Working on my bucket list. Remember the movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman?  It’s the list of things you want to do before you die. This is a serious exercise in setting your priorities. I’ll keep you posted because it’s turning out to be a bigger deal than I expected.

Triggers

Have you ever noticed how you tend to do the same things over and over again in the same way. I am not talking about things like getting up at 7AM  to be at work by 9AM.  The only thing about that is that you can change it by either moving or quitting. What I am talking about is how you tend to react to certain events in a robotic fashion… like a good robot you follow the chain of events programmed into you at a subconscious level.

Let me give you a personal example. Over the years I have learned that eating a lot of food for an evening meal really doesn’t seem to fit my metabolism very well. I don’t digest it well so it keeps me awake, I try various things to go to sleep like meditation, reading, and even sitting in front of the TV. Usually, none of them work, but I try them anyway. Finally, at about 4AM I have digested enough of the food to fall asleep, so I go to sleep. Then when I wake up I feel totally exhausted because I never sleep later than about 8AM. So, it’s off to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and some carbs to pick me up in the morning… well, at least until about 11AM. Then it’s time for another pick me up because I have put myself in the blood glucose yo yo. Are you getting the picture here. Eating large late dinners precipitates an entire chain of events that run throughout the night and next day… they used to end up precipitating a low blood glucose crisis that started the whole sequence again on the next day.

So, the idea here is that some event Triggers a near robotic set of responses that you follow just like an actor in a Broadway play following the same lines in the script night after night after night. It might be the certain way your spouse says something to you that sets you off into the same pattern of thinking and acting.

Mind Watching

Usually, these robotic patterns are not good things. They end up producing bad results and they are quite mindless in the way they operate. So, if you want to stop the bad outcomes you’ve got to catch hold of the chain reactions and stop them. That is, you’ve got to recognize when you are back into a repeating script and stop engaging in the play. And that means you’ve got to recognize how one event triggers another event and how that event triggers another and so forth. Ideally, you want to find the initiating trigger and stop the pattern at the source. But, stop the pattern somewhere if you can’t find the source trigger.

In my own case, I have discovered that the source trigger for the big meals at night is a need I have to socialize over food. When I eat at home by myself, then I never eat large evening meals. When I eat at restaurants by myself I don’t eat large meals. In fact, I have the restaurant box half the meal before I start eating. However, when I eat with others I tend to throw caution to the wind and pig out. I am working on this a bit more to get to the real trigger of it all.

The secret is realizing that all the Triggers and patterns ultimate come from the mind and the secret is to begin to watch how your mind works. Fortunately, Bodhidharma wrote a wonderful essay called On Mindwatching. I have a wonderful translation of this work. The translation is unique and was done by several Zen students and I under the guidance of Myo Bong Snim, our teacher.

Preview On Mind Watching