Jeena Cho and I were invited to speak about our book The Anxious Lawyer at the San Francisco Law Library last week. We had a great conversation with the lawyers and library staff who attended. Many thanks to the Law Library for the generous invitation.
Not surprisingly, our discussion touched repeatedly on the question of how to manage election-related stress. Whether you’re excited or dismayed about the results of the recent U.S. presidential election, the campaign and its aftermath have left most of us feeling mentally and emotionally drained. On top of this, uncertainties surrounding the coming new administration have sent many people into a whirlwind of speculation and at times intense worry about the future.
At this unsettled time, one unequivocally non-partisan, constructive and practical step everyone can take is to meditate or do a mindfulness-based practice on a daily basis. At our discussion last week, I shared my own primary meditation practice of mantra repetition, which is simply the repetition of a word or phrase in coordination with the breath. An example of an English language mantra we use in our book is “let go.”
Mantra repetition can also be helpful outside of seated meditation practice, during day-to-day activities. My own experience is that repeating a mantra can be quite effective in calming a racing mind and bringing myself back into the here and now when my thoughts run away with me. What follows is a short excerpt from our book, discussing some of the benefits of using a mantra in daily life. Hope you find it helpful.
Repeating a mantra in the midst of daily activities enables us to take a more proactive and engaged relationship with our minds. Rather than following your thoughts wherever they may lead, you can actively choose to refocus your mind on your mantra, thereby directing your mind to a calmer and quieter activity. From this quieter place, you are free to notice your surroundings more fully, focus on the activity at hand, or—surprisingly—even listen more closely to the person with whom you are speaking. Mantra repetition is like taking a scrub brush to the mind; it clears out the swirl of thoughts and associations that generally preoccupy us and gives us a single, simple activity to absorb the mind’s restlessness.
The benefits of giving the mind something to do besides thinking can be counterintuitive for lawyers. As a group, we tend to be very invested in the idea that thinking is important and valuable. Wait a minute, you may be saying to yourself . . . first the authors told us to sit quietly for half an hour a day and calm our minds. Now they’re telling us we can stop thinking so much during the rest of the day, too? When do we do our work? We’re happy to tell you there’s no cause for alarm. You can be assured you have plenty of time to do mantra repetition during your daily activities and also be a very effective advocate and problem-solver for your clients.
One of the primary reasons mantra repetition is unlikely to interfere with your important thinking time is you probably do less of it than you believe. Heretical as it may sound in the face of your legal training, most lawyers can and should spend less time thinking. In general, we don’t need to spend as much time thinking through problems as we do. Much of the time we invest in the so-called problem solving is really time we spend ruminating, or simply repeating the same thoughts over and over again in our minds. If you doubt this, devote a day to noticing what you spend your time thinking about. How much of your thinking is actually related to working out the answers to questions you must solve, and how much is spent remembering past conversations, going over and over the same idea in your head, mentally reviewing others’ mistakes, or worrying about what might go wrong in the future? If you are honest with yourself, chances are you’ll recognize a great deal of your mental activity is simply unnecessary.
All the unnecessary mental activity most of us engage in can be quite fatiguing, particularly when the focus of our thoughts is negative. We may replay a single unpleasant conversation over and over in our minds dozens or even hundreds of times. That conversation may have lasted less than two minutes in real life, but in our minds it goes on for hours, wearing us down to the point where we have little energy for the next challenging situation we must face. One reason mantra repetition can feel as rejuvenating as it does is because we get a break from the endless and unneeded review of past mistakes, wrongs, and worry that tends to absorb so much of our thoughts. When we choose to break the cycle of repetitive and often negative thoughts we so often unconsciously allow ourselves to slip into, we are exercising agency over how we spend our mental energy.
Mantra repetition can help us change our relationship with our thoughts in another way as well. It gives us a chance to see in a very concrete way that thoughts aren’t real. The minute you begin to repeat a mantra, whatever was in your mind disappears, revealing it has no existence separate from your thoughts. You can try this by bringing up a mental image, focusing on it for a little while, and then repeating your mantra. Whatever image you’ve been holding in your mind will simply fall away. That dog or tree or car is simply a creation of your thoughts—it has no physical existence. In the same way, the irritable partner or unruly witness you’ve been obsessing over is literally a figment of your imagination. You have created the mental image you have of that person, conjured it up, and, whether you know it or not, have chosen to spend time with it. Repeating a mantra can not only give you relief from the unpleasant images you may hold of certain people but it can also help you have more awareness of the fact that your idea of them is simply that—an idea that you can set aside if it is unhelpful.
When we exercise choice over what we think, we not only have more agency over what we are doing with our minds in the moment, we also begin to have more control over our mental state generally. After all, whatever we choose to fill our mind with is what determines our mental state. By practicing mantra repetition regularly, you are spending less time unconsciously at the mercy of your thoughts and more time in a settled and quieter state. Over time this begins to build a reservoir of greater calm and resiliency you can draw on in both your personal and professional life.
Excerpted from The Anxious Lawyer, copyright 2016, Jeena Cho and Karen Gifford. All rights reserved.