The Mind Is A Living Thing
The late poet Wendell Berry said, “The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
Not many people consciously want to be machines, but look at how we judge ourselves. The other day, I got upset because I couldn’t remember where I was three Tuesdays ago, as though the human brain were even designed for that kind of data recall.
As a dharma teacher, I often hear people say, “Oh, I should meditate. I have no focus.” But then you see how many mental programs people are trying to run at once, and you realize the problem isn’t focus at all. It’s that we’ve begun to live for the approval of our machines.
But the mind is a living thing, not a machine. Living things grow, adapt, and change, but over time. You can repair or reprogram a computer immediately, but the mind is more like a plant: you can prune away negativity, water it with encouragement, and move it toward the light, but ultimately it thrives only in its own time.
In my coaching sessions, I often notice how impatient clients are to extract some kind of analysis about themselves and move on. So I remind them (and myself): connection before change. Before we try to fix or figure out anything, can we stay connected to what is happening in this moment? Can we stay connected to one another?
Over thousands of hours of sessions, I’ve found that what changes people is not data, but conscious relationships in which they feel accepted and seen not as problems to solve but as living beings to be cared for and cherished.
You don't need to become a better machine. You need to learn how to care for the creature you already are.
As always, if you’d like to be held through your own process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.
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