Tantric Thinking

and the problem of mental distress

When Your Mind Won’t Shut Up

I’m sure we have all been there.

Those midnight sessions when your mind is racing. Unable to control your thoughts and get to sleep, frustration builds. And now you’re awake and frustrated, further from sleep. There seems to be no way out, except to stop your mind.

Or that moment when intrusive thoughts start to win.

I remember a time in my life when I was under stress. Extreme stress. My marriage was falling apart (thanks to meeting the love of my life). My career as a church minister was ending (thanks to incipient atheism). I was trapped, and I had nowhere to go, I could see I was about to lose everything.

It seemed obvious that one way to silence the mental noise was to take a knife from the kitchen bench and draw it across my shoulder. Eventually, after months of enduring the dissolution of my life as I knew it, it started to seem obvious that there might be another way to silence these thoughts.

I started to have intrusive thoughts about how to end my li…