Breaking the Broken Record
The more time I spend meditating, the more aware I become of the broken record that spins in my mind. According to recent research, I have more than 6,000 thoughts per day (and so do you). But how many of these thoughts are actually new? And how many are just repetitions of yesterday’s mental chatter?
According to every google search result I could find, 90-95% of our thoughts are repetitive. The articles claiming this name two particular sources but offer no detailed citations, and no amount of googling on my end could turn them up. So perhaps it is true that 90-95% of our thoughts are repetitive. Or perhaps this statistic itself is a metaphor for the phenomenon in question. Perhaps this statistic was merely an estimate or idea posited by someone, then repeated by someone else, and repeated yet again—over and over until it was taken for fact.
We do this, too, within our own minds—repeating everything from observations and hopes to fears and grudges over and over until they cement into reality. But if I’m going to play a broken record to myself, I figure I might as well start with a really good line. So this week, when the broken records of symptom cataloguing and loss recounting click on, I’m interrupting them with a more helpful repetitive thought, borrowed from Mark Nepo: “I am the flame of life living in this body.”
In other words, I am more than my headache, my brain fog, or the history of this past year. I am alive, right here and now. I am awareness, with the space to hold all of this and more.
When I’m feeling playful, I sometimes take a more musical route out of my self-limiting, repetitive thoughts by rapping “I got 99 feelings, but a headache’s only one” to the tune of Jay-Z’s “99 problems” (a significant improvement over the original lyrics, in my opinion.) And then I take up that invitation and notice what else I’m feeling, sensing, and experiencing. I like to start with my hands or feet.
I don’t know exactly what the magic is that makes this true, and I don’t know if it’s true for anyone besides me, but when I give my attention to the feeling of my feet moving slowly across the ground or the sensation of my palms opening to the air around them, an electricity runs through my whole body. The aliveness of my hands and feet is like a portal through which I can drop, splashing into a warm ocean of awareness, aliveness, and abundance.
What thoughts invite you into deeper awareness and a sense of your own aliveness? What thoughts yank you away from that spaciousness and into cognitive clutter? What more helpful thoughts might you repeat to yourself?