The circus of the mind

Entangling cycles of incessant thought
On and on they go

Spirals of doom
Circles of pleasure
Spinning you ‘round the merry-go-round

Stories, beliefs and fairy tales
All many faces of the cycle
Lifting you higher and higher until they dump you
Up and down, round and round
Cycles of memory recycled again

The problem is others, whispers the cycle
Avoid them, fix them, remove them
All alone you end up
With the little cycles

Suffering the cycles you want them to stop
Anything for a moment of quiet
Numbing, avoiding, procrastinating, distracting
All become intimately familiar to you
And on and on the cycle goes

You try running away, it follows you
You try numbing it, it just waits for you
Can’t avoid it, so best understand it

And so begins another cycle
Digging up sacs of memory and inventing all sorts of things
Darkness spills onto those closest to you
Later you find you’re still in the cycle
Not much seems to be working

Pleasure and pain
All depend on the cycle
You’re a slave to the whims of the cycle
You want to break free
But you don’t know how

Internal madness consumes you from within
You think you’re going insane for everyone around looks sane
The incessant spirals keep on spinning
Mental madness, miserable moods

To make the cycle stop
To bring a moment of respite
A comfy moment of silence
How hard can it be?
But still you don’t know how
The endless cycle keeps on going
Making you run in circles
Desperation sets in

One day you stumble upon someone who has something you don’t
You haven’t seen this before
You can’t quite articulate what it is
Poise? Charisma? Peace?
You don’t know but you want to know more
He clarifies that the problem is not your mind
The problem is that you are suffering it’s capabilities
A fantastic sense of imagination and a vivid sense of memory
He makes sense, you listen
He clarifies things you wish had been clarified long ago
Most importantly he talks of a way to gain control
He offers you tools
You start using the tools

Things start happening
Ease emerges
Peace comes
Joy surfaces
Tears roll
The circus continues but you have stopped trying to stop it
Instead a certain gap develops
Over time that gap is sustained longer and longer
The mind is no longer a problem
It has it’s cycles
You are still learning how to use them
But one thing is clear: you don’t suffer them anymore
For you are no longer the cycle
There is a gap between you and the cycle
A silence, a stillness
That thing you were seeking all along

Originally published at http://adrienjamai.home.blog on October 28, 2020.