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Guided Meditation: Thinking: Process not Content

So good morning everyone. Good day. Welcome.

Today's analogy for mindfulness of thinking is to imagine that you have a colleague you work full day, five days a week, and you have a colleague that you work very closely with constantly, actually in communication about the job and what's going on. But the thing about working together, you only work together on the phone. Because it's so constant, you have a headset on and earbuds or something, and so you're constantly talking. You've never met your colleague and know nothing really about them except for their voice and talking about work. Sometimes you get distracted and talk about politics or talk about sports or the weather, and sometimes it's hard to get back to work. But all you have is the person's phone communication.

After many years of this, there's finally an occasion where you can meet in person, and you're stunned to meet the person. The person is so different than what you've ever imagined. Different body type, different kinds of clothes they wear, different kinds of mannerisms, different kinds of gestures, different kinds of ways in which they look with their eyes, different emotions that seem to come through. You realize that listening to the person on the phone, you only had one dimension of the person, and that when you were in person, it's multiple dimensions. Now you have a feeling for the person's emotional states and concerns of the day in the moment, and how all the little subtleties and ways in which they're responding and reacting. You're aware of the person's body and maybe the body has some kind of challenge to it that makes you particularly sensitive and careful with the person. Who knows all kinds of things. So I think you get the idea.

Some of us relate to our thinking that way. That we just relate to the thoughts, the content, the ideas, the stories, the plans, and we're involved in the content of thinking. In mindfulness meditation, you're finally getting to meet the thinker, the person who you're communicating with and talking with. Of course, it's you, but you start becoming aware that this process of thinking is not isolated. It's intimately connected to the fullness of who you are. It's connected to your body, all the little micro-tensions and movements of your body in response to thinking. The energies and temperatures in your body shift. It's also related to your emotional life, and in fact, emotions sometimes are the underlying fuel for the thinking we do. It's related to all kinds of different aspects of who we are, our history and everything.

So to sit in mindfulness and respect your thinking is to open up your eyes away from the content of what you're thinking to the process of thinking, to all the different processes within you that are engaged and involved as you're thinking. Then you can respect the full range of what's going on with thoughts.

In fact, it is often said—it's a little bit not 100% true—that content is not important for the process of mindfulness, but being present for the process is. It's almost like you can ignore the content. Sometimes when I meditate, I imagine that my thinking is speaking a foreign language I don't know, and then I try to just, like I would listen to someone speaking a foreign language, tune into so many different aspects of what's happening as they speak because I can't understand the words. The tone of voice, the speed in which they speak, the energy by which they speak, what they're doing with their body, the emotional background or tone in which they're talking. So the same thing with ourselves: to settle back, open up, and respect thinking as a large holistic process throughout our body.

So assuming a meditation posture, gently closing your eyes. And if you do this, opening up your eyes to the process of thinking now, rather than what you're thinking. How is it like for you to think? What do you notice?

Is there any physical manifestation, expression, manifestation of your thinking? Is there any tension in your body? Are there any emotions, moods that are part and parcel of thinking?

If you open to the process of thinking holistically, what is the space within which you are thinking? Is there mental space, or a space of awareness, or is it claustrophobic?

How much energy goes into thinking?

So then having done that, now take a few long, slow, deep breaths, relaxing as you exhale.

Relaxing down to your core. Then letting your breathing return to normal. But continue now on the exhale to relax your body. Whatever softening you can do in the face, letting the muscles of the face fall away from the bone.

Relaxing the shoulders, and perhaps calming the belly. Letting it be calm and relaxed in your belly.

And now again, notice your thinking. Has anything shifted in how you think? Are you calmer, quieter in your thinking or not?

And opening up wider to the process of thinking. The physicality of thinking, as simple as where in your body is a location for thinking for you, if at all? Any tension?

And as you exhale, relaxing the physicality of thinking.

Noticing the mood or the emotion connected to your thoughts. It might be a very subtle pleasant mood or emotion, or it might be something that's maybe not so pleasant. Whatever it is, it's okay for now, just notice it.

Relaxing around your mood, your emotion, a softening.

And what's the energy with your thinking? Is it insistent, fast, strong, or is it weak, quiet, soft?

And perhaps you can gently calm your thinking, the energy of it, let it settle.

And then allow yourself to more fully receive the experience of breathing. Breathing in receptively, receiving the inhale. As you exhale, allowing the exhale.

And if quiet gentle thoughts are in the background, you don't need to be concerned with them, keeping the breathing in the foreground. But if thoughts predominate, open up your attention to the process of thinking.

The holistic experience of thinking in your body, your emotions. Stepping away from the interest in the content to see the whole.

And then as we come to the end of this sitting, see if you can adjust your thinking so that you can think kindly, compassionately, caringly, with a voice or with an attitude that's gentle, peaceful, confident, and unassertive. Gently think thoughts of goodwill, well-being for others, well-wishing.

May the people in your life be well, happy, and safe. May the people in your communities be happy and well and safe. May those people you encounter today who you don't know, may you be ready to think of them with goodwill. May they be happy, well, and safe.

And to spread out to the whole world, gentle thoughts of how wonderful it would be. No matter how unrealistic—it's not unrealistic to wish welfare on others. May all beings be well and happy and safe. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And almost as if it's second nature, that easy and natural, may we contribute to that possibility.

Dharmette: Thinking (3 of 5) Respecting Thoughts

So here we are at the third talk for mindfulness of thinking. Today the focus is on respecting thinking. I like to think that in dharma^[1] practice we're learning to respect everything. I remember the surprise I had when I was sitting in the meditation hall for a retreat next to a Japanese Zen monk^[2]. At the end of the retreat, people came into the meditation hall to retrieve a little cup that he'd used during the retreat for drinking tea. We all had little cups, and before he handed away the teacup, he bowed deeply to the cup. I kind of wondered why I wouldn't bow to a cup, but it opened my eyes to a whole different way of living: living with respect for all things, but to do so wisely. So thinking doesn't need to be an enemy for us, and we can respect it, respect it deeply.

Sometimes I think that thinking—what we usually think of as thinking, maybe the words, the inner voice that we speak, or the images if we see more in images that pass through our mind—is kind of the tip of the iceberg, and we're mostly involved with the tip of the iceberg. But there's much more to it. Or maybe there's a metaphor which is not so icy cold. Maybe it's going to a city park, and at the entranceway there's a little lawn, and you spend all your time just on the lawn. It's just a little part of what this park is all about, the natural preserve perhaps. And someday you go into it, and you discover there's so much more to it.

With thinking, there is a surface: the content of the thought. And it isn't necessarily that we're respecting the content of the thought. I think some content of thinking is a little bit nonsense, and sometimes worse, maybe it's very unfortunate. But there's no need to berate oneself or feel bad about oneself for what the content is unless we act on it, and then if it's nonsense or if it's actually harmful, it's very unfortunate.

But the way we learn to respect thinking is to not be so involved in the content, not be glued to it, not invest so much importance in the content, especially for purposes of meditation, but rather bring mindfulness to the holistic experience of thinking. So the art of learning all the component parts of thinking. This is a part of mindfulness in general: to begin seeing things or to think in terms of components, composites, that things come together from causes and conditions, different things exist together in relationship to each other. When we start seeing that, we stop reifying or getting too focused or fixated on one particular part of the whole.

Thinking is one of the most important areas. If it's really obsessive thinking, if you're really caught in the grip of strong thinking, the chances are high that there's an emotion which is fueling it or out of which it's coming. So planning, more often than not, arises out of some kind of apprehension or anxiety. Remembering something can come from a variety of things: it can come from happiness and delight, it can also come from a desire to relive it, maybe because we're lonely now and we want to kind of remember. It can come from anger and resentment—to review the offense over and over again as a way of somehow making the past better.

And making the past better is kind of a hopeless case; the past won't change so much, but we can shift how we think about it, we can shift how we relate to it. So if we're caught in the grip of resentment and that's what's fueling the thinking, then we want to bring respectful attention to that resentment. Bring respectful attention to the anxiety, or whatever it might be: the loneliness that might be fueling it, the discomfort that we might feel that is producing the tension of thinking. So each thing to be respected means to take a second look, to feel it, to be present for it.

I sometimes think of the content of thought as a messenger. I see it as a signpost sometimes, that the sign is pointing in a direction. What's written on the sign is not that important; what's important is the direction the sign is pointing. And so thinking is pointing back to the emotions out of which it arises. As we feel the emotions and get to know them—do mindfulness of emotions as we talked about last week—then it might be a time to respect that deeply. It might be a time to feel it physically, feel the physical manifestation of the emotion. And that's also a place where you start noticing the tension in the body that's related to thinking. Because the more tension there is in the body, the more obsessive the thinking will become usually. There's a way in which tension in the body creates a kind of a mental tension that presses out thinking or makes thinking more desperate or more important or more insistent.

There's a reciprocal relationship between how much we're invested in the content of the thought and the tension in the body, and how much tension we have in the body and how much we are caught up in our thoughts. It's a chicken and egg thing, it's hard to know which one comes first. But as we get quieter and quieter in meditation, sometimes we can see some of that. We can see a tension arise in the body and lo and behold, certain kinds of thoughts arise. Or we feel certain thoughts arise, and we notice a tension that follows in the body.

So all this kind of opening up to be more holistic has a number of wonderful functions. One is we learn where to place our mindful attention, and so it's onward leading, it's productive, it helps us become free. Sometimes putting the attention into the content of the thought just encourages us to think more and more. But to put the attention on the emotion underlying it begins to allow the emotions to settle or to open up or to be processed. It also means we're not feeding our thinking with our interest, with our involvement with them, and thinking generally will start to dissipate if we're not directly interested in them and involved in them, if we just kind of let them go.

There's this wonderful teaching, and some of you know this better than me, I'll never remember the number, but there's this idea that emotions never last more than something like 90 seconds unless we're feeding them and fueling them. So it's relatively short, it's surprisingly short what researchers have found. I have no idea whether that's true or not, but I certainly know there are times when if I bring my attention to my emotion and really be present for it, it seems to relax pretty quickly. But thinking is even faster—if we are no longer fueling the thoughts, they last a millisecond. It's very short. The perpetuation of thinking has a lot to do with how we're feeding it and involved in it and engaged in it.

This idea of respecting thoughts is to open up more widely to feel the wider ecology of thinking that's going on: the emotional, the energetic, the physical, the motivational. Sometimes it really helps to notice what motivation is behind the thoughts. If we might be planning a lot, maybe the motivation is to make ourselves safe when we show up at some event. To recognize, "Oh, that's the motivation," and feel that maybe that needs our attention. It's like a signpost pointing back, and then, "Oh, I'm anxious, let me feel my anxiety. Let me practice with that and breathe with that."

As we do this mindfulness and respect, it begins opening up the space in the mind or the space in the heart. So there's more space, more room to hold all things, to hold our emotions, hold our thoughts, without being glued to them or trapped in them. This is a wonderful idea, this idea that we're making space rather than getting rid of things. Rather than fixing something, we make more and more room and space, and then lots of things don't have to be a problem when there's lots of space for them. When we're claustrophobic, then it's like we're troubled by it and pushed around by it.

So this idea of respecting things is valuable for what we're paying attention to, but also it's a means by just kind of stepping away and opening up and holding things with a wide open mind, a wide open heart, and not being troubled by what the content is. Finding our home in a spacious, open, relaxed field of awareness, a field of kindness, a field of respect, a field of freedom that holds all things. It is a really wonderful thing to open up to this wide scope of attention, where there's freedom to be found without changing anything. It's a power, it's kind of a superpower to do that, and it's a game changer in many ways for our life.

So may you respect your thoughts, no matter how difficult they are or painful they are. Maybe they're messengers pointing to something deeper inside of you. They're the tip of the iceberg that you really want to start dipping down into the fullness of who you are and really seeing there. It's a way of respecting yourself to really take time to get to know all of who you are, not just the voice that's thinking in the head.

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