a buzzcut haircut, tie that’s way too tight, and a persistent grimace on his face. Not exactly the most fun person at a party. By doing so I’m a lot less inclined to listen to them unless they have something genuinely useful to say. If you’re more artistically inclined than I am you can even draw what you picture these personas to look like, to better picture them.

It’s silly, but I’ve found some early success in using these personas to separate my thoughts from my sense of self. If this is something you struggle with as well, give it a shot and see what you think.