Like Clouds Drifting By

Like Clouds Drifting By — The first idea: we know things by their opposite; all couplets are an essential unity. The second idea: thoughts are not real — they are like clouds drifting along on a blue sky day.

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One key to ele­gant relat­ing is using a com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­el. Dar­bel­la and I use what’s called the “Haven Mod­el,” and I would also say that their mod­el pret­ty well match­es the orig­i­nal Cou­ples Com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­el I learned as a baby ther­a­pist in train­ing, back in 1982.

Here’s the model!

I think that the two “hard­est parts” of any com­mu­ni­ca­tion mod­el are,

1. real­iz­ing the dif­fer­ence between a feel­ing and an inter­pre­ta­tion (thought), and
2. doing what you say you will do. (action)

As to the first one, I was talk­ing with a friend who said, “Yes­ter­day was a real­ly anx­ious day.” I replied, “Days aren’t anx­ious, so that would be bet­ter put, ‘I made myself anx­ious yesterday.’ ”

She said, “All my life, I’ve believed that there are good days and bad days—that exter­nals cause feel­ings. You’re say­ing I caused my anx­i­ety!”

I replied, “Not quite. You felt some­thing in your body, and inter­pret­ed it as anx­i­ety. Declar­ing your­self (or the day!) anx­ious is a thought. What were you actu­al­ly feel­ing in your body?”

She said, “My mus­cles were real­ly tight, and I was­n’t breath­ing much… holy crap, that fits! I almost nev­er breathe very much!”

I then said, “Right. The feel­ing is tight and breath­less. That feel­ing leads to the thought, “I am anx­ious.” In actu­al­i­ty, you could call the tight and breath­less feel­ing in your body any­thing you chose. It’s just a label.”

So what’s the point here?

Well, often peo­ple use their feel­ings as blud­geons — they sug­gest, and none too sub­tly, that oth­ers are the cause—are to blame—for their poor lit­tle piti­ful feelings. 

I work real­ly hard to get peo­ple to recog­nise and own their bod­i­ly sen­sa­tions, while also own­ing the sto­ries they tell them­selves about those sensations. 

This is what I mean by self-respon­si­bil­i­ty (among oth­er things.) If I say, “Here is the sto­ry I’m invent­ing regard­ing the tight feel­ing in my stom­ach,” I have ceased to blame “you” for either the feel­ing or the thought.

This whole thing is very Zen.

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Eastern Perspectives — clouds in the sky, mirrors in the mind

The first idea is this: we know things by their oppo­site, and all cou­plets are an essen­tial unity.

The sec­ond idea is this: thoughts are not real — they are like clouds drift­ing along on a blue sky day. You could say that the clouds are there, but they have absolute­ly no effect on the sky. Or they are like reflec­tions in a mirror—seemingly real, but only there until they are gone.

Opposites

I’ve like­ly men­tioned this before, but it is impos­si­ble to know any­thing unless we have some­thing to com­pare it to. So, for example,

We know that water is hot com­pared to water that is cooler.

We know that some­thing is tall, com­pared to some­thing that is shorter.

We know plea­sure as it is com­pared to pain.

And, (here’s where it gets sticky) we know hap­pi­ness because there is sad­ness to com­pare it to.

Which flies total­ly in the face of all the peo­ple out there who want to lead a “hap­py life,” and can’t com­pre­hend why hap­pi­ness does­n’t exist 24/7.

Here’s a twisty-turny part. You think that you are inside of you. That you live “in there.” You might even think that inside includes your out­side — your skin. 

But it is impos­si­ble for there to be an inside by itself. Or an outside.

There­fore, if some­thing can­not exist with­out its oppo­site, the “oppo­sites” are, in real­i­ty, one thing. So, you are not only your inside, but are also essen­tial­ly every­thing out­side of you, and the whole thing is one uni­ty! Insides and out­side are sim­ply two aspects of the same thing. (Two sides of one coin.)

Many people are caught in the dreamland of thinking that everything should work out fine — and that all people should be healthy, happy, wealthy, and wise.

And yet, these terms are rel­a­tive, in that they have to, by def­i­n­i­tion, relate to some­thing else — sick­ness, unhap­pi­ness, pover­ty, and dumbness. 

Every­one is some­where on a con­tin­u­um — some­where rel­a­tive to some­thing or some­one else. Thus, for exam­ple, per­fect hap­pi­ness can­not exist, because it begs the ques­tion, “Com­pared to what?”

This is just the way it is. Rail­ing against it changes nothing. 

Indeed, we can take any one of these cou­plets, and recog­nise in them the Yin/Yang sym­bol. Or, visu­al­ized anoth­er way, if hap­pi­ness is one side of the coin, unhap­pi­ness is the other. 

In the words of the song lyric, “You can’t have one with­out the oth­er.” No mat­ter how much you wish it were otherwise.

This fits into good communication in the following way.

Most peo­ple go through their lives one day out of sync. Rather than liv­ing in the here and now, their focus is on tomor­row. Always tomorrow. 

The judg­ment is, 

“Things real­ly suck today, but tomor­row my Prince(ss) will come every­thing will be perfect!”

The same thing applies to how they deal with their part­ner. There’s the thought that, 

“He real­ly screwed up today, but if I keep nag­ging at him, maybe he’ll be bet­ter tomorrow.”

This, as opposed to, 

“This is how it is right now, and here is what I will do to shift things in anoth­er direction.”

We real­ly do need to stop judg­ing our lives on the basis of how we imag­ine they ought to be and begin accept­ing them as they are.

Accept­ing does­n’t mean accept­ing for­ev­er.
It means accept­ing how things are right now as how things are right now.

In this way, we stop play­ing men­tal games with our­selves. We stop blam­ing the world. We stop pre­tend­ing that we can force the world to behave itself accord­ing to our stan­dards — that our indig­na­tion can elim­i­nate the Yin/Yang-ness of life. 

And the rea­son we want to learn to do this is it’s sim­ply a waste of time to think otherwise.

Clouds and Mirrors

I know. That one was pret­ty obscure. Rather than try­ing to pin it fur­ther to the ground, what I’m real­ly try­ing to say is this.

Thoughts are like clouds in the sky. We see them, and we think, “Wow! Those clouds are huge! They are so big they could knock down a house!” 

Except, no they aren’t, and no they can’t. They may have some sub­stance — they do exist — but they don’t amount to much.

Just like our thoughts.

Or, think of your mind as a mir­ror, and your thoughts as reflections. 

Mir­rors have noth­ing to do with what they reflect. An object comes into view and the (nor­mal) mir­ror reflects an image back, while tak­ing noth­ing of the thing reflect­ed into itself. 

The image is unre­al, ephemeral.

And no, I’m not real­ly talk­ing about ana­lyt­i­cal thought. I’m sure Ein­stein devel­oped the The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty par­tial­ly in his head. That might have been a use­ful thought. 

I’m thinking about the kind of thoughts that lead precisely nowhere.

For exam­ple, many peo­ple in cou­ples will say stuff like, “I know exact­ly what he’s think­ing.” And I won­der aloud if she’s asked him, and she assures me that she does­n’t need to — she just knows. Well, phooey.

Whatever is going on in your head is just your story

What you believe about how you were par­ent­ed, what you believe about your rela­tion­ships, what you believe about your child-rear­ing skills, what you believe about your employ­ment — it’s all just you, talk­ing to your­self —and it’s all just as rel­e­vant as clouds in the sky. 

In fact, if you’re try­ing to fig­ure out what Zen is all about, it’s not real­ly about the sit­ting. It’s about watch­ing your thoughts while sit­ting, and notic­ing how fleet­ing and unsub­stan­tial they are. They arise, they drift by, they go — so long as we don’t grab hold of them.

It’s the “grabbing hold of” that gets people in trouble.

They get an idea about a sit­u­a­tion, or an ill­ness, or a per­son, and they not only believe that idea is true, they demand that oth­ers believe it too.

They ascribe all kinds of mean­ing to what oth­er peo­ple are doing, with no data oth­er than the sto­ries they’ve invent­ed in their heads, and then they expect the oth­er per­son to agree with their story. 

Like­wise, they have all kinds of rea­sons and jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for stay­ing stuck, and get quite incensed when some­one sug­gests they drop the non­sense and do some­thing different.

Mirrors do not grab hold of what they reflect.

Dia­log becomes “hold­ing up a mir­ror” — “Here is what I see and hear, and here is the sto­ry I am telling myself.” There is no attempt to change the oth­er person—there is just mind­ful feedback.

In Zen, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and in life, what mat­ters is not the sto­ries we tell our­selves inside our pointy lit­tle heads, but rather what we do when con­front­ed with a dilemma. 

Rather than judge it, rather than fer­vent­ly wish for its oppo­site, rather than hop­ing end­less­ly for res­cue, we do some­thing different.

We speak respon­si­bly, own­ing our sto­ries, describ­ing our feel­ings and tak­ing full respon­si­bil­i­ty for all of it. 

And then we sim­ply con­coct an alter­na­tive behav­iour and enact it. If it works, we do more of it — if it does­n’t, we drop it and attempt some­thing else.

What you think does­n’t mat­ter, the exter­nal world is as it is, and the only thing you have a mod­icum of con­trol over is what you do next.

Choose, and enact, well.

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