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Guided Meditation: Slowing Thinking

Hello everyone, and warm greetings. I am very happy to be back here after being away for a week.

I hear some reports of a hum or buzzing in the audio. Hopefully, it is all well enough now. I'm sorry for the people with the buzz; I'm not sure what to do. The heater is on, so I don't know if it's picking up the sound of the heater here.

Good morning.

There is a rule of the road—if rules is the right word—that when you're driving a car, you vary the distance between yourself and the car in front of you depending on the speed at which you're driving. If you're driving slowly, you might keep one car's distance from the other car. But then, as you go faster, maybe at fifty miles an hour, you want to keep at least five cars' distance from the car in front of you. This ensures there's enough time to slow down and stop if something happens. You certainly don't tailgate.

The same thing applies to our life. The faster our life goes, the more space you want to have between your thoughts. Maybe if you're just sitting quietly, ruminating and thinking nicely, it's fine to just let your thoughts go at the speed they're going. But when the thoughts start tailgating, coming one after the other without any pause whatsoever—especially if the thoughts are going fast—then there's not much room for a deeper awareness of what's happening. There is not much room to stop, really see, consider, and be wise about what is going on.

The idea, the possibility, of slowing our thinking down—or maybe not slowing it down exactly, but giving space for thoughts, space between our thoughts—and not having thoughts run through our minds one after the other, is one of the wonderful ways of tapping into our own wisdom. It also taps into our own safety. We become safer if we're not tailgating our thoughts. Because when they come so fast, we don't see enough; we don't really see what's happening.

With that as a background for this meditation, assume a meditation posture in which you can sit in an alert way.

Take a really deep, full breath and let your chest fill with air. Feel that sense of openness in the chest. As you exhale, don't lose all of it. Sit with a posture that allows the chest to be a little bit open, a little bit expanded.

Sometimes, if you take a very deep breath at the beginning—so much so that you feel you're pulling on your shoulders as the rib cage expands upward—when you exhale, let your shoulders relax.

The same applies if you take a very deep, full breath and let your diaphragm push down. When you breathe in, if you're relaxed, it expands the belly. Take a deep breath, relax, and let the belly expand as fully as you can. Then, as you exhale, let the weight of the belly settle.

If your eyes are still open, you can lower your gaze. If it's comfortable, you can close your eyes.

Breathing normally.

On the exhale, relaxing the muscles of the face.

On the exhale, softening the shoulders.

On the exhale, relaxing the belly.

On the exhale, relaxing your arms and hands. If it feels right, you can adjust the posture of your hands.

On the exhale, relax your brain, as if the brain is a muscle.

Notice the speed at which you're thinking. Are your thoughts fast and tailgating each other? If they are, on the exhale, can you soften and slow down your thinking?

Maybe at the end of the exhale, let there be a brief pause in your breathing. Breathe in, and have a brief pause in your thinking. Begin getting a feel for there being space between thoughts.

Then, begin settling down into the body's experience of breathing. Relaxing your thinking mind as you exhale. Letting there be a simple pause in your thinking at the end of the exhale. And maybe with that pause, you can receive more fully the beginning of the inhale.

Noticing the speed at which you're thinking. Can you calm your speed, calm your thinking down? Slow your thinking, and with the slowest thinking that's available, direct your thinking to your breathing. Use the simplest, shortest thoughts you can—thoughts of recognition of the experience of breathing here and now.

As you're sitting here, if there's any degree of calm, align yourself with that calmness. Allow yourself to feel the calmness, the subtleness. Letting the thinking mind enjoy the calmness.

As we come to the end of the sitting, perhaps you can consider that when you have a traffic jam of thoughts, there's not much space in the mind to take in other people. There isn't much space to really see them, hear them, feel them, or recognize what's happening with them in a fuller way.

But when the thinking becomes quieter, slower, it's possible to gaze upon others, to look upon them, and to see them more fully. That ability to be present for others can be a gift. It can be a form of generosity, of care, of kindness, and of friendliness.

May it be that the calmness and subtleness that might come from this meditation today—whether you know it or not—somehow comes with us into our life in the world, so that we're more present for people. Listening better, hearing better, seeing better, without the distraction of a lot of thinking preoccupations.

May it be that this meditation that we do serves for the welfare and happiness of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Dharmette: Calmness (1 of 5) Non-distraction

Good morning everyone, and welcome to this Monday morning talk.

This week, I'd like the theme to be calmness, and to discuss five different areas or aspects of calmness. Meditation is often associated with calmness, but not just for its own sake—though it can be quite nice for its own sake. It is because calmness allows for greater wisdom to operate. It gives us a greater capacity to see what's happening and also sets up the conditions where it's easier to let go of things. There's more space or softness in the mind where clinging begins to loosen its grip.

When I think about this topic, I think about it in relationship to a distracted mind—a mind that is caught up in its thoughts and preoccupations. The faster the thinking is, the more preoccupied the mind is, and the more chances are that the mind, and maybe even the body, is not tranquil; it is not calm. When there's an incessant chatter in the mind—fast thinking, where one thought follows the other and thoughts are tailgating each other—our ability to perceive, to understand, and to be creative is diminished. The busy thoughts fill the bandwidth. They fill the space, and so other forms of intelligence, other ways of perceiving and reflecting, don't have a chance to operate.

But when we're not distracted, we're also not distracted from our deeper wisdom and our deeper understanding. We're not distracted from taking the time to really see what's here. Recently, I heard someone say that the more urgency he feels, the slower he goes. That is a wonderful principle. When things are urgent, it's probably a time when we have to really use all our mental capacities to problem-solve, to figure out and understand what's happening, to do things well, and to not be impulsive and make mistakes because we didn't take time to learn what happened.

Learning the art of calming ourselves—learning the art of not being swept away in destructive thoughts and an agitated mind—is one of the most useful things we can learn from meditation and mindfulness. But it's easier to learn it if we begin to appreciate the value of calmness. We can begin by appreciating the calmness of a calm mind, or more specifically, calm thinking.

The Buddha talked about calming speech. If you find yourself speaking very fast—and sometimes when we get agitated, we speak faster—know that we have some control over how we speak and the speed at which we speak. It's easier to control how fast we speak than it is to control our thoughts and our thinking, because we have to engage physically with the act of speaking. Experimenting and getting a feel for speaking in ways that are not hurried begins giving you a sense of what it's like for the thinking mind to also be unhurried. You can then begin slowing the thinking mind down, especially when you're distracted by your thoughts and concerns.

Slow down and calm down the thinking mind like you would calm down your speaking. The advantage of this is that we are not saying, stop thinking or let go of your thoughts, which might be too tall of an order for anyone to do effectively in daily life. But maybe it's possible to begin slowing down your thoughts, to have a little more space around them, or a little more calmness associated with them.

How do we do that? One way is to relax the body. Chances are that if you're thinking in a fast, distracted way, something in your physical system is tense, tight, pushing, leaning forward, or holding on to some feeling. So relax. Relax the belly, relax the shoulders. The advantage of some of this relaxation is that it can be done without anybody else knowing that you're doing it. You can do it at meetings, you can do it sitting in traffic, you can do it standing in line at the store. You can take a little bit of time to relax.

If you feel like you don't have the time to relax when you're standing in a checkout line at a store, then you're probably caught up in some kind of distraction that is limiting the depths of your wisdom and clarity of really seeing what's happening. Be very careful with the insistent voice in the mind, or the sense of authority that distracted thoughts can have—like, It's really important to think about this, or I have to think about this concern. There is a kind of fear, desperation, desire, or greed that might go into thinking that gives it an insistence.

When that happens, and you can't stand on both feet and relax your body for a few moments, chances are that your innate natural wisdom and clarity of thinking are not going to be available, because you're caught in that insistence, that push to think. As you go through the day, look for opportunities—maybe secret opportunities where no one needs to know you're relaxing your belly, your shoulders, your face, or your hands. Look for opportunities to relax, and see in that relaxing, or that intention to relax, if there starts to be a tug of war with your thinking mind. The thinking mind might be saying in some form or another, No, no, we don't have time for this, it's so important to be thinking fast and furiously, or It's so important to be caught up in thinking about this concern.

But maybe that's not the case. If you have an important concern that really needs to be thought about, maybe you think about it more effectively and better when you're calm, relaxed, and when you slow down. When the thinking mind becomes slow enough that you can be attuned to what it feels like in your body—you feel embodied—there's space to be aware of your emotions and feelings. There's a deeper emotional connection to what's happening, not just the surface emotions of fear or desire, which are often symptoms of something deeper.

If you can slow down and calm down enough to fill in the picture with more of how you are and who you are, there is more space for undistracted thoughts. Calm, relaxed thoughts somehow arise from a deeper place of understanding and a deeper place of creativity within us. Often, we can find our way better with the challenges in our life than if we have an agitated mind.

Practicing having an unagitated mind is the same thing as having a calm mind. One of the vehicles for doing that is a calmness of the body, a relaxation of the body. There is a wonderful interplay and mutuality between mind and body in terms of helping us be calmer.

If some of you don't like the word calm, there are other words: tranquility, serenity, peace, ease. All these words are in the same family. If you don't like any of those words and you think they set too high a bar or are somehow unappealing, then perhaps aim for an unagitated mind and an unagitated body. When we're agitated, we can't be as wise and it's harder to be kind. It's hard to be generous from a place of depth.

One of the wonderful things about becoming calm and unagitated is that our care for others, our friendliness, and our attention to others come from a different place in us. Others will feel it. It's bigger, richer, and more connected. It is much better if we connect to others from a calm place rather than a distracted or agitated place. Sometimes we can be in such a fast pace that there isn't really enough space for ourselves in a deep way, let alone enough space for others.

So, calmness. Maybe this week's theme will be useful for you, especially as we're getting ready for this winter and holiday season. May you become a student of calmness this week. Thank you.