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Guided Meditation: (4 of 5) Foundations of Vipassana - Thinking

Well, good morning, and welcome back. My name is Mei Elliott, and here we are in our week-long study of the foundations of Vipassana^[1] meditation. These are the basics that you would be taught if you went to most Insight or Vipassana centers in the West. So today, we will be focusing on thinking. The first day it was on breath, then on body, then yesterday emotions, and today the thinking mind. So let's get started with our meditation.

Taking a posture that is both upright and energetic, as well as relaxed.

Connecting with a felt sense of the body.

And touching in with the breath or your primary anchor.

Settling into the here and now.

Befriending the breath, giving a powerful attention as we drop into this moment as it is.

As we begin this meditation together, we'll be rooting our attention with the breath. And when thoughts arise, we'll simply let them go to start.

We're allowing the breath to steady the mind, to stabilize the mind.

And sustaining our attention on the full length of an inhale, and the full length of an outhale... an exhale.

Feeling the complete release of an out breath.

Shifting our attention, moving our awareness away from the breath. And instead, we'll open the awareness in front of us.

Open the awareness in a way where it's as though you might be looking at a blank screen in the mind's eye. And soon a thought will arise and unfold through that space, in that space.

So I invite you to just notice the first thought that comes into the mind after I finish this sentence.

It might stay for a moment and pass away. If not, that's fine too.

And if you did, this is mindfulness of thinking in the present moment. Thoughts occur as present moment phenomena. The content of the thought often is not in the present, but the thought itself is.

Opening again now to that open space in front of you. Maybe tapping into the sense of a blank screen in the mind.

And go ahead and see if you can notice the first two thoughts that enter the mind after I finish this sentence.

And then returning the attention to be with your anchor again.

Returning to that open space, this sense of a blank screen. And see if you can pay attention to every thought that comes up after I finish this sentence. See if you can maintain the awareness for a little while.

And returning again to your primary anchor, maybe the breath.

You may have found that you were able to be with the thoughts, and you might have gotten lost in thought. And that's okay. Mindfulness of thinking is a very slippery object, as we're so apt to get lost in the content.

So for the rest of this meditation, you're allowed to think. See if you can look straight at thinking, being aware, "Ah, this is thinking."

Imagine that you are watching a group of people standing around and having a conversation with each other, but that you're standing maybe fifteen feet away so you're not lost in the content of what they're talking about. Just see the process of them speaking to each other. We can relate to the mind in that way, watching this process of thinking from a little bit of a distance.

And at any point, if you find yourself getting too lost in thought, or if you need to just ground in the breathing, or if the thoughts subside, you can return to the breath.

As you do this, you might take a look to see: do you think in images or in words?

Do your thoughts have a tone of voice?

Is it harsh or soft? Judgmental or gentle?

Do you notice any physical sensations associated with thinking? Maybe contraction in the forehead, in the jaw, or the torso.

Notice any emotions that go along with the thinking.

Do the thoughts have a hook? Are they very compelling? Do they pull you in?

Do you find yourself with the desire to keep thinking, wanting to continue with the content?

Just observing whatever happens. No need to judge or reprimand, just doing our best. There is no right or wrong.

If it's helpful for you, you can use a soft mental note with thinking. When a thought arises, you might just note, "thinking, thinking." And then if you return to the breath, you might note "in" on an inhale and "out" on an exhale. A very light note.

And if you notice a repetitive thought that seems to keep coming back, you might choose a specific label for it so that you're not as easily caught in its gravity. This might be "rehearsing," or "planning," maybe "judging." And when the thought moves on, you see what happens next.

As we come to the end of our sitting together, we can dedicate the merit^[2]. We can dedicate the positive energy of our time spent together to all beings everywhere, so they may be happy, healthy, safe, and free.

Dharmette: (4 of 5) Foundations of Vipassana - Thinking

Welcome back. So here we are: mindfulness of thinking.

At the beginning of the meditation, I mentioned how, up to this point, the meditation instruction has been to just stay with the anchor of the breath. And if a thought takes us away, we don't give it our attention; we let it go and we come right back to the breath. Because of this really standard meditation instruction—"let go of thinking," "don't get engaged in it"—many meditators think that meditation is about getting rid of thoughts, when really that's actually not the goal of meditation.

The goal of meditation is to be free from suffering, to be liberated. And in order to be free, we need to learn to have a skillful relationship to our thoughts. Part of this skillful relationship is knowing that our mind produces thoughts, and that's okay. The mind produces thoughts in the way the mouth produces saliva. It's just the function of that organ. It's nothing that we need to beat ourselves up about. And this doesn't mean that we're complacent with thoughts—we don't let them run wild—it just means that we don't need to be aversive to them, that we don't need to get rid of them.

Our skillful relationship to thoughts will also include letting go of them at times, but we don't need to reject them. There's a distinction there between letting go of thoughts and pushing away thoughts. Kodo Conlin^[3] uses the image that we let go of thoughts just like releasing a balloon—a really light touch, there's no rejection there.

One thing that can be helpful to remember, as we learn that our thoughts are not the enemy in meditation, is to remember that thoughts can do wonderful things. We can have loving thoughts, generous thoughts, wise thoughts. Like all of the Buddhist teachings, the Four Noble Truths—these can all be transmitted because of thinking. And we can have very onward-leading thoughts.

Another interesting aspect of thinking is that thoughts themselves occur in the present moment, and this is what we were exploring in the meditation. Their content is often in the past or the future; the content of the thoughts is taking us into ancient history and planning what we'll do next. But thinking itself, regardless of the content, takes place in the now. So knowing this, we can learn to be mindful of thinking in the same way that we can be mindful of sights, smells, sounds, etc.

As our practice with thinking matures and we stabilize in the present moment, we learn how to see our thoughts simply as additional phenomena arising in the present. Being able to incorporate our body, emotions, and thoughts in meditation—one of the impacts of this is that we're able to meet everything as worthy of our attention. And that's something that's so beautiful about Vipassana: nothing's left out. As we learn to include everything in mindfulness, nothing's excluded. Everything is included, everything can be folded into our meditation practice. Because of this, there's no such thing as a bad meditator because of too much thinking. Thoughts are just another phenomenon to be mindful of.

Now, the trick is, it's hard to be mindful of thoughts, because mindfulness of thoughts isn't getting lost in the narrative. It isn't getting lost in the storyline that the thought is weaving. It's being present, knowing that thinking is occurring.

If the mind is really active and the thoughts have a lot of gravitational force—likely to suck us up into their content—this is a good time to just practice letting go of thoughts. Because if we don't let them go, we're going to disappear into them. So this might be a time, if the thoughts really have a ton of gravity, that you might just do breath practice. Maybe it's not the best time to practice mindfulness of thinking if, as soon as you look at it, you get sucked into it.

Once the mind is more stabilized, though, we can begin to see thoughts more clearly. On Monday, I spoke about mindfulness of breathing, and I used the analogy of a tripod. When we practice focusing on the breath and letting go of thoughts, this stabilizes the mind much like a steady tripod. When a tripod is steady, we can put a telescope on it and see the stars much more clearly than we ever could before. If the tripod isn't steady, we're not going to see much of anything. In the same way, when we focus on the breath and let go of our thoughts, our mind becomes steady and we can see the mind much more clearly. And from that place, we can begin to see more clearly how our thoughts function as process rather than as content.

We begin to be able to see more clearly whether we think more in images or in words. Whether the thoughts have a tone of voice—like, you might discover that certain thought patterns might have the critical voice of a parent or the loving voice of a sibling. And some thoughts may not have a distinctive tone at all, but we can get to see how our thoughts are speaking to us.

It can be incredibly helpful to notice the physical sensations associated with thinking—that even often pleasant thoughts will have some level of contraction in the body. We can begin to investigate the way our emotions go along with our thoughts, and we can see how compelling they are. We can see how they pull us into their gravity.

These are all great things to investigate, because these observations over time begin to show us how flimsy thoughts are. Some teachers talk about thoughts as being like little holograms or energy wisps. And yet, as Joseph Goldstein^[4] said, if we're not aware, thoughts are little dictators saying, "Get married! Get divorced!" When we can see them for what they are, we learn that we don't have to believe them. They don't have to be the dictators of our life.

And this is one of the most freeing experiences: to realize that we don't have to live by limiting fears, that we don't have to believe our judgments, that we don't need to be enticed by our addictions. We don't have to take our thoughts so personally or believe them.

I have a refrain that I often say to myself: the thought is not the thing. The thought is not the thing. We so often mistake our concepts of things, our thoughts about them, as the actual thing. But our thought is not the thing. The concept is not the actual experience. As the great teacher Munindra-ji^[5] said, "Your thought of your mother is not your mother."

As we begin to see this, we start to let go of our obsession with thoughts. We realize how often they're false prophets—that the news is not always good, and the news is not always true.

Another aspect to consider regarding thoughts is that they're not ours, nor did we deliberately choose to put them there. If I sing the line, "We all live in a yellow..." I bet a certain word popped into your head. It might have been "submarine." So if you grew up listening to The Beatles or are familiar with them, that conditioned what happened in your mind. You didn't intentionally put that there. We didn't put that thought there, did we? It was conditioned.

There's a way that our thoughts feel so personal. Like, if we think something that seems unwholesome or unethical, we think that we're a bad person for thinking that. But it's all conditioned. Thoughts are impersonal and impermanent, but we give them so much weight. And it can be helpful to remember that we don't need to be bothered by our thinking. I often relate to my own thinking as off-gassing. The pancreas produces insulin, and the mind produces thoughts. No big deal. It's just how that organ functions.

And when we begin to question the stories of suffering that we tell ourselves, so much room can open up. We still think—thinking is an incredibly helpful thing that we do—but the thinking is lighter, less believable. It no longer reigns over the castle.

To quote Guy Armstrong^[6]: "The deeper purpose of meditation is not simply to enjoy moments of calm, as rewarding and meaningful as they are, but to understand deeply how our minds lead us into unhappiness, so that we can stop the activities that lead to those states. To reach this understanding, we have to learn to observe thoughts with as much presence and discernment as we bring to the seeing of breath."

Another way that we can do this is by getting to know the patterns of our thoughts. I mentioned this in the meditation. Often, we'll have repeating tracks, and it can help to name them—kind of like the top ten hits of your thinking mind. If you have a repeating track, you might name it "planning," or "wedding thought," or "judgment," or "football game thought." And remember: don't follow the content. If you want to get to your destination, you need to stay on the freeway; don't get off at an exit. If you get caught in the content of your thinking, it's like getting off at the exit. Stay on the freeway.

I lived for a number of years at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center^[7] in the Ventana Wilderness. Each month, the community would have a full moon ceremony where we would renew our vows. Perhaps the most central vow in the Zen tradition is the Bodhisattva Vow^[8]: "I vow to save all beings." And one of my teachers at Tassajara, Leslie James, put a playful twist on the Bodhisattva Vow by altering it to say: "I vow to save all beings from what I think of them."

While this is a little cheeky, it's also right on target. Our thoughts about others can cause a lot of harm. The acts of killing, stealing, and lying all begin with thoughts. So if we can get to know the mind and see the insubstantial and selfless nature of thinking, we have much greater agency in choosing what thoughts we want to act on.

Thoughts about killing, stealing, and lying: red light, don't do that. Thoughts about shaming, blaming, or othering: red light, don't act on that. Thoughts based in kindness, compassion, and renunciation: green light. Yeah, that's a good one to act on.

Our level of agency is equal to our level of awareness. So if we are aware of our thoughts, we have greater agency. We have greater choice in what we do in our life, and we can make skillful choices to move towards awakening and to reduce harm in the world.

I will close by reminding you that the thought is not the thing. Don't mistake your ideas of others for who they really are. If you want to help others, practice mindfulness of thinking. If you want to help yourself, practice mindfulness of thinking. May all beings be free from what we think of them.

Thank you very much. I hope you all have a wonderful day, and I'll go ahead and put the quote that I read from Guy Armstrong in the chat, as I saw that somebody was interested in that.