Doing and Thinking

  Lately, I have been learning the importance of doing things, not just getting caught up in thoughts.  I have often fallen into the chosen trap of using my thoughts to gauge actions. But I realize that this way of doing things is really limiting. For one thing, it makes 'thoughts' the measure of a person's values and actions rather than looking at behaviors. For another it lets the action be the key way to look at the behavior rather than how we feel prior to doing the actions. This is a hard lesson to learn, and I wanted to explore it from two perspectives. One of them is something I just learned about recently called Morita Therapy, while the other is a Buddhist perspective.
    I learned about Morita Therapy through Caroline Brazier's book Buddhist Psychology. I believe the principal behind this practice is using journals to document actions that need to be done, rather than looking only at feelings. I have found a lot of times in the past, I have relied on my present emotion (whether fear or anxiety or desire) to determine how and when I do something. But the interesting thing about Morita therapy is that it asks that clients (or practitioners) focus on the details of the actions themselves rather than on our initial feelings about those actions. Brazier remarks:

In particular, Moritist method focuses on moving a person into purposeful action and away from a state where they are at the mercy of crippling emotions. It places a lot of emphasis on the distinction between action, which is under the control of the person, and feelings, which are not. Unlike many western approaches which emphasize waiting until something feels right before acting, the Morita approach emphasizes putting the attention into whatever activity needs to be done and allowing feelings to flow in their own way. The aim is not to eliminate feelings, but to accept that they are just part of our experience. We do not need to become fixated on them. (p.265)

I found this account of Morita therapy quite interesting, and would consider trying Morita journaling technique for a while to see how it unfolds for me. I think it's especially interesting when it comes to doing things I am not used to doing or might not yet have embarked upon. I recall also reading in David Burns' book Feeling Good a similar exercise, where he gets participants to write down what they do on a daily basis and rate their feelings about the action before and after doing it. Burns focuses on the feelings and how they change from 'thinking about' doing something to actually doing it. But nonetheless the key catalyst seems to be getting depressed people to see what they can do and how good they feel once they finally get to doing it.
   I am especially prone to getting more caught up in thoughts (and attendant fears) rather than just buckling down to do something. And it happens all so often that if I get stuck in a thought, I will not see the possibility of action. In Buddhism, I think this has to do with habit energy. When I am in the habit of taking my thoughts to be what is happening in the present, I will fail to really act spontaneously from the heart, because my thoughts are all I can see in the moment. And those thoughts are the result of previous clinging to objects and comfortable ways of seeing the world. For example, if I am going to a movie theatre and I only want to see certain kinds of movies, that becomes an expectation which prevents me from venturing to enjoy other movies. It's not that I am attached necessarily to the actual movie, but it's more a general feeling of familiarity that constellates around my memories of similar movies from the past.
    What Morita or similar therapies try to do, it would appear, is put action first so that people don't fixate on feelings so much. In this way, I am not letting my previous impressions or emotions around something get in the way of the present experience of the actions. By emphasizing action over emotions, it can allow people to stop attaching their identity to emotions, and toward a more action-based approach to being and living. But it also gets away from the 'mystique' of believing that emotions are signs of divine fate or providence. Actually, such is not the case, because how a person feels does not often determine whether things are actually accomplished or not. Though I might believe that some job was 'meant for me', I cannot really tell whether it's going to work or not unless I put my full efforts into the job itself and plan to succeed in it as much as I can.
        

Brazier, Caroline (2003) Buddhist Psychology: Liberate your mind, embrace life. London: Constable