Learning How to Talk to Yourself

I was reading some talks today by some teachers who were saying that you have to accept whatever comes up in the present moment, because the present moment is shaped by past causes and conditions, and you can’t do anything about them. If you’re in a bad mood right now, it’s not your fault. If you’re in a good mood, it’s not your fault. So you have to be kind with yourself; be gentle with yourself; don’t pass judgment.

That attitude makes it impossible to learn.

As the Buddha said, there are some things you’re doing right now that are shaping right now; some things do come in from the past, influences from your past actions, but they don’t totally determine what you’re experiencing right now. You play a role in shaping it.

The reason we meditate right here, right now, is so that we can watch ourselves, get sensitive to how we’re shaping things, and learn how to do it better.

Even just the way you breathe—it’s called bodily fabrication.

Then there’s the way you talk to yourself, verbal fabrication, which the Buddha divides into two activities: One is directed thought, where you direct your thoughts to a particular topic. You’re going to think about the breath right now. Then there’s evaluation: Whatever you’re thinking about, you make comments on it, whether it’s good or bad, how it might be changed, how it might not be changed, that kind of thing. In this case, evaluate how you might make the breath more comfortable and interesting, so that the mind is happy to stay here.

Then finally, there are mental fabrications, which are perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things, like labels on a bottle. Some of these labels are just words, and sometimes they’re images. They give meaning to things: This is this, and that’s that. You identify what this is, what that is, what its meaning is.

And then feelings—feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

These are things you’re doing right now. And you want to get sensitive to that, because in doing these things in ignorance, in the darkness, we cause ourselves a lot of suffering. And often we don’t realize that that’s what we’re doing.

So we meditate to bring some light to this topic, by telling you to try to think about the breath and comment on the breath in such a way that the breath feels good and, when it feels good, how you can maintain that sense of pleasure.

In the beginning, focus just one spot in the body that feels especially sensitive to how the breathing has an effect on you. Think about how to maintain that, how to spread it to different parts of the body. You have to think of allowing it to go. You’re not going to push it around. If you push it around, it gets pretty uncomfortable. Just think of it spreading through all the little nooks and crannies of your body. Then see if you can maintain that expanded sense of ease.

As for the perception, hold in mind the image of the whole body breathing. And try to maintain that feeling of well-being. That gives you something consciously to do with these activities. So that when you’re not doing that, you’re aware of it.

It’s like putting a dam across a river. You look at the river, and sometimes the surface of the river is very calm. But below the surface there may be a strong current. And you’re not going to know that current until you try to put a dam across the river and you run into it. You become conscious of the current in the same way when you say, “I’m going to breathe this way, think about the breath in this way, try to maintain a perception of the breath in this way.” And the mind says, “No, I’m going to go someplace else.”

All too often, as we go through life, we don’t know what we’re doing, because we haven’t put up any boundaries. So here the boundaries are useful for becoming aware.

As Ajaan Lee says, the big issue among those three fabrications is verbal fabrication—how you talk to yourself. We can make ourselves really miserable by the way we talk to ourselves. But we can also make ourselves happy, even in the midst of bad situations. If you adopt the right attitude, you find that you can put up with all kinds of things.

That’s why we have the stories of those monks and nuns in Tibet who were tortured and imprisoned, but were able to maintain a calm attitude, having compassion for the prisoners and the people who imprisoned them. In that way, they maintained their sense of self-worth.

So look at the way you talk to yourself.

Once you get sensitive to talking to yourself in the meditation, try to be sensitive to how you talk to yourself for the rest of the day. You can talk yourself out of certain moods; or if the mind seems to be like a crowd, bent on making you miserable, at the very least you don’t have to give in to the crowd.

If you’re feeling lonely, you can ask yourself, “Why do I not like being alone?” See what the mind says. Tell yourself you don’t have to believe everything the mind says; just try to get clear about what its reasons are. And give it alternative reasons for why it’s a good thing to have some time alone. To begin with, you get to know your mind. After all, here your mind is the element in the present moment that is sometimes making you happy, sometimes making you unhappy, and you should want to know why. “Why on earth would you let the mind make you unhappy?”

So, when you find out its reasons, listen to its reasons, then counter with a more positive attitude for having the opportunity to get to know your mind. When you’re with other people, you’re spending so much time getting to know them that your own mind gets thrown into the shadows. Feelings and urges come up, and you don’t know where they come from. But when you’re alone, you can see things more clearly.

A lot of times your fear of being alone has to do with the fact that you don’t know how to talk to yourself. Then it’s good to be able to talk to somebody else, at least to get some new input in. This is one of the reasons why we have Dhamma talks—this is the new input.

It can give you a different perspective on what’s going on inside. Think about it—you’re shaping your experience not only now while life is going on well, but as the body gets sick, as it gets old, as you die, you’re going to be talking to yourself. In cases like that, if you’re unprepared, you’re going to be seeing all kinds of crazy things. The mind will be casting around. Because death is not like anything you’ve done before, at least not in this lifetime. You’ve died many times in the past, but usually it’s with a lot of confusion.

But if you can get some control over your mind, saying, “I want my mind to be in good shape no matter what happens to the body,” then the process is going to be a lot easier, a lot less painful.

So while you’re healthy, in your right mind, get used to trying to talk to yourself in a way that’s useful. Get some control over your inner conversation as best you can. There will be some voices that do come in from the past, and you have to learn how to relate to them in a way that they don’t take over if they’re unskillful. If they’re skillful, of course you want to let them in.

Ideas pop into your head sometimes. You don’t know where they came from, but if they’re actually useful, just chalk that up to good past karma. Other ideas come up and they may seem really insistent and really true, but if they make you miserable, they’re not true. There’s something partially true and partially false about them. So don’t give them all that much credence.

And if you still find that you’re lonely, ask yourself, “What was it that you were feeding on when you were with other people?” Because that’s the nature of our relationships with one another—we feed off of each other. Sometimes, when you’re with another person, it’s not so much the other person you’re feeding off of, but your perception of the other person, your feelings about the other person, the stories you tell yourself about you and the other person. You’re feeding off of those.

But now that you’re alone, you’re feeling that you’re starved. Well, try to find some better food inside. It’s one of the reasons why we begin the meditation with thoughts of goodwill, and why the whole practice is bracketed in the practice of generosity and the practice of virtue.

To do those things, you have to learn how to talk to yourself well. Talk to yourself in a way that gives you encouragement that “Yes, generosity is a good thing. Virtue is a good thing. Thoughts of goodwill are good food for the mind.”

And here you are, you’re free to think them. Think of all the people in the world, all the animals in the world, and you have no ill will for them at all. Now you may start thinking of some cases where you say, “I’d like to see this person suffer a little bit, because after all, when they suffer, justice will be done. They’ve been doing bad things in the past.” But a lot of people, when they suffer like that, don’t admit that what the wrong they did has anything to do with the suffering they’re experiencing. That doesn’t solve the problem.

The best thing is to have goodwill for them, hoping that they will see the error of their ways. Because when you’re extending goodwill, wishing happiness, you’re not saying, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” It’s basically, “May you act in skillful ways.” Think about that: What the world would be like if everybody were skillful?

We know it’s not going to be the case anytime soon, but tell yourself you’d be really happy to see everybody act in skillful ways.

Then be prepared for those who are not going to be skillful.

But at least your beginning attitude starts off right, because that beginning attitude is going to determine what you do and say and think. If someone comes along and does something unskillful, you want to hold on to that original intention, that original attitude. You don’t want your goodness to depend on their goodness. If you’re good to other people only when they’re good to you, well, you look at the world. How good is the world? How reliable is the world? If your goodness depends on their goodness, it’s going to be just as unreliable as everybody else. Which is not what you want.

So make your intention, “May all beings be happy, including the beings that are doing things I don’t like right now. I’m going to have this attitude of goodwill regardless.” That doesn’t mean you do what they want. It simply means that you’re going to wish that they be skillful and you’re not going to do anything that would get in the way of they being skillful in their attitudes, in their actions. That’s an attitude you can have without hypocrisy. And it’s a good attitude to feed on.

We do feed off of the way we breathe, we feed off of the way we talk to ourselves, we feed off of the perceptions and feelings we have. So, you can provide yourself with good food here in the present moment by developing the right attitudes, focusing on the right things, useful things to think about, focusing on commenting on them, evaluating, asking questions, answering the questions in a way that’s really useful—true, useful, timely.

That becomes your food.

You find that when you have a good source of food inside, you’re not so lonely. In fact, you can focus on the good food you create for yourself much more easily when you’re alone.

So a large part of our ability to live with ourselves depends on how we talk to ourselves. And the Buddha’s giving us good instructions on how to talk to ourselves.

There’s a school of thought that has to do with the different Buddhist scriptures. There are the suttas, which are dialogues in which the Buddha’s answering questions, giving Dhamma talks, engaging with other people. He gives basic Dhamma concepts, defines them and illustrates them with analogies, images. He also gives instructions on how you should talk to yourself and what images you should hold in mind. In other words, he’s showing you how you can engage in verbal fabrication and mental fabrication skillfully.

There’s another text where they just have the basic concepts lined up in lists. As some people say that that’s the text that has the real Dhamma. What’s in the suttas is just sugar-coating, decorations. But the basic concepts on their own don’t tell you what they’re useful for, when they should be useful, when they should not be useful. Yet the Buddha said of his teachings that some of them are true across the board and some of them are useful only at certain times and should not be used at other times. Looking just at the lists, you’re not going to get a sense of that.

But watching the Buddha in action in the suttas as he engages other people, you do get a sense that, “This is the time for this concept. This is the time for that one. This is how you should talk to yourself. These are images, perceptions you should hold in mind.” That’s where the best instructions are. That’s what the focus is—how to shape the present moment in a skillful way—to focus on the role that your present moment actions have in determining whether or not you’re going to suffer right now.

So let’s come back to, “what are you doing right now?” You could focus on restrictions and problems you have that seem to be coming back again and again and again. And a lot of those do come from your past actions.

But there are other ways you can breathe, other ways you can talk to yourself, other ways you can hold images in mind, focus on feelings in different parts of the body, different parts of the mind, that ensure that you don’t suffer in the present moment, regardless of what’s coming in from the past.

As you experiment with these things, this is how you learn. Which is why it’s important to realize that what’s happening to you right now, what you’re doing right now, is not totally determined by the past. If it were determined, you couldn’t learn anything; nobody could learn anything. The Buddha wouldn’t have been able to learn the Dhamma to teach us.

But because you can change things in the present moment, and notice, “When I change the way I do this, I change the way I do that, the results get better or the results get worse,” then you learn.

On some days it seems like everything is worse, worse, worse. But you can tell yourself, “At least I’m developing the virtue of patience, the virtue of endurance, determination. I’m going to stick with this.”

As I said this afternoon, it’s like being a hunter. Some days you go down to the spot where you usually see game, and there’s game. Some days you go down to the spot and: nothing. You don’t say, “Well, that was a bad choice right there. I’ll just stop hunting.” That doesn’t help. Maybe you have to go to another spot. Maybe you just say, “It just happens to be a bad day for the game.” But you keep at it. And over time, things will become more clear. This is where it’s different from being a hunter, because being a hunter is pretty random, but the mind does have its patterns.

Still, though, the mind is complex, so it’s going to take a while to learn its patterns. But you’re not going to learn them by giving up. Just keep at it, keep at it. And try to be as observant as possible.

That’s why the Buddha said that what he looked for in a student was not that they be clever or smart. He looked for someone who was honest and observant. You’re honest with yourself about what you’re doing, and you observe. You make a mistake, you recognize, “This is a mistake, I chose something wrong. I had the ability to choose.”

This is why the Buddha said that when you see your own foolishness, you are to that extent wise. You realize you were foolish because you did have a choice, but you made the wrong choice. And you realize that you have the ability next time around maybe not to make the wrong choice.

That’s how you learn.

If you believe that everything is predetermined from the past, then there’s no foolishness. Some people like that. They say, “Well, nobody can accuse me of being a fool or acting in a foolish way.” But then again, you don’t learn. And you keep on suffering.

Ideally, you realize, “Okay, I made a mistake when I didn’t have to. I don’t know yet why I did that. I may not know yet what the alternatives were. But I leave open the possibility that I can learn.”

That’s when you’re wise. And this is a wisdom that leads to your long-term welfare and happiness.

That’s the kind of wisdom you want.