Calm Your Mental Cacophany With This Simple Practice

Your thoughts bounce around your mind in a cacophony, like the discordant sounds that spider monkeys make from the trees of a Belizean jungle. Unless you can distinguish the tones and other reverberating nuances, you will only hear the garbled noises of worry and overwhelm. Your thoughts need an observer, a Jane Goodall, with an acute sensitivity to timber, resonance, and with an attitude of persistence that will not give up. To tune into your thoughts, stop and notice what’s happening. Resist the urge to judge, change, or fix your experience.

If you’ve never been to a jungle, stretch your mind for a moment. The air, hot and humid, sticks to you like a thin layer of honey. Mosquitos sound like incoming kamikaze planes — the canopy of trees overhead shades you. Be careful to look out for snakes and scorpions. Even though you came to observe the tree-dwelling monkeys, you have to keep your eyes out for dangers on the ground as well. Here in the jungle, you don’t have time to chase your thoughts around like butterflies you’ll never be able to catch. You have to sharpen your sensory skills and notice as much as you can.

Spider monkeys, much like thoughts, stay high up in the trees just out of reach. They are hard to see. If you stare too long, they throw food down at you, or worse. Over time you realize that a hard stare at them…