Let…Be, Go, In

Basically, three things are simultaneously true:

• Being with and letting go of an experience – in a mindful way, spacious, disidentified way – does not reinforce it and in fact helps to release it. “A healthy cry” is a beautiful, vastly important thing
• Being identified with our negative reactions and marinating in them reinforces them
• Positive experiences are not “learned” efficiently so it’s useful to deliberately sustain and internalize them

The points you raise are right at the intersection of key questions in working with trauma: does revisiting the material reinforce it or release it? Check out my slides and talks about the  ways to work with the mind.

Fundamentally, in my view, there are just three kinds of ways to engage the mind, to practice with it productively:

1. Be with it – Observe the mind, experience the experience, feel the feelings, etc. without trying to change anything in the stream of consciousness. Hopefully one does this with an attitude of curiosity, kindness toward oneself, and a certain stepping back – “dis-identification” – from whatever one is experiencing. One could also explore more vulnerable, fundamental, or younger material “beneath” the surface of experience, such as the hurt underneath anger or the old pain from childhood that amplifies or distorts one’s reactions. Through being with one’s experience it may change, but one is not directly making efforts to change it.
2. Decrease the negative – Here is where we make efforts in the mind to relax tension from the body, vent or otherwise release emotions like sadness or anger, challenge and let go of wrongheaded thoughts, or resist or abandon problematic desires (e.g., wanting to get hammered or to yell at the kids).
3. Increase the positive – Here is where we make efforts in the mind to take skillful actions (e.g., sitting up straighter to be assertive, calling the doctor for an overdue check-up), to encourage feelings like gratitude and compassion, to develop useful perspectives and other thoughts, and to strengthen and commit to beneficial desires such as exercising or not interrupting one’s partner.

In effect, if the mind is like a garden we can observe it, pull weeds, and plant flowers. In a nutshell: let be, let go, and let in.

The three ways to engage the mind work together. For example, we need to make efforts to grow capacities to be with the mind, such as self-acceptance, observing-ego functions, or distress tolerance. And we be with the results of our efforts to reduce the negative and grow the positive.

Of the three, the first one (which approximates the conventional definition of “mindfulness”) is primary. You can always be with the mind, but you can’t always reduce the negative or grow the positive.

There’s definitely a place for the common advice people give to just “be mindful.” Still, it is important to do more than simply observe the mind.

What happens in the mind depends on what happens in the brain, and the brain is a physical system that does not change unless it gets changed (usually by oneself, if at all). The brain does not generally erase negative patterns simply because we observe them; if anything, its evolved negativity bias makes it retain negative learning. And the brain does not generally develop determination, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, or most any other positive qualities simply because someone is witnessing the stream of consciousness.

Even the Buddha – someone who profoundly valued mindfulness – allocated most of the elements of the Noble Eightfold Path to the second and third ways to engage the mind (i.e., the release of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the cultivation of wise view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, and concentration).

When we are bothered or upset about something, there is a natural trajectory in which we start by being with our experience. Then, at some point, it feels right to start releasing it. Then, at some point, it feels right to start replacing what we’ve released with something useful and positive.

The timing of this trajectory depends on the person and situation. Sometimes you realize quickly what is bugging you, and you shift into letting go of it and moving on to something happier within a minute or two. Other times, something hits you really hard – such as a shocking loss – and it could be months and even years before it feels right to shift into letting go, and then letting in.

Some people err on the side of jumping too quickly into letting go and letting in, but if you do that, those efforts don’t have much traction. Other people get stuck in letting be, in just feeling their painful feelings, and not making skillful efforts within their own mind to release the negative and replace it with something appropriately beneficial. I would like to think that my approach balances these elements in a positive way.

Mindfulness and my work on cultivation (let in – the skillful development of inner resources) are completely complementary. One needs to sustain mindfulness for effective cultivation: to turn passing mental states into lasting neural traits (the biological basis for psychological resources). And through cultivation, one develops the mental factors that support mindfulness. Additionally, mindfulness has benefits unrelated to cultivation (e.g., coming into the present moment) and cultivation has benefits unrelated to mindfulness (e.g., developing caring for others, self-respect, gratitude, positive mood, grit, hardiness).

Mindfulness and cultivation are both “experiential” in that both of these are ways of relating to our experience. Of course, our experience includes our thoughts – both verbal and non-verbal – and one can be mindful of thoughts, can have thoughts about mindfulness, and can cultivate beneficial thoughts (such as a sense of perspective on the hassles of daily life).

That whole process is very important, but my own work focuses on the third way to engage the mind: let in. This is the active cultivation and internalization of beneficial states of mind – in the context of the other two ways to engage it.

My view is that there has been a lot of development in both clinical psychology and the spiritual traditions of the first two ways to engage the mind, but not as much development of how to do cultivation skillfully. In particular, we have not really taken into account the implications of the fact that the brain changes – learns – in two stages (from short-term buffers to long-term storage, from state to trait, from activation to installation), and without really doing the second stage (installation), there is little or no learning, little or no lasting value.

So here is where there is good opportunity: developing ways to more skillfully “install” everyday experiences in the brain as lasting inner resources, such as resilience, kindness, happiness, and wisdom.

I’ll try to respond to both of your questions together, since they are the two sides of one coin.

Your question is very important, how do we know when it is best to stay in “being with” (or “let be”) mode – simply witnessing our experience in open, spacious, accepting, curious awareness – and when is it best to shift into “working with” mode, either through releasing the negative (let go) or replacing it with something positive (let in).

I don’t think there is an ultimate right answer, it is more a matter of what is right for this person with these capacities with this pain at this time. For me, some guidelines:

• Does the person tend toward being with or working with? So it could be good to lean the other way, or at least be skeptical of what is habitual. Personally, my strong suit was working with and I didn’t like being with my feelings. So I had to push the pendulum the other way for balance, and focus for a while on simply accepting and experiencing my experience without trying to shift it.
• On the other hand, some people might be very good at observing their experience, but the garden of their mind is still full of weeds – some fear and anger, frustration and disappointment, envy and shame – that they haven’t pulled and plus it lacks some flowers – some self-compassion, determination, anxiety skills, gratitude, sense of accomplishment, lovingkindness, or self-worth – that they could have grown. Spiritual bypass. Or even, as you mentioned, they could be invested in their narrative or in the “secondary gain” from staying stuck in their pain. These people would benefit from more wise effort, as the Buddha put it long ago.
• Second guideline: Are you learning and growing and changing for the better from simply being with your experience? If so, great. But if not, if it’s same ol’ same ol’, then it’s probably time to move on, to letting go and letting in.
• On the other hand, are your efforts to release the negative and replace it with something positive not bearing fruit? Then probably you need to go back to being with your experience, and feel it more fully, in your whole body . . . and in particular investigate and open to its deeper layers, the more vulnerable, more fundamental, younger layers of this material.
• Third guideline: Do you need to build resources inside in order to be able to be with your experience? Resources like self-compassion, observing ego, steady mindfulness, and understanding why it is actually good to open to your own pain. Without these resources, opening to your feelings can be like opening a trap door to hell. Therefore, how would it serve the first way to engage the mind – just being with it – by starting with the third way to engage the mind: growing inner strengths that would help you sustain accepting mindfulness of your difficult experiences?
• In actual practice, often there is a little movement in the mind in which we accept our experience and open to it . . . and then quickly call up some resource inside (a mini working with the mind) and then go back to being with one’s experience, but now more able to stay with it.
• Fourth guideline: What can you bear? A little pain can go a long way. Be kind to yourself. Sometimes what works is to touch the suffering lightly – simply being with it – and then move on to something else. And then come back to the negative material later.
• Final guideline: As a person’s practice and well-being matures, as they increasingly internalize positive experiences of core needs met (safety, satisfaction, and connection), there is less and less underlying sense of deficits or disturbances – drive states – that lead to suffering. So there is less and less need to work with one’s mind, and there is a natural growing focus on simply being with it, opening into awareness itself and a sense of intertwining with allness. At this stage of practice, working with the mind becomes increasingly subtle and being with the mind increasingly becomes the central feature of practice.

Of course, this stage of practice is the result of a lot of working with the mind. And it would be unskillful to try to bypass it.

For negative thoughts during meditation, the two classic strategies are:

• Open awareness (sometimes called vipassana though that’s a misnomer since vipassana means insight which can be present during many modes of meditation and daily life, and insight can be absent during open awareness) – Allow negative thoughts to come and go, observe them without reaction, ground more and more deeply in relaxed awareness/beingness/well-being.
• Focused attention – Pull attention firmly away from anything other than the object of concentration/absorption (e.g., the breath). Negative thoughts may persist but dimly outside the field of concentrated absorption.

The batting away strategy is a detail for the focused attention approach. Sometimes when the mind is quiet we can see distracting thoughts starting to arise and congeal, and we can gently bat them away before they fully “invade the mind and remain” (as said by the Buddha).

It is also possible in meditation, in an open awareness frame, to use the meditative state to investigate negative thoughts to sense down into deeper, warmer, more emotional layers, as you say. The art in doing this is to avoid therapizing oneself and getting all caught up in self-analysis, but also try to get to the bottom of things. Check out the RAIN Method that Tara Brach, James Baraz, and others talk about.

If negative thoughts are overwhelming if you let them in, perhaps best in meditation to focus on concentration methods, and outside meditation engage practices like RAIN.

When balancing letting be and letting go or letting in, it’s important both to not overreact to depressive thoughts and feelings, and to be careful about sensitizing your brain any further to the negative. It’s a balance. So observe your mind flowing along . . . try not go negative about anything negative . . . and fairly soon shift into gently releasing the negative and then really open to and encourage the positive. And remember that you can bring attention to and becoming concentratively absorbed in the positive even when sadness or other feelings are also present off to the side as it were in the mind.