A man is working his field and a horse suddenly crashes to a halt near him with a rider barely holding on to it's neck. As quickly as they arrived the horse takes off again, across a stream and toward a hedge. The man in the field shouts after them "where are you going?" and the rider, looking over his shoulder, says "I don't know...ask the horse." They disappear haphazardly into the distance.
As long as we allow our minds to race from thing to thing with little focus or attention and with little or no control, we are at risk of being subjected to the things our "monkey mind" finds interesting with as much say in our destiny as the man on the horse, constantly reacting to experiences, thoughts and emotions. Our mind will lead us wildly from place to place with little discretion or concern about the validity of the thoughts it presents to us. We will find ourselves crashing from emotional highs and lows, at best surviving the roller coaster ride of reactions and counter reactions.
So how do we go about taming our reactions - how do we ride the horse instead of letting it take us wherever it might want to go?
I think we need to realise that we have the power to pause. To create a gap between our thoughts or emotions and how we react to them. We tend to think that the best place for the pause is between the stimulus and the emotional reaction but this is rarely possible. We are hardwired to react to the world as we experience it - if someone throws a ball at your face you duck or catch it. There is no time to pause there. The emotional response arises and we act.
I think the pause we need to work on is not between the stimulus (the ball being thrown) and the thought/emotion/reaction (ducking) but, when we can, between the thought/emotion and our reaction (fear of being hit in the face leading to anger and a chain of responses). The moment for wise counsel is when we feel that emotional reaction (fear & anger at having been nearly hit) in order to consider what we do next.
It's at this point we can tame the horse a little and develop a space between our emotional response and our next action. We can develop an awareness of the emotions we are feeling and choose how to react wisely. By doing that we are able to at least begin to control the horse and the direction it goes in instead of being taken in directions we might not choose to go. By doing this we are learning to break the chain of reactions and counter reactions.
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