Thought-Life

I met with my spiritual director this evening, and something that struck me deeply in our conversation was the whole issue of who or what we choose to pay attention to in our thought-life.  What are the thoughts in our lives that are life-giving, and do we focus our energies on those thoughts?  Which thoughts make us feel sad and depressed?  And most importantly: can we choose to direct our thought-life?

My experience this past year has been that when I'm in extreme psycho-spiritual pain, I find it next to impossible to think about anything other than that pain.  My whole outlook is clouded by an overwhelming sadness, so that lofty thoughts about God, for example, become next to impossible.  Instead, I find myself mulling over scenarios that are not resolvable: Why did it happen to me?  What did I do wrong?  What could I have done differently?

The more I think about these questions, the more I get upset and obsessed, because these are questions that I don't have the answer for and never will.  My mind eventually gets stuck in a destructive cycle, and the worst of it is that I seem unable to choose otherwise.

In my conversation with my director tonight, I likened this destructive fixation to the pain that we feel when we hurt physically: when someone hits my finger with a hammer, the most natural response is fixation on that pain.  Our sole attention becomes the pain, and searching for ways to lessen it.  My body at that point overrides any "life-giving" thoughts such as sipping a piña colada at a beach in Cuba.  All I want is a painkiller.

Is it not the same with psycho-spiriutal pain?  Can we think about the finer things in life - faith, hope, and charity - when we're grieving the loss of a loved one?  My experience has been that I want to focus on anything but those things.  Intellectually, perhaps, I could tell myself that "all will be well" as Julian of Norwich said, but that hardly lessens the pain.  Indeed, in some ways it intensifies the pain, because I have to deal with the torture of knowing that things could be better, but aren't.