As I look back on the past five years of my life, the biggest lesson I can see that I’ve had to learn is to work with what I have, whether that’s learning into my emotions (especially the ‘negative’ ones) and letting myself feel them, trying to make the best use of limited information or resources, or simply living and loving the life that I’ve been given. For me, this came into particular focus during the pandemic, which disrupted my carefully-discerned big plans and hopes for the year. The most any of us can do is to make the best play we can with the cards we’ve been dealt.
The story from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers that I’d like to look at today touches on a similar theme, but in the arena of our spiritual struggles. It says:
A brother came to see Abba Poemen and said to him, ‘Abba, I have many thoughts and they put me in danger.’ The elder led him outside and said to him, ‘Expand your chest and do not breathe in.’ He said, ‘I cannot do that.’ Then the elder said to him, ‘If you cannot do that, no more can you prevent thoughts from arising, but you can resist them.’ (Abba Poemen 28)
I love this saying because it separates so beautifully what is in our span of control from what isn’t. Expecting to go through life without temptations or disruptive or unhelpful thoughts is silly. That’s just not how we’ve been made. As the story so perfectly puts it, it would be like trying to expand our chests without breathing. It can’t be done. So it isn’t helpful to get frustrated by the fact that we find ourselves tempted to sin or assaulted by negative thoughts. What is helpful is to focus on how we manage those thoughts and temptations when they inevitably arise.
I can relate so strongly to this. For years, my emotional and psychological life was almost entirely governed by my ‘automatic negative thoughts’ — those scripts that run on a loop that tell us we aren’t enough or that we’re too much, or that the good things in the world can never happen for us for one reason or another. Later, I learned to recognize them for what they were, but, like the young monk who visited Abba Poemen, would feel so angry and frustrated, and sometimes even ashamed, that they still arose. It took a lot of hard lessons to learn that I had to accept their existence as a given of my life and put my focus and energy on how to manage them when they arose.
One of the most helpful practices I’ve encountered for dealing with these thoughts came through some instruction on contemplative prayer (likely either from Thomas Keating or Cynthia Bourgeault). The ‘problem’ of thoughts comes up in most contemplative or meditative practices, as left to its own devices, our minds will make thoughts, and so meditating can very quickly devolve into thinking. The metaphor I found helpful was to think of the process as being like lying on the grass in the Summer, looking into the sky. Thoughts are like the clouds that will inevitably float through our field of vision. It’s natural to notice them and maybe even spend a second or two thinking about what they look like. But, those clouds will soon move out of sight. We don’t become attached to the clouds. In the same way, we can acknowledge our thoughts, but then let them go and float away. And, you know what, that’s what happens. Not only did this help my attitude towards contemplative prayer, but it has also become a helpful metaphor for dealing with my unhelpful thoughts. They will appear, and I can notice and acknowledge them, but if I don’t fixate on to them, they go away on their own. They only become a problem when I latch on to them and let them carry me away.
Thoughts happen, and more of than we’d like, they aren’t helpful ones. We may not be able to stop them, but we can stop them from controlling us.
Matthew Root 