Minding the Minor Mental Habits

Major outcomes can depend on our minor mental habits.

It took me a long time to realize that many of our everyday problems stem from the most fleeting thoughts, the smallest aversions — so habitual they are usually below the conscious level. But these mental shadows end up explaining a lot of our counterproductive behavior.

We have rarely paid attention to this in the West, but Buddhists have long recognized its importance.

“It all starts because you walk into a room, or someone does something, and you feel this tightening,” author and Buddhist nun Pema Chodron explains. “It’s triggering some kind of old habituated pattern. You’re not even thinking about it at all, but basically what’s happening is you don’t want to feel that. It’s some kind of really deep uneasiness. Your habituation is to start dissing them, basically, criticizing them ... how they don't do it right, and you get a kind of puffed-up satisfaction out of this. It makes you feel in control. It’s this short-term symptom relief. On the other hand, the more you do it you also begin to feel, simultaneously, like you’re poisoning yourself.”

She refers to this subtle, common mental aversion by the Tibetan word “shenpa.” It’s a source of procrastination, of emotional overreaction, of daily dissatisfaction.

“(T)here’s the tightening that happens involuntarily, then there’s the urge to move away from it in some habitual way,” Pema Chodron said. “Usually it’s accompanied by this bad feeling. In the West, it is very, very common at that point to turn it against yourself: something is wrong with me. Maybe it’s still non-verbal at this point, but it’s already pregnant with a kind of little gestalt, little drama.”

Perhaps the shenpa’s unspoken, unrecognized source is a vague memory of a co-worker’s insult or a childhood embarrassment, or it’s the urge for a cigarette, whatever. The original source may be trivial and insubstantial, but the effect can be powerful because the shenpa operates below our conscious radar, triggering behavior. Recognition can interrupt it, dissipate it.

“I just saw this cartoon of three fish swimming around a hook,” Pema Chodron said. “And one fish says to the other fish, ‘The secret is non-attachment.’ So that’s a shenpa cartoon: the secret is don’t bite that hook.”