Replacement thoughts are like the old choke chains on dogs. You don’t see them so much nowadays, I think they’re considered cruel. We grew up next door to a lady who trained guide dogs and this was how things were done. Nowadays dogs are restrained by a harness around there body so there is no discomfort, but back in the day people used a chain with a loop that went around the dogs neck, and when they pull, the loop tightens and hurts their neck so they stop. Dogs would get excited and pull ahead at the park and you would see them rasping for breath as they couldn’t breathe. But this was actually the wrong way to use the chain. The actual method was to notice when the dog is getting ahead of itself, and give a short, sharp (fairly gentle) yank to let the dog know, to slow down and discipline itself.
The skill of ‘yanking’ the chain, it wasn’t to pull it to hurt the dog and it wasn’t for long to actually choke it, the point was to gently redirect. This is what a replacement thought (mini-Nembutsu you could say) does. The mind runs off and does what it wants on a tangent, as all the past conditioning your unreigned will stored in the light keeps resurfacing.
The skill is to reign the mind, to hold a single, chosen image, very intently, for a minute. There are really four stages to it. One, being mindful to know what is happening (noticing the negativity in the first place). Two, letting go of what is arising. Three, holding the chosen image. Four, releasing to hopefully a new course of consciousness. If the old stream rearises and the mind isn’t on the course you set, like a dog pulling on the lead, it is corrected gently and lovingly. A little puppy needs a lot of guidance and an old dog knows the way to the shops and back and can practically walk itself. There’s a lovely analogy in Zen literature about a rebellious horse fighting the whip, but a tamed one growing stronger with a gentler touch.
The skill is to be able to hold the image for one minute, with high emotion. With the chanting practice I teach, the images are cycling around three seconds for each one, but the separate skill is required, of this intense holding, and the ‘glue’ that keeps it in place is joy. To train myself in this I actually went as far as to find a one minute timer, the old hourglass/sand variety, and the novelty of it gave me a bit of focus. Nowadays, I have a ‘feel’ for it. The holding of a chosen image is fairly effortless and I can feel when the ‘thought-pressure’ of the unwanted thought is receding and won’t return.
There can sometimes be resistance when we’re talking about ‘replacement thoughts’, because it comes across as thought control and repression. Repression is an idea from psychotherapy, that emotions are a bit like an energy, and when there is a traumatic event in childhood and you stop thinking about it because of the emotional pain it causes, then that unexpressed energy behind the thought festers and manifests as anxiety. If it’s a sexual repression, it can manifest as fetishes or anxieties.
The idea of mental events being imbued with emotional energy (in the light) isn’t so different to my experience. So the way a psychoanalyst ‘cures’ the repression (refusing to think certain thoughts) is to talk about them (and so choose to bring them into the mind) but then using a conversation based on reason, to be feeling a different emotion while the pictures are being recalled (from shame to acceptance or forgiveness say).
I’m not teaching repression. It’s not to absolutely refuse to think certain thoughts or feelings. It’s to delink them from identity. To take my own example, I kept having memories of abuse from my schooldays. It wasn’t that I refused to think about them or feel that emotion of bitterness and resentment. The replacement was to widen that energy, from bitterness to compassion, from self to others.
Nothing is being pushed down into forgetfulness. THE PAST IS AS FLUID AS THE PRESENT. The past changes over time. We don’t need to pay thousands to a therapist to change the emotions in the hurts we stored in our inner-light, we can do it directly, in a wholesome way that clears the path to harmony and leads us towards awakening.