hy are we conditioned to feel bad, experience resistance, focus on the negative, and sabotage ourselves?

The Buddha taught that thoughts create our reality and where we direct our attention determines the quality of our lives. We can either be here (present) or we can not be here (lost in thought and suffering).

In my training at the Zen monastery, as a monk, I practiced meditation and used the tools of awareness practice to expose the constructs of my mind.

I discovered that the only limitations I experienced in life were created by my failure to understand how my mind worked. And because I didn’t know how my mind worked, I kept falling into the same traps over-and-over again.

Back when cassette tapes were still around, it was easy to describe these mental patterns through the analogy of tape loops. Like one tape spliced to itself, it just kept repeating again and again.

Today, there’s even some scientific evidence that 95% of our thoughts today are the same ones we had yesterday and that 80% of those are negative.
Daniel Amen calls them “automatic negative thoughts.” ANTs for short.

Many people I talk to can attest to this assertion, (with or without the stats!)

So given all of this is backed up by ancient wisdom, as well as modern science, what’s the solution?

At the Zen monastery, we taught that these thought loops were operating in the background unconsciously and it was imperative for us to bring them to the surface into full consciousness. Once they were brought up to the surface, the next step was to have an effect on them. To interrupt them. Stop them. Break them up. Whatever was required.

So that when the tape played, it stopped sounding believable.

Only when we consciously interfered with it did we have a chance to successfully break free of it and create something new.