Experiment #1: Sharing the Top Ten Things I Do Regularly to Create a Happier Life

A collection of practices I now call the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S. help me dissolve the biggest monkeys in my mind of anxiety, perfectionism, and depression.

If reading time is hard to come by or you’re interested in a more human experience, there is a “Read-to-You” version of this article.

[Read-to-You Version] Experiment #1: Sharing the Top Ten Things I Do Regularly to Create a Happier Life

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When I first heard the Buddhist concept of monkey mind, I felt like I immediately knew what it was.

Wikipedia explains it as:

A state of restlessness, capriciousness, and lack of control in one's thoughts.

This definition might be accurate, but it severely understates how it feels when I’m in the grip of it.

Thoughts — the “monkeys in our mind” — can feel like they’re taking up so much space. With pleasant thoughts, it doesn’t necessarily feel so bad, but with thoughts of self-judgment, fear, second-guessing, anger, sadness, and others like them, it can feel incredibly painful. These are the ones that cause suffering — the ones that can make us feel like our mind never gives us a moment’s rest. Sometimes they literally prevent us from resting because we can’t fall asleep or enjoy a vacation!

This was the case for me years ago on a vacation in the beautiful mountains of Asheville, North Carolina.

Asheville, North Carolina

I was at the height of my depression. I hadn’t written any music in five years, which was the longest I had ever gone since I started in fifth grade. I had switched jobs twice that year and was one month into my third — trying desperately to find a job that would make me feel creatively fulfilled like I once did.

I had spent the morning trying to answer a few quick work emails only to get sucked into a back-and-forth that triggered an avalanche of unrelenting, excruciating self-criticism.

I sat down for a “break” to play the piano. I played one of my favorite pieces — the theme from the TV series Lost, which was fitting. I felt lost. 

My 10-year-old, who was learning piano, came over and started plunking out a few notes beside me while I played. The combination of the beautiful music, the sweetness of my kid, and the realization of how heavy my sadness had become, made me choke up. First, it was a few tears, but as we kept playing I began uncontrollably sobbing. Ugly crying. I had to stop. Within moments, my child had noticed Daddy wasn’t okay and went to get my wife.

As they hugged me on the piano bench, my mind raged. Why can’t you just be normal? Why can’t you just do a few emails and then have fun on your vacation like a normal person with a family that loves you on a beautiful day in a beautiful house with a beautiful view? Why can’t you control yourself? Are you really so pathetic that you have to be crying right now? And on and on it went.

Many of us — most of us — experience something like this from time to time, at least to some degree. It’s part of being human. Over the years, I have come to realize that I am living in a human body that seems particularly prone to anxiety, perfectionism, and depression. This trifecta usually plays out for me in this way:

• Anxiety - Fear of what people will say or think about me.

• Perfectionism - The belief that if I craft something in just the right way, I will be able to avoid being criticized.

• Depression - The hopeless feeling that results from repeatedly not crafting something in just the right way.

Shortly after this “vacation,” I found a fabulous Buddhist psychotherapist named Dr. Stephen Clarke, Ph.D., LCPC. In one of our sessions, he said to me, Jonathan, your mind has some neurotic tendencies. When I looked it up later, my first feeling was shame because it rang true.

According to Wikipedia, people who experience neurotic tendencies are:

…more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, pessimism, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness. Such people are thought to respond worse to stressors and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations, such as minor frustrations, as appearing hopelessly difficult. The responses can include maladaptive behaviors, such as dissociation, procrastination, substance use, etc., which aids in relieving the negative emotions and generating positive ones.

Neurotic tendencies can be a sign of neurosis, which, according to Siri, is:

A mental condition that… [involves] symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria), but not a radical loss of touch with reality.

Despite the initial shock, Dr. Clarke’s neutral, non-judgmental way of sharing this observation allowed me to accept it in the way he intended: as neither good or bad. It just is.

Or, to put it another way: the monkey mind is strong in me.

Why I’m starting this weekly newsletter

The benefit of having a strong monkey mind is that I have spent a lot of time learning how to successfully live with it.

I am starting this weekly newsletter for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that I know that there others are out there like me who have struggled with their mental health and suffered (or are currently suffering) from the kind of pain I felt.

When I was struggling, it was helpful to find others out there like me, to learn how they got through the pain, and to see how they keep getting through it.

Working with monkey mind (instead of fighting against it)

If our thoughts are monkeys, it’s understandable that when they are bouncing around playing with bananas, we might feel bananas.

The question then becomes: Can we give the monkeys something other than bananas to play with?

The answer is yes.

As I have (perhaps obsessively) explored, learned, and experimented with solutions to this question, my journey has led me to some surprising new habits, new interests, and new beliefs.

Not to overstate it, but this journey has changed how I exist in the world. The most surprising change, at least to me, has been how a spiritual practice now underpins everything I do.

Until this moment, I have almost never talked about spirituality publicly despite having been baptized in the Presbyterian Church and having sung professionally most of my life in Presbyterian, Catholic, Baptist, and Episcopal churches. Fear of looking stupid or delusional or naive or ignorant, etc, always held me back.

I used to describe myself as “spiritual, but not religious” for the longest time because I didn’t know what I believed. The only thing I knew for sure was that music connected me to something bigger than myself. I felt it when I performed. I definitely noticed it when I wrote music — when I felt a sense of “downloading” information from outside of me. But I didn’t have language beyond that and I was scared to allow myself to go too far down any particular religious path. (See above about the fear of looking stupid or delusional or naive or ignorant).

But when the pain got bad enough, the net I cast for solutions grew wider.

To paraphrase what someone said to me recently, people come to spirituality from one of two places: either inspiration or desperation. I definitely came from the latter.

I was drawn to the spiritual teachers who talked about how we can dissolve the negative effects of monkey mind. The Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche agrees with Dr. Clarke that monkey mind is neither good or bad.

Rinpoche says we just need to give the monkeys a job.

“If you give a job to monkey mind, then you become the boss, and monkey mind becomes your employee.”
—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

If we give them the right kind of jobs, they can help us move our thoughts from ones that cause us suffering to ones that are neutral, or, better yet, ones that allow us to feel peaceful, calm, and focused on what brings us joy.

How do I know this? Because I have practiced it. A lot. I’m not perfect at it, but I no longer suffer the way I did and when anxiety does start to spiral, I can reliably find my way out of it within minutes or hours instead of days, weeks, or months.

The trick is that we have to work with our monkey mind instead of fighting against it.

The M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S. framework

With this newsletter, I am drawing inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi, who described his spiritual practice as a series of experiments.

I like thinking in terms of experiments because they are not rigid. They breathe. They adapt to new information. They don’t require faith alone. They may require faith at the beginning of the process, but after some effort, experiments produce data that we can reflect upon and analyze. We can compare that data to our hypotheses and goals.

This way of thinking has helped me tremendously in my spiritual journey by giving me permission to try on different practices and different beliefs from different spiritual traditions. (Did you know we have permission to keep what resonates and what works and let go of the rest? Well, we do.)

Over the years, as I have been experimenting with giving the monkeys in my mind different kinds of “jobs,” the ones I have found to be most effective center around ten areas. I now call these areas the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S.:

M - Meditate (Experiment #2)
O - Observe (Experiment #3)
N - Notice Nature (Experiment #4)
K - Kindle Uplifting I AMs (Experiment #5)
E - Engage with Spiritual Teachings (Experiment #6)
Y - Yearn through Prayer (Experiment #7)

B - Build an Intention (Experiment #8)
A - Aum (Experiment #9)
R - Refresh the Physical (Experiment #10)
S - Serve While Connected (Experiment #11)

I refer to the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S. as my spiritual practice because they quite literally lift my spirit in three distinct ways:

1. Intervention - When I experience a surge of anxiety or fear or perfectionism or depressive feelings, one or a combo of these can help me return to center.

2. Increase Capacity & Resilience - Over time, as I have practiced these, my resilience has increased and has allowed me to be less affected by things that might have caused suffering in the past.

3. Connection - These practices make me feel connected to something bigger than myself and allow me to feel this connection at any time, instead of only feeling it occasionally (and unpredictably) through music.

Using M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S. as a concept and an acronym helps me in three ways as well:

1. It helps me easily remember the way out when I’m in the grip of monkey mind.

2. It helps me remember my goal of working with monkey mind instead of fighting against it.

3. It helps me remember to be playful, have a sense of humor about myself, and accept my monkey mind for what it is: neither good or bad. It just is.

Truth is one, we call it by various names

My particular spiritual interests have led me into yoga philosophy, Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism), Kriya Yoga, Karma Yoga, the wisdom from the Toltec tradition, the teachings of Jesus, the teachings of Buddhism, the teachings of Mindfulness, and more.

There is a Yogic teaching that says:

“Truth is one, we call it by various names.”

I understand this to mean that while there are many paths up the metaphorical spiritual mountain, most love-based spiritual traditions ultimately all reach the same place whether we call it heaven or nirvana or samadhi or paradise or something else.

Swami Satchidananda says something similar in his translation of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali:

"Many people ask, "Is there just one way to meditate?" Patanjali clearly says, "No, you can meditate on anything that will elevate you."

Swami Shankarananda, the founder of Awake Yoga Meditation, which has become my spiritual home, said it this way:

“Whatever technique you practice, whatever way you follow, whatever way you do not follow — does it make you more expansive and more loving and more compassionate and more caring? Does it bring you peace and joy? That’s all that matters. It’s not that there’s one path that’s better than another, that’s individual.”

My spiritual teacher, Swami Nityananda, who Swami Shankarananda chose to succeed him after he left the body, goes one step further in her book Awake: The Yoga of Pure Awareness, saying:

“We are inviting ourselves, before we physically part from our heart, to tune in to that energy, which is unique to us, and to allow ourselves to live from that energy with clarity, calm, and kindness so that nothing blocks the sharing of that heart energy through us…

“Consider letting that be an index for How successful was my day? Your day will transform if you ask, How much heart energy did I share? How much did I allow myself to honor the heart energy in everyone on the planet?

This is the metric I choose to follow. I do not claim to be an expert in any of the spiritual traditions, I am simply experimenting with what makes me feel:

1. more expansive

2. more loving

3. more compassionate

4. more caring

5. more peaceful

6. more calm

7. more kind

8. and more joyful

I am observing what’s most effective, reflecting on it, and then deciding whether or not to continue working with it or to let it go.

When to practice the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S.

Like in gardening where weeds can come up every day, we know it’s time to do some weeding in our mental garden when we feel certain kinds of emotions.

In the way that our car’s dashboard tells us when our gas tank is empty or our tire is flat or our oil is low, when we feel any “spirit-depleting” emotions, it’s a good indicator we need to give those mind monkeys a job on the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S.

Spirit-depleting emotions are:

• Fear

• Anger

• Annoyance

• Irritability

• Stress

• Jealousy

• Frustration

• Sadness

• Self-criticism

• Resentment

• Envy

• etc.

When we feel these emotions, our ability to offer patience or forgiveness or love to ourselves and others might feel diminished (or will be soon). A metaphor that helps me is to imagine ourselves as a bucket in the way that Denzel Washington describes:

“You start off each morning with your bucket of self-esteem and you come out of the door and everybody’s sitting there with ladles, ready to just scoop it out and scoop it out and scoop it out. So, you have to refill that bucket every day. Whatever your practice — meditation, prayer, hope, dream — but you got to fill that bucket. You got to understand that it is being emptied every day.”
—Denzel Washington

This echoes what Don Miguel Ruiz teaches from the Toltec tradition in The Four Agreements:

“Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day.“

A heaven frequency?

With practice — and over time — what can emerge is a way of living where our daily lives feel harmonious even when there is dissonance (conflict, suffering, hatred, etc.) around us.

As Don Miguel Ruiz puts it:

“You can live in heaven in the middle of thousands of people living in hell because you are immune to that hell… Heaven is a place that exists within our mind. It is a place of joy, a place where we are happy, where we are free to love and to be who we really are. We can reach heaven while we are alive; we don't have to wait until we die.”

Swami Nityananda has described this as “the heaven frequency” or “the love frequency” — a state of consciousness where we are so unshakably tuned to the emotion of love (and love’s related emotions of joy, peace, compassion, forgiveness, etc.) that even as challenges enter our lives, we greet them from a state of peace. We remain steady. 

I find this way of looking at the world to be very empowering and it resonates with me particularly as a musician.

If we understand love not as something abstract, but as a frequency, we can begin to understand that changing that frequency in our minds from a spirit-depleting one to a spirit-lifting one (like love) can have a profound effect.

It helps me to think of it like changing a radio station from a frequency with static noise or a song that drives me crazy to one that’s playing one of my favorite songs. I may not be able to control what others say or do or think, but I can control what to focus on. I can control which frequency I put my inner radio on.

Depending on what I choose, I can allow the monkeys in my mind to play with bananas (fear, hate, anger, etc), or I can give them a job playing on the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S.

When they play with bananas, I feel bananas. When they play on the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S., what I have noticed over time are significant increases to the evenness of my temperament, my calmness, my experience of happiness, my experience of self-love, and my resilience to things that don’t “go my way.” I have noticed more creativity, more intuition, and more joy. My friends and family have noticed it too and often pull me aside to mention it.

What does success look like?

I had my Dad as a teacher for math in 5th and 8th grade. His signature line at the end of his classes was always “Have a Happy Day.”

Maybe I internalized this as a kid, but when I boil down my goals in life to their simplest terms, that’s kind of it. I want to have a happy day, for as many days as possible. Is every day too much to ask? Every minute?

What makes me happy? Time with family. Singing. Writing and producing music. Cooking. Reading. Exploring. Writing. Hearing great stories. Designing things. Laughing. Feeling love. Giving love. Giving. Helping others. If I looked back at the end of my life and knew my days had been filled with these kinds of experiences, I would feel successful.

In one of my favorite television shows, Friday Night Lights, the main character, Coach Taylor, says:

“Success is not a goal, it’s a byproduct.”
—Coach Taylor, Friday Night Lights

If success is happiness, I have learned that it will be a byproduct of which thoughts I choose to focus on and which thoughts I choose to act upon. For me, success has been a byproduct of practicing the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S.

My intention is to treat this newsletter as part of my practice and as an act of service to others who are struggling in the ways I have struggled (the last of the M.O.N.K.E.Y. B.A.R.S. is to “Serve Without Expectation).” I have no expectations for it. I will offer it weekly for as long as I feel it is of service and/or for as long as I am able.

If it resonates with you, please consider becoming a subscriber. You’ll never miss an update and every new post will be sent directly to your email inbox.

Free and paid subscriptions are available. Paid subscriptions:

• Are a way for people who appreciate the work to support me and my family.

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• Have the ability to comment and participate in discussions within the Monkey Bars for the Monkey Mind community.

Thanks for considering, and I hope you have a happy day!

With love,
Jonathan

This article was updated 4/20/24.

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