Reason #332: The Cure for the “Noisy Brain”

Posted at June 24, 2010

I have often found that I am at my worst when I am judging or prejudging, worrying and basically being impatient, bored and dissatisfied with life…AND blaming everyone else for my plight. I will call this attitude, or mindset, the noisy brain, or the brain that just won’t shut up. So what is the cure for this malady? It seems that a noisy brain is most often a nosey brain. One that wants to poke and probe into the affairs of others. Why? Because “they” are the reason for my unhappiness, no less! Here in Costa Rica, for me it is always those Latinos speaking that confounding language, Spanish, I believe they call it, and expecting “me” to return the favor, or those damn ticos drivers and their habit of being “mal parqueado” (that means, parking you car in the middle of the street and using your “flashers” as if that makes it allright)…or, those hotels with their insistence of always being “prepaid” for every reservation…or, “the kids” who expect me to drop everything on a moment’s notice and drive them to whatever they feel is more important than what I am doing! Or, well, believe me, I could go on. See, this morning my brain is quite noisy. The cure? Suspension. Suspend all judgements, suspend the very concept of time (for it is our preoccupation with the clock that leads to impatience in the first place), suspend the idea of being bored…and just be. Most people would probably call this exercise meditation. I liked the part in the book, Eat, Love, Pray, where Liz Gilbert’s Balinese guru showed her the secret Balinese meditation method. It consisted of just sitting for prolonged periods of time with nothing on or in your head except a great big smile. So rather than meditation, maybe you could think of it as just being happy with what you have, where you are, who you are and with the general state of the world. Stop trying to fix it, or condemn it, and for god’s sake, stop worrying about it. Worrying never fixes anything, only makes it worse. The cure for the noisy brain…just shut up and smile.