Are We Addicted to the Soap Opera Mind?
Since I first began to meditate, and even after years of meditation, I’ve found that the “non-meditative mind,” the mind that is habituated to distraction, still remains. Though I find more peace and am able to live more presently with the mind that is free from the routine habits of distraction, there’s a powerful force within my mind based on the habit of running after drama and strife. I’ll call this the “soap opera mind.”
The soap opera mind likes things stirred up a bit, it likes to chase after drama and thrives on staying busy. Even if we find ourselves at relative peace, the soap opera mind will search the horizon, looking for some particularly juicy potential for worry and fretting.
How do we tame this soap opera mind?
How do we tame this soap opera mind? How do we put this mind to rest?
Have you ever noticed that there’s space between the drama, that there are times – no matter how addicted we are to thoughts – when there’s nothing going on. Have you ever had times when your mind is at peace, even for a brief moment?
What meditation does is to help us to remain in this state of non-distraction, or non-grasping and non-aversion. Meditation helps us to open up that space between the drama, allowing us more experience with the meditative mind and less engagement in the soap opera.
While meditation is the process of gradually coming to know our mind and learning how to remain in a state of non-distraction, even just practicing meditation when we haven’t perfected it allows us brief periods of rest from the habitual addiction to strife and drama.
Change Your Mind, Change Your Habits
As we change our habits of distraction and become used to the process of engaging our meditative mind, we may find that the dramas no longer hold the same kind of allure. I know that for myself, even though I’ll hear myself bemoaning life’s circumstances to someone who’s offered a sympathetic ear, even in those times when I bother to complain, there’s a part of my mind watching me and saying, “What’s the big deal?!”
Meditation helps us to see that our thoughts and the drama (both actual and imagined) that evolve from our thoughts are fleeting and without substance. We can spend hours contemplating the most grandiose schemes or the most awful scenarios, only to have them fade away with our wondering why we ever entertained them in the first place. Meditation helps us to break our cycle of addiction to these ways of thinking, returning us instead to our strife-free mind, one that gradually remains in a state free from want and worry.
Besides all of the others reasons presented on this site that have offered good reasons to begin a meditation practice (see Related Posts), can anyone think of one reason why we wouldn’t want to change the channel of our mind from 24/7 soap operas to (at least) occasional tranquility? Gives us a cause to pause….
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Fantastic post. I and many people I know get addicted to drama and sometimes do things to incite it. I like the ideas you’ve provided to combat this self destructive behavior.
Hi Pika –
I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed the post. Yah, it’s amazing how easily we get drawn into the drama and forget our truer nature. Meditation provides such an accessible way to cut the cycle of drama and to find our meditative and peaceful mind. Enjoy!
[…] can get so caught up in the soap-opera of our daily lives and the stories that we tell ourselves, that we forget that within each of us, there resides a […]