Counter-programming against the habitual

Joseph Goldstein is interviewed in Ten Percent Happier Podcast "Three Mindfulness Strategies."  One thing he talks about is the fact that it's not just big emotions which lead to thoughts (and vice versa), but micro ideas.

For me it might have been just some planning or maybe remembering something or maybe a quick little comment about what I was seeing. So it could be just the ordinary activity of the mind, you know, in our daily lives and how frequently these quickly passing thoughts happen and how, for the most part, I hadn't been mindful in those short durations. And I realized a few things from this. One is that these unnoticed thoughts would, in a very subtle way, be conditioning different emotions and maybe a thought would make me a little more interested or sad or excited or whatever and all in a very mild level, which is why we generally don't notice it.

We are being conditioned, altered by these tiny rememberings or comments.  

But what I saw was that every time we're in these thoughts and mindfully, you know, we're like we're lost in the dream for that short period of time. It is creating an inner mental environment. It's conditioning our inner environment. And even though it's for short durations, it's many, many times a day. So it was very interesting for me to see how our minds get conditioned very often unknowingly, you know, in these seemingly innocuous stream of thoughts.

These thoughts, because they are often self-referential, "dream ourselves into existence" as he says, by which I understand him to mean that we reinforce our "me-ness" which is, in Buddhist practice, an illusion.  I don't understand that completely (we are actually physical things...). But I do grasp the idea that the constant self-referential thoughts (which are likely distorted) create a character that we think we are and follow the script of.

And there was one other little piece that stood out from me that a lot of our ordinary thoughts in one way or another. Or self-referential. You know, it's a memory I had or a plan that I have or, you know, a reaction or a comment. And so every time we're lost in the dream of those thoughts, it's as if we're dreaming ourselves into existence over and over again.

 The benefit of knowing this and becoming aware of these tiny thoughts and emotions which dream ourselves into existence, is simply that we become aware of this process and the possibility of interupting the process.  Dan Harris coins the phrase "counter-programming against the habitual."  As Joseph says:

And the more we understand how thoughts condition different emotions and the reverse, that's also kind of a doorway into greater freedom.