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Mindfulness of Thinking (1 of 5) Recognizing Thinking

As I start this five-day series, the focus of this week is mindfulness of thinking. I think of it as building on last week's theme, the seven days we had on mindfulness of breathing.

Thinking is a hugely important part of human life and certainly should be respected, and hopefully also appreciated. The product of thinking is all around us. Civilization is a product of people's thoughts, the ideas they had, designs they had, and inventions they had. Much of what we see in the so-called civilized world came through the vehicle of someone who was thinking about something—sometimes for great benefit and sometimes not for such great benefit.

Without thinking, we would not be able to navigate the world, take care of ourselves, be safe, make a life for ourselves, or be in rich relationships with people. So, thinking is an important part of life. But it's also a place of tremendous suffering. Thinking can be quite deleterious. The stories we tell ourselves, the judgments we tell ourselves—some of them are quite debilitating and undermining of our vitality, joy, and happiness. Some of them bring great fear, depression, discouragement, and all kinds of things.

To learn how to be mindful of thinking—to not be caught in the grip of thinking and to be able to see with greater clarity, but also to be able to think more clearly or more wisely in beneficial ways—is one of the byproducts of mindfulness practice. So, this week I'll focus on mindfulness of thinking. As a beginning that provides the orientation and material to work with, and to really see clearly what it is we're working with when we're doing mindfulness of thinking, the first step is to clearly recognize that you're thinking.

There's something tricky about thinking: sometimes it doesn't really want to be recognized. It's almost as if thinking is sometimes so concerned with its own thoughts and its own ideas that it just wants to be left alone so we can gallop off or do the thinking fully. To say it differently, sometimes thinking is so alluring, captivating, and commanding that it seems easier to just wander off in the thought and think away than it is to step back and recognize, "I'm thinking, I'm thinking."

There can even be a protest in the mind that the thinking is really important: "I have to think this. I can't just step back and recognize that I'm thinking. Everything needs to be there in the thinking. I have to be fully involved, and I have to think this," and gallop off we go. It can sometimes be quite disconcerting and disorienting to really learn the art of stepping back in the mind, or getting enough of an overview of the mind to be able to see, "Oh, I'm thinking, and I'm thinking about planning, or remembering, or a fantasy, or my resentments," whatever it might be. I might be having a conversation in my mind with people, repeating the same conversation I had with my friend last week over and over and over again to understand what happened, or to come back with a better answer. But I'm having a conversation.

I like this language of stepping back. It's a metaphor: you're in a crowd of people, and you step out of the crowd for a little bit, maybe three, four, or ten feet away. Then you look back, and there's a whole different relationship to the people involved in a heated conversation that you were part of just a moment ago. By stepping back, you're not in it; you can watch it and see that it's there.

So mindfulness of thinking, this clear recognition, is not meant in and of itself to be a dismissal or denial of thinking. It is meant to wake up clearly to the fact: "I am thinking. Thinking is happening now." It is not being pulled into the stickiness or the compulsion of thinking over and over again, which for many people is what they spend their life doing. For many people, before they do any kind of mindfulness practice, thinking is given free rein. We just think whatever we think, and we wander off, and the mind just does what it does. Sometimes we just follow along. We're pulled by the nose by our thoughts; the mind thinks, and we follow along without any thought about it.

I've met people for whom mindfulness of thinking—recognizing that they're thinking—is a completely foreign idea. They have no clue how to do that. Whether it's that challenging, or whether you can get some handle on the fact that you're thinking, beginning to develop the skill and strength to recognize what you're thinking when you're thinking it is really foundational. It is foundational to all the other aspects of mindfulness of thinking that develop mindfulness and meditation, and help us go deeper and deeper in the practice.

One of the very simple exercises to do is to tell yourself what you're thinking. It can be with your inner voice, or if you're alone, you might even say it out loud to yourself: "I'm thinking about lunch. I'm thinking about the news that I just read. I'm thinking about my plans. I'm thinking about my fantasies. I'm thinking about my complaints. I'm thinking."

Sometimes, as if someone is asking you, "What were you thinking just now?", you can use that very general, or coarse, form of thinking that simply names what's there to yourself. Independent of trying to meditate, this develops a skill of learning: "Oh, that's what I'm thinking about. That's what I'm thinking about."

I know a Buddhist teacher who, when people come to him and say that they have a lot of repetitive thinking and they can't stop doing it, asks them to count every time they do it throughout the day. Some people have come back to him and said, "Wow, I came to some high number, like 325 times. I kept thinking the same thing. And after the 326th time, I said, 'This is ridiculous.'" Somehow, it broke the trance, the stickiness, or the compulsion around it. "Wow, this is phenomenal. This many times."

So, that's another way of recognizing: just count. "Okay, here I am thinking about sex again." One, two, three—maybe that's enough, and after that, you stop. Or maybe it's a lot more. Or maybe it's some other thing, like the resentments you have over and over again. See how many times through a day these kinds of thoughts go on. It's also like taking an inventory of what we're thinking.

If you start doing it, start recognizing and seeing how repetitive they are and how often there are top themes, that's very instructive. What are the top three things you think about through the day? Many times, people just go sailing along in their thoughts without any reflection. They have no idea that they're thinking the same thing over and over again, or that there are three major themes that keep visiting over and over again.

One of the advantages of being on a meditation retreat is that, because of the heightened attention to the present moment and the attempt to focus on the breath, for example, people tend to notice their thinking a lot more. It's a shock to some people to discover the common themes of their thoughts. They had no idea how many of their thoughts were fear-based until they started taking an inventory and getting a sense of the frequency—"Wow, it's happening again. It's happening again." It's not bad news to learn this about oneself. It's actually a part of growing. It's happening anyway. Rather than not knowing it, which is dangerous, it's actually healthy, healing, and beneficial to start recognizing what is happening with your thoughts.

One of the things we can learn when we start doing this kind of exercise is the attitudes we have about our thinking. Some people have adversarial relationships with their thoughts. Some people are afraid of their thoughts. Some people feel that their thoughts are the most important things going. Some people's relationship to thinking is that it is a form of entertainment, so they're very happy to think because they can get entertained. For some people, it's an antidote to boredom or an antidote to stress to go into the entertainment center of the thinking mind.

Some people's attitude is that we shouldn't be thinking. I was once on retreat with another Buddhist teacher. We were both practicing. He was a senior teacher to me; I wasn't a teacher myself yet. There was an occasion for a little conversation, and I was going to ask for some advice about something—I forget what it was, maybe about being at the meditation center. I started my sentence, "What do you think about?" He didn't let me go any further. He just looked at me and said, "I try not to think." I thought, "Well, maybe on retreat, maybe that's okay," but that was a strange answer, I thought.

We don't have to be adversarial with thoughts. It's wonderful to have thoughts quiet and get still. It's wonderful to discover the deeper layers of how the mind works that are obscured by a lot of discursive thinking. The point being, as we start getting a handle on seeing what our thinking is about, we also start noticing our attitudes and beliefs about our thinking as well.

I would encourage you for the next 24 hours, as you go about your day, to start recognizing what you're thinking about. Recognize your thoughts. Recognize that you're thinking. You can maybe set a stopwatch to beep every minute and just say, "Oh, okay, that's what I was thinking." Or maybe you keep a little journal with you and write down every few minutes what you were thinking about. Or you just say it to yourself, "Oh, okay, I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about that." You might also spend some quality time actually thinking about your relationship to thinking. Maybe talk to friends about what they've discovered about thinking, or what you're discovering about your thinking.

This high-end overview of thinking as it goes along will be good preparation for the next four days as we go deeper and deeper into this topic. In the background of all this is the idea that I had offered in the meditation session: if we can have a clear, calmer recognition of ourselves thinking, then sometimes the thinking begins to settle itself. Part of developing the skill to recognize thinking is so that we can use a calm, still awareness to help quiet and settle the thinking mind—partly so that we can see more clearly, and partly so we can think more clearly.

I hope you enjoy this, and I hope one of the results of this week around thinking is that you become friends with your thinking, and your thinking becomes your own friend. Thank you.