Day 9: Mindfulness and Thinking

Welcome to 40 Days of Mindfulness and Compassion Day 9!

 

Lecture

Today, we begin to extend the practice of mindfulness of breathing to work with thoughts and our thinking processes. We are thinking creatures. Thoughts are central to everything about us including our identities and relationships. Though useful and necessary, thoughts can skew our perceptions of reality and contribute to psychological and emotional suffering. As such, it is useful to work with thoughts and the thinking process in contemplative practice.

Working directly with thoughts is very important. You can get quite “deep” into mindfulness practice and still be quite captured by thoughts. When this happens, we are completely under the sway of thoughts. Buddhist teacher B. Alan Wallace uses a phrase that I like, saying that we “get glommed on to our thoughts.” Our identities become so fused with thoughts that we may be unable to untangle the thoughts from our perception of them. We may think that the thoughts, or what they represent, are actually reality.

But often, we are mistaken. When viewing the world through the conceptual mind, we are seeing reality through lenses and filters. This is not a problem in and of itself, but it can present serious problems is we are not aware of this mis-representation. Thoughts can trigger or be associated with strong emotions, which themselves are priming us to behave in certain ways (more on this later). Thoughts can skew reality. Thoughts can make us feel certain ways about ourselves, including self-doubt and self-hatred. They were given to us by evolution, and are perhaps our greatest resource, but also can be the biggest barrier to our happiness. In short, they are important and necessary, but can also be our biggest problem.

A premise of the contemplative practices presented during these 40 days is that mindfulness and mindfulness-based practices can help us to have more autonomy in terms of our thoughts, emotions and behaviors. By becoming more self-aware, and by enhancing pro-social capacities such as compassion and kindness, we can function better. The “simple” practice of mindfulness of thoughts can be immensely useful and important in this enterprise.

The approach that will be introduced is here, like many of the practices is very “simple.” Yet, it can be quite transformative.

The practice is basically this:

• Get settled and practice mindfulness of breathing.
• When you find yourself distracted by thoughts and the thinking process, pause briefly and observe what is there, then silently say the word “thinking.” Then return to the breathing.
• When distracted again, repeat this process.

This practice is called noting and is used in a variety of mindfulness practices. It is a way of observing and acknowledging what is there without being overtaken by it. It helps us to develop our capacity for awareness and introspection. It helps to lessen the power that thoughts have over us.

 

Meditation Tips

Meditation Tip #11: Recognize that struggling is normal, and come back to your basic motivation. Meditation is a struggle, at  least partly, because we are going directly counter to many of our habitual tendencies.

 

Meditation

 Mindfulness of Thoughts

 

 

Self-Reflective Activity

Try to pause periodically throughout the day during your daily activities. Just pause and breathe for a bit, then very gently look at your current experience. Observe what your mind is doing, and notice what thoughts are occurring.

A second option is to pause when you feel that you are getting stressed. Just stop and do the practice of noting the thinking process. Rest in the mindfulness of breathing process and note when distracted by thinking. A few minutes of this can help us de-identify just a bit.

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