recently I was lying awake and started getting in some bad thought spirals -- negative self talk, fixating on traumatic memories, things of that nature. Folks, we all hate it! And then I remembered the meditation technique of 'noting,' where when a thought enters your mind while you're trying to meditate, you basically just go 'there it is, that's a thought' and you let it drift away.
That doesn't quite work for the uglier, more problematic thoughts, I've found, so that night in bed I imagined something else. I pictured that upsetting memory that was gnawing at me as a cricket that I'd captured under a glass, and I imagined picking it up with a piece of paper beneath to keep it stuck inside the glass. "You are very annoying and you freak me out if you show up when I'm not expecting you," I said to my imaginary cricket, "but you can't actually hurt me. And I am going to put you outside where you can be free." And then I imagined putting that cricket of bad thoughts out into a field where it could hop off and not be my problem anymore. I got to sleep after that.
