Non-Elaborative Processing

There is an assumption in psychology that goes like this: Thoughts create feelings and feelings energise behaviour. This apparent linear linking between thoughts, feelings, and behaviours is surely an over-simplification, however it is a useful way to conceive human experience for two reasons. Firstly, it closely correlates with our personal experience of how things seem to happen, at least when we consider strong emotions like anger, sadness, and anxiety. For example, thinking you were deceived can easily trigger angry feelings and subsequent behaviour that expresses or vents this anger. In this example, there seems to be a linear association that goes like this: thinking you were deceived > feeling anger > venting. Or for anxiety, the sequence might look like this: thinking you will be harshly judged > feeling scared > avoiding the party.

The second reason for this linear association being a useful one is due to its clinical application. Because human psychological suffering stems from the way we relate to the thoughts and feelings we experience and the behaviours we enact, they can be individually targeted therapeutically to alter their relationship with each other and thereby severing the link. Whereas the content of thought is not easily changed, we can alter the context by, for example, recognising thoughts come and go. For feelings, we can work at developing tolerance to them. For behaviours, we can choose to act in accordance with those things held to be of utmost importance in our lives – our values.

This is all very well, but there is a precursor quality necessary before we can hope to change our relationship with the three forms of experience above. This is the quality of awareness. Awareness could be as direct as knowing we are having a thought, experiencing a feeling, or engaging in a behaviour, however it isn’t usual for us to be so introspective and mindful without training or uncommon life experiences. It is far more likely our mind wanders about in a free-association kind of way with one thought leading to another, triggering mild or strong feelings along the way.

One way to begin to reign the mind in and cultivate awareness and insight about how your response to thinking and feeling contributes to suffering is to practise Buddhist Vipassanā meditation. Vipassanā meditation, sometimes referred to as insight meditation and less commonly mindfulness meditation is a way to see things as they really are without elaboration. It is a straightforward and no-nonsense approach to develop awareness and promote insight and purification. (I will discuss mindfulness and equanimity and how these qualities support insight and purification in an upcoming post.)

Vipassanā meditation begins much like any other form of meditation, usually with an initial orientation toward noticing the inhalation and exhalation of your breath. The sensations of the breath then serve as an anchor to which you can return your attention as it wanders away. The objective is simply to notice what form of experience—generally a thought or feeling—your mind may wander to and return your attention to your breath. The easiest way to do this without elaboration is to simply state the form as either a “thinking” or  “feeling.” For instance, if you mind wanders to a thought about dinner tonight, simply say to yourself “thinking” and gently return your attention to the breath. If you say to yourself “thinking about dinner,” you are already engaging in elaborative processing. In this exercise, we are focusing on the context of experience, not content. Likewise, if you are sitting and you notice a pain in your hip or a sense of sadness, you can simply say to yourself “feeling.” Stating the form, keeps the focus on context for thoughts and feelings as they arise. This reduces the tendency for the mind to engage in elaborative processing, including judgement and analysis.

The objective of this exercise is not so much to quieten the mind or generate calmness, although this may happen. The purpose is to develop a greater awareness of the emergence of thoughts and feelings and experience them as they really are, in a pure way free from elaboration. Doing on a regular basis can fundamentally alter our relationship with thoughts and feelings and suspend our universal struggle against them, which we have previously termed resistance.

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