This one study reveals a deep truth. College students were given a choice to either sit quietly without their phones or could bypass this by taking a painful electric shock. Most of them preferred the shock. See the study and others like it here.
How much do we try to avoid being with ourselves in a quiet space? The answer is a lot. We go through pain and expense and odd behaviors to set ourselves up for constant mental input. Self avoidance is the most popular past time. It's easier for many of us to watch hours of video explaining meditation than to try it seriously. I get it. It can be very scary to reach a deep quiet. To avoid it we build up layers of distraction and removing these seems offensive and annoying to us. Have you seen the anger rise up when our internet doesn't work or you turn off the show mid-way or don't get to eat dinner? Anger is always based in fear.
Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, has always been a profound teacher to me. For the longest time I would watch his shows even though I no longer had a dog that needed whispering. Why was I watching this show without a dog? Deep in a meditation one day I saw the reason why I watched it: My mind was the scared dog. Cesar would never corner a dog and beat it into submission and that inspired me to change my approach to meditation. There is a (nearly) 1:1 correlation between rehabilitating your energetic, emotionally stunted dog and rehabilitating your chattering mind.
So, now letting go can be viewed without fear if we learn from Cesar. We can Dog Whisper our chattering mind into submission with our "Calm Assertive" energy, as he puts it. He had many techniques to do it. Sometimes Cesar would strap on his roller-blades and run the dog until their were tired. Sometimes he would normalize their triggers. One case stands out where the dogs would incessantly bark at passers-by. They ran up to the fence, frothing and barking at anything that moved. Rather than push the dogs away and discipline them, he calmly claimed the fence and never touched the barking dogs. It was his and he showed it by walking to the fence and gesturing the dogs away when they got close. Although they had dominated the fence as their perch of power for years, Cesar dethroned them in minutes.
Seeing meditation in this light, we can approach the "monkey-mind" chattering bits with the calm assertive energy. We can claim the fence. It's our right to have a clear mind, free of thought and in a flow state. It's okay for that chattering part of us to be under the authority of our will. We don't have to be mad or abusive, we just claim the space, and keep practicing that power. Our minds eventually get a chance to be relaxed and happy, because deep down they knew they weren't designed to talk day and night.
