HOW much do you think about? You could probably name four or five things off the top of your head but I bet if you actually watched your mind closely for a few days you’d realise you think about hundreds of different things. Some things you probably think about dozens of times a week. The weather. Have I remembered my purse or wallet? I’ll just lock the back door. Does the car need petrol? These are the relatively trivial things.

Much more serious things pervade our minds. Hope the kids are OK. Another terror attack could happen anywhere. What if so and so gets elected next week? I can’t take much more of the stress that my work makes me feel.

Moreover, we tend not to deliberately think about these things. They just appear in our heads, as if by chance. However it’s not by chance. As we know everything happens because of some previous event. It’s like the weather forecast. Forecasters can predict with reasonable accuracy what the weather will be like tomorrow because they see the patterns from previous days.

It’s the same with the thoughts, feelings and emotions that arise in our heads. If we could know the billions of past experiences you’ve had, plus the influences of your genes, then theoretically we could predict your response to some future event.

That’s actually quite scary isn’t it? As if we’re more like a computer programme, pre-set to act in predictable ways than a truly free-thinking, unconditioned living example of human intelligence. It’s a bit like Keanu Reaves as the character Neo in The Matrix, a science fiction film in which humans only think they’re living a life but are in fact actually being used as batteries for sentient machines which have taken over the world.

It’s not quite as bad as that but being affected in predictable ways by external experiences or events, internal genetic impulses, or conditioned ways of thinking is hardly a great vision of living a full, free and vibrant life.

So what can we do about this? The scientific research shows us quite clearly. We can use the natural skill we call mindfulness. This allows us to notice the automatic responses as they happen. That’s stage one, what Sri Lankan Buddhists call Bare Awareness. So it’s just noticing. Not judging. Not yet trying to change anything.

What we’re doing when practising in this way is building up the strength of this skill we have. It’s literally just practice. The more we do it the better we get at it.

So over time we get better at being mindful. Our Bare Awareness strengthens and sharpens.

That’s stage one. Now instead of simply unconsciously reacting to something with irritation, we see that irritation has arisen. This then sets us up for the second stage. Deciding what to do about our automatic reaction.

You can’t change your mind unless you’re aware of what your mind is doing at any moment. Once you are aware you can use the wiser, more reflective and rational aspects of our mind to assess the likely outcome or outcomes of what’s currently happening automatically in our head. In this case it is irritation.

We reason that irritation is likely to cause us no good, and possibly some negative results. Moreover if we have used some of our time to study and learn about how the mind and body are affected by emotions and thoughts, we will remember that irritation in our mind speeds up the body’s ageing process and makes us a bit more likely to catch the next series of bugs that come along. Moreover being irritated makes us more likely to be irritable in future. In other words it strengthens that particular habitual response in us.

So, seeing all these likely outcomes from our automatic irritation enables us to decide that we don’t want this irritation to fully blossom inside us or be expressed to the outside world.

What then are our options?

In the early stages of mindfulness we can switch the attention gently and subtly to our breath, or something similarly neutral and pleasant like noticing the softness of our T-shirt on our skin. For reasons we don’t know yet, this has a different, more positive effect than forcibly suppressing our negative emotion. Simply notice the breath lightly but clearly, especially at the tip of the nostrils, or at the diaphragm, or alternatively at the lungs as they fill and empty.

This allows our negative feeling to diminish, often vanish. Job done.

A more advanced version of this is to deliberately use the negative feeling as a form of learning. In this situation instead of noticing the breath in order to take the mind’s attention away from the irritation it currently possesses, we instead try to gently but clearly notice the emotion of irritability itself.

This is harder as it runs the risk of switching the mind back to the very thing that you want to fade away. However the benefit from doing this effectively is great. We get to see the monstrous and petty nature of some of our raw emotions and reactions. The more familiar we become, the better we are able to let them go.

We may never quite gain total liberation from our mind’s conditioning, but we can increasingly remove ourselves from the worst of our Matrix-like autopilot way of living.