Day 10: Mindfulness and Thinking

Welcome to 40 Days of Mindfulness and Compassion Day 10!

 

Lecture

Each day, I suggest a self-reflective activity. Many or most of these are practices can be integrated quite readily into daily life. Sometimes theses are referred to as informal practices. Such practices are ones that are done outside of “formal” meditation sessions.

It took me many years of meditating to recognize the importance of these. I now see them as indispensable for waking up.  I am not using this terms in a high-minded spiritual sense, but in a very pragmatic nuts-and-bolts sense. We are often quite unaware of what we are thinking, feeling and doing (and the mechanisms underlying these), and this creates a lot of problems. Waking Up is basically becoming more aware of our internal processes and how these effect us and our relationships to others.

A few weeks ago I was at Rice University, in Houston attending a workshop. It was Friday afternoon and I had a few hours to kill before the workshop began. It had been quite cold here in Arkansas, and I was walking around and enjoying a perfect sunny day on campus. I was really taking in my surroundings; the beauty of the campus, the buzz of the students frolicking and getting ready for the weekend. For a bit, I was really relishing in the beauty of my surroundings and the happiness of others.

But then I woke up to another reality. I recognized that I was stressed and did not feel quite right. I had been working with informal practices relating to mindfulness of thoughts, so I paused and checked in with a practice. I just stopped to notice my thoughts and note what was there. There were thoughts such as “The campus is so beautiful. This is the type of campus that I expected to be working at when I got my doctorate degree. I wished that I worked somewhere like this, but I probably will never be able to,” as well as thoughts such as “I would love for my kids to go to a college like this, but I do not know if we will be able to afford it.”

Whoa! All of this was going on under the surface, and I was completely unaware. I have a name for this type of thought process. I have labeled it Catastrophizing Dent. I was able to stop and use that label and to de-identify with this thinking process. Immediately things softened. The emotions and anxieties that were triggered did not immediately disappear, but by bringing awareness to them their power over me was diminished and they were able to dissipate.

The practice today is an extension of the one from yesterday. We use the same type of noting technique, but note the type of thought. Some examples of types of thoughts include: remembering, planning, worrying, judging, self-criticizing, and self-narrating. This is not an exhaustive list at all. Be creative and use terms that describe your own experience. Two important things about the noting process are: 1) note but do not evaluate. Our noting is as objective and matter-of-fact as possible. And, 2) Note the type of thought, but do not note or give attention to the content. If I am planning, I just note, “planning” not what I am planning.

 

Meditation Tips

Meditation Tip #12: If struggling or having difficulties, normalize but do not pathologize, your own experiences.  The content is personal, but the process is impersonal. What you are going through is a human process. As one of my teachers sometimes says “the brain is just doing what the brain does.”

 

Meditation

Mindfulness of Thoughts Part II

 

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. Note the type of thoughts that are occurring. Do not judge or evaluate. Just notice and note.

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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