What To Do About Thoughts?

We don’t have to ask if you were on the breath most of the time – most of the time we aren’t. Everyone who ever sits down will spend most of their time thinking early on. That’s ok. Everyone who ever sits down has to deal with this. We’re not used to being able or willing to focus. What we think—our thoughts--- are more enticing to us. We’re “addicted” to thinking. You’re not alone if you found you can’t slow down thinking. We think about what has been, or what we’re planning to do tomorrow, or some other struggle or problem we’re trying to solve. And this is when we’re meditating! What do you think happens when we’re NOT meditating? We spend most of our time living in our thoughts rather than actually connecting with our lives. You can see the problem. This is a very deep and profound insight. Let’s reflect on this particular insight for a moment.

Oftentimes we don’t realize that we’re not in control of our thinking. We think we direct our thinking, and that we have control over it:  I decide to think, I decide not to think. I decide what to think and what not to think. Did you ask yourself to think while you were sitting? You had one instruction: to rest your attention on the sensation of the breath – you’ll find in the course of meditating, this week and the next, that this is impossible to do. If you were in charge of your thinking, why couldn’t you do that? Why couldn’t you say, I’ll stay focused on my breath for 5 minutes without thinking, and then do it? Because thoughts happen – often they just think themselves. It is the nature of the mind to think!

Our thoughts think themselves because they’re another conditioned activity that we’re not aware of. However, the good news is that while we can’t stop the first thought from arising—thoughts will come whether we want them to or not---we can learn to stop letting them act like a runaway train. We can stop chaining them together and becoming lost in them. We simply learn to notice when thoughts are leading us away and bring ourselves back (to our anchor, our breath).

Important to understand that thoughts themselves are not “bad.”  Intentional thinking is necessary and serves us well. It’s when our thoughts lead us away from our intentions or from living in awareness of what is happening in the present moment that they interfere with leading an awakened life.

Marketers know that thought is a conditioned activity. You watch a commercial, see an ad, walk by a store, and the mind gets enticed and begins to grasp after items. 

In meditation what we’re trying to do is establish a new way to focus. So the first thing we have to do is to realize very clearly how difficult it is for us to focus, to consciously direct our attention and awareness. 

That is a huge undertaking because we have patience for everything but ourselves, and yet in this practice we have to have patience for our inability to focus. We are retraining the mind to come and reside and stay stationary, to stabilize on one thing. This training is key if we’re ever going to move away from mind just thinking itself throughout our life. We don’t realize how out of control the mind is until we sit down with it for 5 minutes. It’s a very sobering understanding, but that’s an important insight. The point of tonight’s meditation is to show us this conditioning. 

One final caution: many of us are competitive, used to being at the head of the class. We can be very hard on ourselves, critical of ourselves. This is not the way to approach meditation and mindfulness. This is a lifetime practice, not something on our to do list to master and move on to the next item on the list. Be kind gentle and understanding with yourself. 

Sometimes humor can help: “Wow! Look at this monkey mind, leaping from one thought to the next like a monkey swinging through the trees.  Who would have thought all that was going on up there!”  OR get to know that “obnoxious roommate in our head who gives us bad advice and won’t shut-up”!