“Welcome to the theater of your mind! As you enter, the restrooms will be on your right and the snack bar on your left. When you’re ready, enter the auditorium and find your seat.”
Mary O’Malley – As you hear these words in your mind, you feel excitement about coming to this theater, excitement about getting to know more about your conditioned mind. Your conditioned mind is the storyteller in your head that talks all day long, always trying, doing, fixing, judging, feeling unsettled, happy, sad, anxious and even at times getting caught in despair.
There is already a play going on when you enter the auditorium. As you walk down the aisle looking for your seat, you find yourself drawn to what is happening on the stage, and rather than sitting down, you walk straight up the side stairs and find yourself involved with the play.
Sometimes being involved in the play of your mind is easy and even pleasant. More often there are little challenges and little upsets that turn into big traumas and big dramas. Sometimes you like what is going on and sometimes you don’t. But mostly you feel a sense of unease, struggling to make the play to be the way you want it to be.
Although you are involved in the play, at moments there’s a small part of you that feels that you don’t belong on the stage, a memory that says you should be sitting in the auditorium. But that realization comes and goes in a flash and then you’re back to being absorbed in the play of your mind and all the dramas and the traumas that it goes through on a daily basis.
Awakening is about realizing that maybe you are so much more than what’s going on in this play of your mind. You find yourself in mid-scene walking down the stairs into the auditorium. As you sit down to watch the play, rather than being lost in it, you begin to have moments where you can say, “Oh, fear has just walked on the stage,” rather than immediately getting out of your seat and running back onto the stage, getting lost in the fear.
For a while, awakening is about sitting and watching the play and then getting pulled back onto the stage and then watching the play again. Every time you come off the stage to take your seat, being curious about what is happening in your mind, you find yourself sitting higher up in the auditorium. This gives you a more spacious view, so it is easier to not get hooked into the various struggles of your mind. “Oh, that is the story line of shame,” or, “that’s the story of sadness, or loneliness, or not-enoughness, or dread, or irritation,” or “I’m finally happy and it will never go away,” or even “this is the helpless hopeless despair I have known for a long time.” All of these are the different stories that your mind has believed in the past.
Gradually you find yourself more and more often sitting and watching the play rather than being caught in the drama unfolding on the stage. And the more you watch, the more you see how afraid your conditioned mind is, how much it believes it’s truly not okay as it is, and how it is constantly trying to control life so that finally everything will be okay.
As you watch, you also begin to realize that the foundation of most of the stories in your head were created when you were very young. You also see with great clarity that many of the stories are still very young, especially when you are greatly challenged. Slowly, your heart begins to open, even to the most unacceptable parts of you.
Reconnecting with the joy of meeting yourself in your own heart, you notice something that you had never noticed before – there are exit signs on each corner of the auditorium. For the first time it begins to dawn on you that maybe there’s more to your world than just the theater of your mind.
One day, (and with some fear for the theater is all you have known since you were young), you find yourself standing up and walking out of the theater. Outside is a whole other world – light instead of dark; spacious rather than enclosed. You feel great joy because you know now that you don’t have to be caught in your mind. You can use it as the wonderful tool it is for maneuvering through physical reality, but you no longer have to fall into its stories. And because your attention is actually here, rather than following your thoughts all day long, you open to the magical and creative flow of your life.
In the process of awakening out of the conditioning in your mind, you do go back into the theater again, and you even go back up on the stage. But more quickly you realize you’re just caught in your mind. Down the stairs you go and out into the auditorium and it doesn’t take very long for your heart to open to all the stories of your mind that are playing out on the stage in front of you. More and more easily you remember that there’s so much more to life than what is happening in your mind, and with great compassion for what is going up on stage, you walk out of the theater and back into the experience of being fully alive.
It is a startling and wonderful realization when you discover that you can watch the play of your mind. You can relate to it rather than being lost in it, lost in the play up on the stage. The more you are curious about what your mind is doing – the ongoing stories it generates about what is happening in your life – the more you begin to realize that this dark theater, this theater of the mind, is maybe just a small part of who you are.
You are reading this because you no longer have to be an actor in your life. Instead you can be your life and know again the joy of being fully alive.
SF Source Mary O’Malley Jul 2018