There was a time in my life when I was young when I used to brood a lot when I suffered some injustice or was treated badly.
This is not I think all that uncommon. Lots of people do just that. And they make life miserable for themselves in the process. I am speaking from experience.
There are two aspects to this problem. The first aspect is – Why should we stop brooding? And the second question is – How are we to go about stopping brooding?
I will try to answer the first question here in this article. Why shouldn’t we brood?
The first reason is that whenever we brood we feel miserable.
The second reason is that old chestnut from the Bible – Judge not that you be not judged.
Now if you are not a Christian and want reasons why you should do what the Bible says, I can only say that you will have life more abundantly if you follow this advice. I am not interested in becoming a holy man but I do want to live life.
I will pull out here two poems. One is a Zen poem that goes:
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right or wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
This is self explanatory. I can testify through experience that curing yourself of the sickness of the mind mentioned above frees your time and energies to an astonishing extent. And you will also be much happier.
In any case God is running the Universe you are not (or if you are an atheist you can say that the Universe is running itself). The only thing that matters is the well being of the Universe. Text of a related article in my blog is below:
According to the findings of Quantum Physics the Universe is an organic whole, similar to the human body. Our position as sentient beings is similar to that of cells within the human body. It does not matter what happens to an individual cell as long as the body survives and is in a state of well being. I told myself that similarly it does not matter that I suffered injustice as long as the Universe keeps going. As the Bible says – God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.
It is God’s job to separate the wheat from the chaff. The people who have harmed me do not need to explain their actions to me. They are required to do so either to a judge in a court of law or to God Almighty on Judgment day. God will judge them – my opinions or judgment of them are irrelevant and have no meaning because I can neither reward nor punish the harmful people. That is not my job.
A related point is that right and wrong, good and bad are joined at the hip. You can no more separate the good from the bad as you can have a right without a left.
Here is a quote from the Taoist masters that makes that point:
When everyone recognises beauty as beautiful, there is already ugliness;
When everyone recognises goodness as good, there is already evil.
“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited; …
Before and after are in mutual sequence.
If people have the freedom to treat you well then they also have the freedom to treat you badly. You have to accept that some people will ill treat you at least some of the time. If you go about trying to right all wrongs that you suffer in your life then you may find that you have wasted this human birth and all the opportunities that came with it. And it is not a way to live happily.
Ok so that’s the first question.
The second question is – How are we to go about stopping brooding?
I have found Buddhist meditation and mindfulness methods to be very useful. Try Vipassana (as taught by SN Goenka) or the books of Thich Nhat Hanh. The book The Miracle of Mindfulness is particularly good. Link is below (not an affiliate link):
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Note: The poems above were sourced from the excellent book below:
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