When I first took robes and entered the monastic community of
Ajahn Chah, I had already been practicing meditation for two years. Now,
sitting and walking mindfully for hours in a little hut in the forest
clearing, my mind gradually became quite open and sensitive. One day as I
was scanning my attention through my body, I noticed with curiosity
that there were some areas where I could hardly feel anything and my
skin felt numb. With further awareness, this perception grew even
clearer.  Then I had the thought “patches of numbness on the limbs are
one of the first signs of leprosy.”  I was not usually prone to
hypochondria, but during part of my time in the Peace Corps, I had
 worked with lepers in a rural health program.  Now my mind got
worried.  I was afraid that the numbness meant I’d contracted leprosy. 
What would I do? Do they throw leprous monks out of the temple?  My fear
grew rapidly.  Thoughts proliferated.  I pictured my whole life
unfolding as a leper, an outcast and then a beggar.  Already isolated in
my forest hut, I now felt really alone.  Then I imagined having to tell
my mother, “Your son is a leper and he can never come home.”  Self-pity
was added to the alarm.  My thoughts went crazy. What was I to do?  I
was too ashamed to say anything about it.  What if it wasn’t true?  What
if it was? I waited and practiced while this whole movie played for
several days.

Then I noticed how the areas of numbness shifted and changed.  I got
the courage to ask a senior monk about sensations, though not about
leprosy.  He explained how body perceptions change in meditation –
sometimes you feel many new sensations, sometimes parts of the body seem
to dissolve or disappear.  It could happen on the skin or inside the
body.  “You just notice it all with mindfulness,” he laughed, as if to
ease my nervousness. For three days I lived as a leper.  Now all these
thoughts vanished like a dream.  Who was I now? What would my mind make
up next?

How do we work with the storytelling mind?  The poet Muriel
Ruckheyser writes, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” 
Buddhist psychology emphasizes that we must understand the power of the
stories we tell, and differentiate them from the direct experience of
life.  In this way we can use thoughts without being trapped by them. 
As one of my teachers put it, “Thoughts make a good servant, but a poor
master.”

The first step for us in working with the storytelling mind is to
notice the endless stream of thoughts and commentary that plays along
with our experience.  Almost everyone who sits down to meditate is
startled by this process. Even though we try to focus our attention on
our breath or body or a prayer, we are interrupted by a torrent of
ideas, memories, plans.  This is a key insight called “Seeing the
Waterfall.” One Buddhist meditation teacher explains that the average
person has 17,000 thoughts in one day.

Just as the salivary glands secrete saliva, the mind secretes
thoughts.  The thoughts think themselves.  This thought production is
not bad, it’s simply what minds do. A cartoon I once saw depicts a car
on a long western desert highway.  A roadside sign warns, “Your own
tedious thoughts next 200 miles.”   The thought stream can take the form
of pictures, of words and stories and even more subtly of body-based
and intuitive knowings.  One of the unique features of Buddhist
psychology is that it directs us to examine both to the content of our
thoughts, and the process of thinking itself.

This excerpt is taken from the book, “The Wise Heart”

(Read Part Two of The Storytelling Mind)