Woodbury welcomed a talented, accomplished new cohort of master’s students this week and I worked with them for the first two days of their on-campus residency. When I returned to my office later in the week, I sat down to craft my lesson plan for Conflict Intervention Skills, a class I’m helping teach to master’s students who began classes last fall.
I’ve found my thoughts turning repeatedly to monkey mind.
“Monkey mind” is a Buddhist idea and describes the experience of a person who is not fully in the present moment. Like a monkey swinging from tree to tree, the monkey mind jumps from thought to thought, rarely resting for more than a brief moment. Monkey mind prevents us from “being here now” and distracts us from the present.
Learning to mediate typically leaves new ADR professionals with a bad case of monkey mind. I know my grad students have this experience because they tell me about one version of it and I watch them struggle with a second version.
The first type of Monkey Mind is what I think of as “Fast-Moving Monkey Mind” — too many trees to choose from and darn too much fruit to sample in each tree. It’s the experience of managing multiple new concepts, skills and strategies at once and still trying to pay attention to what the disputing parties are saying and doing. The result is a flitting from one approach to another, too quickly to be effective. Or verbal paralysis…nothing comes out of the new mediator’s mouth at all because the mind is too busy trying to get it “just right.” I experienced this latter result myself when I was learning to mediate and it sure wasn’t pretty.
The second type of Monkey Mind is what I call the “Too-Attached Monkey Mind” — the tendency to engage every monkey thought that arrives in the mind. Buddhists tell us the trick is to observe our thoughts without engaging all of them; meditation is the practice of learning how to do this. With each new group of mediation students, I notice this latter version of monkey mind in their earliest work. New mediators bring a lifetime of judging (sometimes harshly so), interpreting, assuming and diagnosing with them to the mediation table. They engage each judging or diagnostic thought and commit to it, not yet noticing that having a thought and becoming attached to it are different from one another.
So I’ve found myself musing about how to share new ideas and challenge old ones without contributing unnecessarily to monkey mind overwhelm. And how to help new mediators learn how to stay present, calm the monkey mind, and truly listen and engage fully with their disputing parties. Here are some ideas, none of them new in the grand scheme, but perhaps new to you:
Practice noticing the difference between acting on a thought and simply having a thought. In the former, you treat your thoughts as the decision-makers, allowing them to determine what you do next. In the latter, you observe you’re having a thought and know to question it before attaching. It’s the difference between, “She’s being disrespectful of the other party…I better stop her now” and “I’m seeing her behavior. It appears to be disrespectful…Hmmm, maybe that’s it, maybe it’s not…”
Practice the art of deep listening even when you’re not in the mediator’s chair. Like any new behavior, you’ll get better at it the more you do it. Give yourself permission to listen without needing to prepare a reply, without needing to prepare any action while you listen. Give yourself permission to risk that your next action will become known to you after you’ve fully listened to the person in front of you. It’s about not listening with your answer running.
Practice stopping yourself when you get too wrapped up in your own head. I and some of my colleagues call this “getting out of your head.” Notice it. Stop yourself. Be gentle with yourself. Re-orient outward.
Take time to practice “being here now” every day, even if only for a few minutes. Do an activity that requires your full attention and brain resources. Or take five minutes every day to practice pulling away from your run-on thoughts and just experience sitting quietly, listening and feeling and tasting whatever’s there (yes, this is a version of meditation).
Play my Way Over the Top Reflective Listening Game. It’s reflective listening on steroids. Find someone who’ll play it with you for just 5-10 minutes each day for 21 days (that’s the amount of time research suggests it takes to make a new behavior a norm). The game goes like this: The other person tells you a story of his or her choosing. After every single sentence of their story, without fail, they stop and you reflect back what you heard. It’s ridiculous, yes, but you won’t be able to do anything but pay full attention.
What other practices do you recommend to take the Monkey Mind out of mediation training? I’d love to hear them and so would other readers…scroll down to leave a comment.
Last 5 posts by Tammy Lenski
- The Agile Creativity of the Skilled Mediator - August 16th, 2007
- Woodbury Faculty Member Helps Build Bridge Between US, Arab and Muslim Students - August 16th, 2007
- Musings on Being a Mediation Road Warrior - July 19th, 2007
- Accept the Offer and Move It Forward - May 15th, 2007
- The Self-Conscious Mediator - February 27th, 2007
5 responses so far ↓
Nan Starr // Feb 13th 2007 at 12:56 am
Tammy,
As one of the “monkeys” that you accurately and affectionately reference here, I want to thank you, and Alice, for helping guide our monkey-minds on the journey through the jungle of our first week at Woodbury. We collectively and hastily pulled most of the fruit off of the trees the first few days, before noticing that it all just grew back, and that there was no need to pick it all at once. By the end of the week we were beginning to step out of our rushed, self-focused, evaluative monkey-selves, opening the doors to greater understanding of the path ahead of us.
Attempting to create a few new neuropathways in the quest to become a better listener, I have found many friends willing to help out. While we all know it is hard to find a really good listener out there, there is never a shortage of people who want to be listened to!
Nan
Tammy Lenski // Feb 13th 2007 at 11:28 am
Nan, thanks for taking the time to write. It was such a pleasure to work with you all and I love your comment about realizing the fruit will grow back…perfect extension of the metaphor. And you’re right, there’s never a shortage of people who want to be listened to…I wonder how our lives and world would be different if we could somehow all attend to just that simple observation?
John Maher // Mar 27th 2007 at 12:46 am
Hi Tammy,
I’ve just started the reflective listening with my wife as a willing? partner. It does help–and slows me down. In fact, I’ve found my wife more engaged in our conversations and she talks more than ever– which is great because she was never loquacious—maybe because I filled up all the air time. I don’t have any thoughts at this time to add to your suggestion but will be thinking about it going forward.
Hank’s comment is so true–and I can hopefully see us in time “following the force”–trusting the process.– Thanks for your continuing help. These articles provide interesting insights .
Deb Bopsie // Jul 31st 2007 at 7:20 pm
Thank you Tammy for your creatively deep article. Reading it opened my heart and mind.
I oversee a community transformative mediation program in southern Maine. I also have a meditation practice that is pivotal to the work I do in mediation. I, along with other transformative mediators here in Maine, have begun to offer participants in mediation different perspectives to assist with their process of having the kind of conversation they want to have (coaching the thinking mind). We are examining and experimenting with offering participants the opportunity to slow the thinking and conversation down and opening up the options for letting go of old storylines and fear.
I believe the learning for mediators and participants is a parallel process. What I am hearing over and over again is the call for assistance with thinking and the suffering that accompanies it.
Again thank you for your thoughts,
Deb
Sylvia Gerl // Nov 9th 2007 at 6:04 am
I was at a doula training recently as I am at a crossroads in my life and am trying to figure out what to do next. Among the options is doing mediation and conflict resolution, which is how I happened onto your blog.
I have worked in a shelter for battered women and their children, and conflict resolution was one of the skills that workers had ample opportunity to learn, as the families that came to stay understandably had few skills for living communally, (there were usually 10-15 women, most with children) and obviously traumatized and sometimes very uncomfortable without a certain level of chaos.
The reason I write this in your “monkey mind” section, though, is to describe an exercise we practiced at the workshop. We were given 5 minutes to have a conversation with a partner, where one was the interviewer, and the other the interviewee. We were to learn as much as possible about the other with restriction that the interviewer could ask no questions.
It was incredibly eye-opening to me to realize how much I usually direct a conversation, and, though I have always thought of myself as an excellent listener (and people have told me the same), that when I listened without questioning, the conversation would go in completely unexpected directions, and above all, my partner spoke far more than she would have otherwise.
At first, the monkey mind was fully occupied with coming up with comments that could still evoke the answer to a question, but really, that was cheating, and I found that as I practiced, I could let go and just listen more. Stunning experience.
Sylvia
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