Session 4 Mindfulness of Thoughts
I love when people say to me “Who do you think you are?” It reminds me of Peter Sellars in the film The Party when he says ‘In India we don’t think who we are. We know who we are.’
So don’t think who you are, know who you are.
So we'll begin-- we'll practice in a few moments. We've included body and breath and feelings. And now we'll widen the field to include the arising of thoughts.
Grounding Meditation:
[CHIME]
So take a few moments to find that posture that most allows you to be here, alert, sitting upright, and also at ease. (pause) You might notice what parts of your body can relax just a little bit more right now. Perhaps there's a little bit of letting go that's possible in the shoulders. Maybe you can soften the hands a bit. You might sense an openness to the chest, let the belly soften some. (pause) And be aware of the movement of the breath, relaxing with the breath, letting the attention collect some, and settle with the breath.
(pause) As we've been practicing letting this movement of the breath, the wave, the breath be in the foreground, sensing the other waves of experience-- feelings, motion, sounds in the background (pause) the instructions have been when one particular experience becomes strong, when it starts calling for your attention, to let go of the breath and open to that, letting that be in the foreground, those feelings, emotions, sensations. (pause)
So expand the instructions now to include thoughts. And when you notice a thought, when you become aware of thinking, the invitation's to gently note that. You might mentally, with a whisper, name the thought, the kind of thought, or just the fact of thinking, thinking, thinking. And then pause for a moment, just relaxing open to what's right here (pause) -- sounds, sensations, the life that's right here, gently, as you're ready to reconnect with your primary anchor, with the movement of the breath or bodily sensations or movement and again, taking some moments to notice the difference between being inside the thought (pause) and this aliveness that's right here, this changing flow of experience.
(Longer Pause)
You might notice where your attention is. Now, if the mind has been wandering in thought, just to appreciate this as a moment of awakening. (pause) It's an opportunity to ground ourselves with a quality of non-judgmental friendliness, presence, relaxing open, sensing the difference between what's here right now, and any thought, (pause) and continuing, feeling the wave of the breath, background waves of other experience, present and awake.
(Longer Pause)
From the poet Wu Men, "Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter-- if your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life."
[CHIME]
And we have been moving from opening our attention, awareness, to the experience of our body and our breath and widening it to the-- all the different domains of experience, feelings and emotions. And this session will be opening further to include the realm of thinking. How do we bring a wise and openhearted attention to the world of thoughts?
Because we’re often Lost in Thought, lost in our storytelling mind. And it can be an incessant monologue featuring moi! as the protagonist.
It’s a movie, and a book called The world according to me! I’ve actually been recording my thoughts in notebooks and in digital format for a number of years.
Can we create something other than what is asked for? Can we tell our version of truth without self-censorship, out of fear of personal negative consequences? I thought about this in relation to how my own family objected to me putting on plays that reflected how our relationships represented a microcosm of the macro cosmos from my perspective.
Around the time Dad died my mother said or told me in yet another of our heated arguments, ‘you’re not a writer’ because what I was writing about and she didn’t want in the public eye didn’t make me a writer in her eyes. Just after that, we went inside and I told her how angry I was, partly towards her but even more so ashamed of myself for allowing her to rule the roost regarding the care of Dad.
It was a cathartic moment for us although it didn’t stop me from feeling that I wasn’t authentic or authoritative enough to decide how to act or define myself rather than cow down to others.
Sometime after that, she showed me a letter from a friend of my father who had attended the funeral where I read the eulogy I had written for Dad. He had been moved by it, as had others who spoke about it afterward. Some months later Mam asked me for a copy for someone and then came a day when she said I should write my memoirs and share my stories. ‘You spent years stopping me and now you want me to write!’ I had given up or given in to the will of others so as not to displease or offend them, as well as risk ostracism, not only from family but also the community and culture, whose nature I was describing.
Of course, I’ve not stopped writing my thoughts for myself or writing just to people-please, be it for the stage or any other medium of public performance. I have to some extent put aside trying to change the world through sharing my stories, at least for the time being. The reason being:
Now I find myself being drawn back to creativity in a time of environmental change and inevitable cultural changes that we have tried to avoid. As Carl Jung succinctly put it; ‘what we resist persists.’
Now, I am not so sure or motivated by anyone or anything to believe I or we can turn back time or make a difference to repair the damage that we’ve already done. However, I need to see or at least feel that what we’re doing is making a difference. Plus, I need to see and hear more of the ideas and stories and artivistic actions coming to fruition and not just withering away due to lack of courage to speak truth to power. As Eckhart Tolle said; ‘power over others is weakness disguised as strength.’
These are just my thoughts and I’m aware of how repetitive they are when I read what I wrote years ago. I still don’t know who or what I believe in and while thoughts can lead to action, they can also be paralysing.
One of the challenges of this ongoing story in our minds is that it's insistent and repetitive. And the themes often make us miserable. I'd like to have you try a brief experiment for a moment. And just close your eyes.
We're going to take two different words and the first word is "crisis." And just let the word "crisis" be in your mind. You might mentally whisper it to yourself, crisis, crisis. And just pause for a minute and notice what it's like to have the word "crisis" floating around inside.
That's enough of that one. And then the next one we're going to think about is the word "challenge." Just for a moment, let challenge move through you, the idea, the thought of a challenge. And notice what that's like.
When you'd like, you can open your eyes.
As we begin to check out the thoughts that are moving through us, we start discovering they really create an inner atmosphere. And it's an interesting question to ask ourselves: what kind of thoughts are we habitually thinking?
The thoughts that move through us create a very real physical experience, an emotional experience. And because evolution has rigged us to be vigilant about potential threats, an ample number of our thoughts are in the category of worry or judgment or anxiety thoughts about what's about to happen. So they perpetuate this atmosphere of tension and fear.
Neuroscience says it in this way-- neurons that fire together wire together.
So our habitual thoughts perpetuate our emotional states that can cloud or brighten our day.
Imagine you’re surrounded by a pack of hungry hyenas: what would you do?
Stop imagining!
There’s a saying: ‘thoughts are a good servant but a poor master.’ We need them to survive as well as flourish. But without being able to step back and observe just how repetitive and similar they are we can lose our way with them. We can’t see the forest through the trees and we can often be misled by them.
Maybe you’ve heard the expression I’ll believe it when I see it but it’s actually the other way round at times. I’ll see it when I believe it. And most of us know our memory is subjective and faulty even at the best of times. And then we often live with these painfully limiting beliefs about ourselves, about each other. And we also project a lot and misinterpret one another’s actions.
And sometimes in ways that cause a lot of suffering for ourselves and others. So when we believe our thoughts, when they're the master, we're living in a virtual reality. And it's directly shaping our life experience by creating all kinds of feelings we talked about in the last session.
some pleasurable that we want to hold on and others not so pleasant that we want to escape from.
My story about obsessive thinking and waking in the morning before my storytelling mind switched on.
A Story I heard about a tiger who lived in the Zoo. Her name was Mohini. And she was housed in this cage that was 12 by 12. And she would pace back and forth all the time, as caged animals do. And so at one point, the biologists and staff decided to create a natural environment for Mohini, to give her acres and acres of land with hills and with ponds and so on. And they were really excited about releasing her into this natural environment.
So when they opened the doors of her cage and transported her and led her into the compound, she immediately went to a corner of the compound and began walking back and forth in that corner. And she paced and paced until an area of 12 by 12 was worn bare of grass. She did that for the rest of her life.
And there's something tragic that our lives are filled with so much possibility, and yet the storytelling mind keeps us imprisoned repeating the same old pattern over and over again.
But the purpose of our training in mindfulness is not to stop thinking or telling stories but to begin to discover the space between our thoughts and not to confuse our thoughts with reality.
The first step in bringing awareness to thinking is simple, yet challenging. And that is to purposely recognize that the thoughts are happening. With mindfulness, we become aware that the thoughts are just thoughts. They're real but they’re not reality and they don’t define you.
They're real insofar as they're happening. They're going on. They're an experience, a real experience. But they're not truth itself. Thoughts are a re-presentation of reality that is sometimes more accurate and sometimes less accurate. But it's no closer to the real thing than a photo of a tree would be to a living tree, to that budding that happens in the springtime and the change of leaves in the fall and the branches that sway in the breeze or the smell of decomposing leaves.
So that first step of recognition. It's that wing of mindfulness, of noticing what's here.
And with feelings and emotions, it can be very powerful to name thinking, that expression that the shaman described that when you name something, it doesn't have power over you. What happens is the power is lessened because, in the moment of naming, you're no longer AS CAUGHT UP or identified with them. You can name the type of thought. You might name worry or judging or planning, sometimes rehearsing, daydreaming.
Some people find it really helpful to name the top 10 themes, that are playing right now in the mind. And it may be if you're infatuated, you're-- the theme is something to do with romance. If you have a job interview coming up, it's about how well you'll do on the job interview, or if there's financial pressure, that if you're remodeling - those thoughts - diet, sickness. Whatever it is, it's very useful in that noting to have the note be a soft whisper in the mind, just a soft background whisper, no judgment at all, just naming it.
I find it really helpful in the moments after recognizing a thought to pause and sense in the pause that I can reconnect with what's actually here. But that reconnection comes when there's no added judgment when there's a quality of kindness.
So the second part is relaxing open. Come back to what's here, to the experience of sensations in the body, to the rhythm or movement of the breath.
When you arrive back here, in reality, it can be very, very powerful to deepen your practice by just noticing the difference between the thought experience, being inside a thought, and this living moment.
So I'd like to, in a moment, practice a little exercise with you that helps in this recognition. And I have noticed that when people begin meditation, the biggest breakthrough that they report is that "I don't have to believe my thoughts." Another language for that that sometimes comes through is, "I realized I'm not my thoughts." There is an incredible power in bringing awareness to thinking, that we include thinking in the field of awareness.
So coming into stillness and closing your eyes, taking a few moments to feel the sitting posture from the inside out, you can feel the sensations and aliveness inside you. Feel the sensations of breathing, the movement of your breath.
Now, we'll practice mindfulness of thoughts by imagining that you are a cat. And you're sitting right outside a mouse hole. And you're bringing great interest to the appearance of any mouse that might dare poke its head out or, even more, come racing out so that whenever a thought arises-- that's the mouse-- you're going to notice it quite fully.
So thoughts might appear as words or as pictures. But your only job in this next minute or so is to be fully like that cat, fully attentive to when the thoughts arise. When you hear the bell again, you're going to begin to count the thoughts. When you notice them, count them. You don't have to count the counting.
[CHIME]
So we spent about a minute and a half. And some of you might have noticed you just had a few thoughts. Some had 20 thoughts. Some had 30, 30-plus.
Now, for some of you, it might have been that because you were purposely paying attention, that fewer thoughts came up. And for others, it might have been because you were paying more attention, you noticed more thoughts. Some of you might have had fewer thoughts. But they were longer thoughts.
So it's hard to say. But what's interesting is that you can begin to notice, "Oh, a thought is happening." And that is the beginning of real freedom. We begin to sense as we start noticing thoughts, well, what exactly are they?
For some, they're words. You might hear a noise or a voice in the background speaking that sets you thinking. For others, images-- and if there were images, they might have been just one or a kind of movie.
Some of you might have noticed, or as you continue to practice might start noticing, that thoughts are body-based. There's a real kinaesthetic feeling with them.
Some of you might have noticed there were really sneaky ones, like ones that said, "Hmm, there haven't been any thoughts yet," or, "Hey, it's getting quieter in here." Some of them might have been more emotional or judgmental like "I don’t think I’m doing this right."
The value and this is a continual process, is that as we become aware of thoughts, we become aware of what's been called "seeing the waterfall," that there really is an endless stream of thoughts, commentary, sometimes memories, plans, judgments. And especially for those of you that are brand new, you're starting really fresh in meditation, it can be discouraging.
many new meditators judge themselves and come to the conclusion of, "My mind is too busy to do this, or I'm not really suited to do this.” And we can feel a sense of failure.
And so I want to stress that having lots of thoughts is normal.
Our mind secretes thoughts like our body secretes enzymes. And it's part of our evolutionary design to be thinking a lot. It's a part of our impact as a species for better and for worse, as we know. But mostly, it's not our fault. And we are rigged to scan for danger, plus we have a default network in our brain where, if we're not occupied with a formal task, our brain automatically starts scanning the past and the future to keep our story narrative of self going to stabilize us, orient.
So learning to include in awareness the play of thoughts is not about trying to stop them but really cultivating a wise relationship with what's happening.
And it's a key part of this training, is the attitude or relationship that we have with ourselves is often how we see ourselves. And you might sense, "How do I relate to thoughts?" Because it's very easy to think we shouldn't be thinking these thoughts and then go to war with them. And if you're at war with your thoughts, you'll be at war for the rest of your life.
The moment of recognizing and waking up out of a thought is an important moment in this training. It's full of possibilities. You can either feed the old habits of thinking that something bad is happening, judging it, trying to control your mind, or you can cultivate a new way of being that's really filled with a friendly curiosity.
Where you think: Oh that’s an interesting thought. I wonder how where that came from?
One of the biggest challenges in working with thoughts is that when they are emotionally charged. We might notice them and open out of them if it becomes too much. And believe me, they will come again and again, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice challenging them with you ability to curious and kind and remain self-compassionately present with them.
We all have core beliefs. And they're often forged out of our deepest insecurities. And if you're suffering, you are believing a fear-based belief with the different thoughts that are coming around it.
For example, feeling fear which leads to anxious thoughts:
It's very easy to get into a chain reaction, where we have these incessant dialogues and these core fear beliefs and thoughts that are moving through our mind that then bring up the feelings and the behaviours that keep us trapped in looping patterns that really cause suffering until we shine the light of awareness on them and realise we don’t have to believe them.
The question is how to really work with our mind in a way that begins to give us some freedom.
“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore”
This is a kind of communion that we have with one another and the kind of community we can form.
Three Levels of Awareness
· Notice the content of experience
· Notice thoughts are insubstantial
· Notice you are the witness of it all
How to teach mindfulness of Thoughts
· Name the thoughts
· Identify your ‘top ten’ tunes
· Normalize the thoughts
· hold the thoughts lightly
Perhaps the most important teaching is not to believe we are our thoughts
Home Practice
Continue with a core practice of mindfulness for twenty or more minutes a day. As you sit, be aware of the thoughts that arise and the possibility of naming them softly: When you’ve recognized and named a thought that has arisen, return your attention to mindful presence with the breath and any sensations or emotions that arise.
Over the next few days, try to notice when you are caught in one of these pre-identified thought patterns; mentally whisper its name and pause. Keep a journal to write down what you notice.
I also recommend that you create a list of your strongly held beliefs and reflect on those that are limiting and fear-based and then write them down. For example: “I need to work hard for approval,” “I’m not worthy of being loved,” “Anyone I get too close to or trust too much will hurt me,” “Other people don’t understand or appreciate me.” When you are caught in emotional reactivity, practice asking yourself, “What am I believing?” Keep a journal to record and reflect on your thoughts with kind curiosity and discover the story of what’s really true for you.
