This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Thinking from the Source

So good morning everyone, or good day. And it's raining here, which is quite lovely. I'm very fond of the rain, though I think I'm fond of all the weather, maybe because being in the weather means being outdoors, and it's just a wonderful connection to feel the world through the outdoor atmosphere, air, weather, ground. I was happy coming down here today.

So, becoming wise about thinking is not only useful for ourselves, it's also useful for this world of ours, and I'll talk more about that later today. But one way of becoming wise about thinking is to have a clear sense of the source of thinking. Where inside of us does thinking begin? What triggers it? What energizes it? What influences its mood and the characteristics of the thinking that we do? Before we start thinking, before there's a thought, what is the environment in which thinking will occur? What's the emotional state we have? What are the beliefs we have? What are the fears or desires which are motivating or influencing how we think? And are we thinking, and from where are we thinking? From where do thoughts arise?

Many people, if you say that someone seems stuck in their thoughts, might point to their head. They're "all up in their head," meaning they're just thinking a lot about things. Is the location for thinking in the head for you in fact, and might there be other locations from which thinking might arise? My teacher in Burma^[1], if you asked him where thinking occurs, he always would point to the heart. There are some people who would point to the belly, and for them, thinking arises from their relaxed belly—a soft, peaceful, kind of floating sense of belliness. And it has a big impact on us where our thinking arises from.

In this meditation, I want to guide you through an exploration of thinking. And maybe there'll be more talking for me than usual, but it's such a phenomenally important skill and knowledge to acquire about thinking that it'll support all your future meditations and maybe your life.

So to assume a meditation posture. Taking your posture is when you already begin being mindful. Mindful of the sensations and feelings of your body, so that you line up the body in such a way that the body begins to feel harmonious or aligned, and you are attuned to your body.

Gently taking some deeper breaths, comfortably deeper, fuller. And as you exhale, to relax into your body. To relax down into your sitting bones if you're sitting upright, relax into your spine and hips. And your head, all the bones that rest against a surface if you're lying down. Letting your breathing return to normal. Continue this process of relaxing, maybe with a notion of deep relaxation. The different parts of the body I'll point to, maybe you can feel them deeply. The muscles of the face relax as you exhale. The shoulders, the rib cage, and deep in your upper torso. And the belly, releasing the belly to the pull of gravity.

Centering yourself on your breathing, breathing in an easy, natural way. And if it's not that way, don't be bothered by how you're breathing. Instead, accompany a breathing which feels strained or constricted, or just accompany it. It's okay.

And then feel your way into your body. Feel your way to where the location is for your thinking. Whether you think in words or in images, or whether you think without words—but there's a cognitive knowing that maybe you feel is wordless—where is the center of cognition for you? Is it in the center of the head, behind the eyes? Is it in the torso or the belly? If it's in the head, is it near the front of the head, behind the forehead, or the back of the head? If you see images, do those images appear in front of you? Is there any sense of a projector that's projecting the images?

A location for thinking may come with a sense of pressure or contraction, feeling that this is a place where things are dense or tight. There might be a directionality, as if that location is leaning forward, or pulling back, sinking down, or ready to soar upwards. Allow yourself to think if thinking wants to happen, but don't focus on the content of your thoughts. See if you can recognize the location where thinking occurs. Or if thinking occurs everywhere, where's the center of everywhere? And what sensations come along with thinking, the thinking mind?

Independent of what you're thinking about, does your tendency to think come along with wanting something? A general feeling—not a thing, but a general attitude of wanting? Or an attitude of aversion? Or an attitude of fear or confusion? An attitude of overwhelm, discouragement? And if there is some attitude that is there and almost precedes your thinking, it's okay for now for it to be there, but feel the location where that occurs. Make room for it. Feel it, know it. Know the attitude more than knowing what you're thinking about. Breathe with it.

If you stand on your tippy-toes, reaching up as high as you can with your hands into the air, high up, stretching yourself up and hold that for a while, your whole body will be tired, tense, wobbly. But then if you relax, feet firm on the ground, maybe even sit down, maybe even lay down, all the tension, all the holding in the body is no longer needed. And feeling the support of the floor, something deep inside can relax that can't relax stretching upwards on your toes. In the same way, we can live our lives psychologically as if we're on our tippy-toes. Allow, without changing your posture, as you exhale, relax your whole body. Relax internally, externally, as if your conscious mind, your awareness, has a chance to sit down, relax, lay down. Deep to the deepest place of relaxation within. Feeling your way into your depths to the place where things are most peaceful and relaxed, calm for you.

Whatever degree of calm or relaxation that's available for you, that's calmer than you are otherwise, relax into that place of calm or peace. As if your mind can come to rest there, maybe with every exhale settling more into that place deep inside of peace, calm.

Gently breathing with the location in your body that is calm or peaceful, or at least calmer or more peaceful than your usual thinking mind. Almost as if you're going below your usual thinking into a place that's more intimate, more safe, more at ease than your thinking mind. With every breath, let go.

And from this calmer depth within you, listen carefully. Bring a careful attention, and from here, is there a different form of thinking that arises for you? See if it can be a thinking that you don't latch onto, you don't get involved in. You just allow it to appear like water flowing from a deep underwater spring to the surface. What deep thoughts are there as you get out of the way to let them flow as they wish? In the way that your usual thinking mind would get quiet if you were listening to a very faint sound in the distance, let the usual thinking mind become quiet for a little bit so you can sense or listen to the quietest source of thinking within. Maybe not listening to the content of those thoughts, but what does it feel like? What are the sensations and attitudes and moods associated with thinking from the depths?

A profound understanding is that no matter what you're thinking, thinking is not who you are really. It's not who you are. Who you are is found in that within you, that awareness which is independent of your thoughts. In the way that if you're listening to someone speaking—maybe listening to strangers speak not to you, but to each other—you would clearly feel like you were independent from what they're saying.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, again on the exhale, settle into the deepest place of calm that's available to you. And from there, think thoughts of goodwill for the people in your life. Thoughts of appreciation and well-wishing.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And may we remember to care for others from the soft depths within us.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Wise Thinking (3 of 5) Independent of Thoughts

So hello and welcome to this third talk on wise thinking. One of the reasons why this topic of mindfulness of thinking^[2]—wise thinking—is so important is that the way that we relate to our thinking is also connected to how we relate to anything that comes from outside of us: any information, ideas, content. Specifically, what's been on my mind lately is the way that we relate to media, the way we relate to our screens. Everything that comes through a screen, one way or the other, represents someone else's thinking. Someone has produced it, designed it, thought it out. And so in that sense, we're constantly living in someone else's content, the thoughts that they've created for us. In some sense, maybe that was clearer when we were reading something that someone had put their thoughts on paper. But when we are watching screens and videos and consuming the news that we have, how do we relate to it?

I would like to propose that an unhealthy way of relating to it is how many people relate to their own thinking: we're the consumers of information, consumers of opinions. Even if we don't like them or approve of them, we take them in, we react to them. So often as a society as a whole, for many people their thoughts are the same way. There's no sense of distance from their thoughts or sense of questioning their thoughts, or mindfulness of thinking about what's really going on there. There's a way in which many people are just living in their thoughts, carried by their thoughts, influenced by their thoughts, without any reflection, without any awareness of how much we're being influenced by them. We have an opinion, or a bias, or an advertisement, or a projection that we want to convey to the world, and it's just second nature. We don't even realize we're doing it.

A lot of our thinking carries ourselves, our self-concept. Sometimes the way that we talk and think is kind of like an advertisement for ourselves, our desires, what we want, and it's strategizing. We have a whole marketing department in our mind that's trying to figure out what we want and how to get it.

So what we can learn by becoming independent of our thinking, seeing our thinking clearly, what we can learn from thinking is learning how to think from a place deep within us that has no attachment^[3], that has no fears. The place that's free of stress, the place that's free of wanting and not wanting. The deepest wellspring of relaxed thinking that we can have, where it's easy for us to be independent of the content of what's being thought, so we can be independent of the unusually odd things that we might be thinking through the day. And a few of us have odd things we think, but we don't think about that because we're living in it, it's just so obvious. And unhealthy things, we don't think they're unhealthy because it's just second nature that we should be upset with ourselves or feel shame about ourselves and have a thought like that, or that it's second nature to want to get what we want, to have what we want. So there are a lot of strategies about, "Of course I should think about and try to figure out how to get what I want, because that's just natural, that's how it should be." So we're not independent.

So to learn how to step back and be independent of our own thoughts, so that when we do think we can think more wisely, more creatively, more objectively, more connected to the deepest wellsprings of compassion and care and kindness, if we learn to do it with ourselves. And then we can apply that to media, apply that to how we are. We don't become consumers of news, consumers of what's on our screens, but we become, in a sense, independent of it. Where we have a sense that we're not consumers taking things in; we're more the producers. We certainly hear and see what's being presented in the world and what comes around us, but we're rooted in a deeper place where we're the producer. We're in a deep place of creativity and responsivity that can be free of attachments, free of fear, free of confusion.

So the application of mindfulness of thinking into daily life is huge for our society. There are people who are spending billions of dollars to try to take your attention hostage, or to hijack it to keep it for themselves and keep you engaged. And engaged from that surface mind, or from the mind of desires, the mind of fear, the mind of aversion, and keep that activated as we engage in this world out there.

To discover the source of thinking within us, there are two general sources. There's that place where we think, the location or attitude with which we're thinking, that comes along with attachment of one form or another. The attachment to self—a very strong sense of "me, myself, and mine"^[4] in it—my needs, my need to prove myself, my need to get what I want, my need to be safe. Of course we should be safe, but if we're caught up in the need for that, then we are thinking from a kind of surface way of thinking; it doesn't have access to the depths of who we are. So that's one source, the source of thinking that I often point to my head for, this swirling idea of concepts, ideas, things that come from how we put words together into language and grammar, and that build things all the way until they build to wars between people.

The second source of thinking is a thinking that arises out of being deeply relaxed, deeply at ease with ourselves. This is the source of creativity. If we're tense, it's very hard to be creative. Creativity has to do with a holistic way of thinking, a thinking that somehow we're relaxed enough, nothing is constricted, nothing is narrowed down. That happens when we have any kind of tension or attachment. Thinking that occurs when we're deeply relaxed and open so that our senses are open and available, or sensing to all the different capacities, that we are open to a broad range in a relaxed, subtle way. I associate that with the belly, and if not the belly, then I associate it with a wonderful feeling of warmth and delight in the chest, where thinking is just a pleasure to do. Because of the creativity, the joy, the delight in just being alive and letting this wellspring, font of flow of pleasant, creative, unattached thoughts. Thoughts that are not under the influence of anger, aversion, regret, not under the influence of shame and despair, and thinking which is not under the influence of our desires and our wants, our conceits. Thinking which is not under the influence of being confused or lost in our life. There are so many things that influence our thinking.

As we learn to be mindful of thinking, in a sense to step back and say, "Oh, I'm thinking now," clearly, consciously, with an act of awareness where we find ourselves independent of our thinking. Where the knowing that we're thinking—maybe it's a kind of a thought, but it can be a thought that comes from that deep source. "Oh boy, am I thinking a lot now. The control tower is going wild. People in the control tower are having a party and they're not watching the planes landing; there's going to be an accident soon."

But to have this thinking from the depths within, or from the peace within, that recognizes the other place of thinking non-judgmentally. But non-judgmental does not mean without evaluation, without assessment, without understanding: "Oh, that is not a useful place to be thinking, to lose myself in this kind of surface mind that's caught up in attachment. That's not useful." To be able to see that and evaluate that is wisdom, the wise thinking. To judge it means to say, "Oh, what a terrible person I am," or "What a bad thing that surface thinking is." Chances are that kind of thinking where we're putting a value like that on it, that's just more of the surface thinking. The thinking from the depths can understand, but has no criticism and no attachment to anything that it sees. It's phenomenal to switch operating systems from the surface mind—that's one way, the other is being driven by something that we're attached to—to the deep mind, the deep thinking, which is free of any kind of attachment, or much freer from attachment.

So I hope that this contrast of this idea of finding the location, the source from which you're thinking, gives you access to a deeper understanding of your thinking and how to be mindful of it, and how to kind of step away and be independent of it. And this idea of then relaxing into the depth of your body and really being at ease, so that the creative thinking, the depth thinking, thinking from the depths which is so holistic, can animate your life and help you with this task of becoming independent of your thoughts. And that's only a step away from learning how to be independent of the news that you're reading, the opinions that you're hearing, so you can be wise about what you're hearing, what you're reading, what you're seeing.

So thank you very much, and we'll continue tomorrow.