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Guided Meditation: Relaxing Thinking

So good morning and welcome to our Monday morning meditation, beginning of a new theme for the week. We're continuing in the ongoing series on the basic foundations for meditation and the way we teach it here at IMC. This week it's going to be working with, or practicing with, thinking.

I'd like to use an analogy, that somehow you received a gift of an amazing thousand-year-old clock with all kinds of gears, very precisely made and sophisticated. It has gears that keep the time for nanoseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, years (including leap years), and the cycles of the moon, the seasons, and light and dark through the year, centuries. So it's amazingly precisely made with sophisticated math, arithmetic, and engineering to make it all work. It's a great present to be in awe of, but then it turns out after working perfectly for a while, one of the gears decides to go faster than everything else. Suddenly the gears start getting confused and not working properly, and are put under a lot of tension. The whole clock doesn't seem to work very well anymore. It worked well for a thousand years, but under your watch one of the gears started to go too fast.

We as human beings are an even more sophisticated, complex system than such a complicated watch. There's an amazing amount of interconnected parts of the human being that all have to work harmoniously for us to stay alive. It's amazing that we exist and all that it takes to keep us going, all the interconnected deep gear work of these biological systems that we have. And there's one system, one of those gears that if it works faster than the others, it begins messing it all up, and that is our capacity to become tense. Anything that becomes tense, anything that begins working faster, makes it difficult for everything else to go smoother. If we can relax the tension, then the whole system begins to operate much more smoothly emotionally, intellectually, biologically, physically. All these begin to come into more of a harmony, working together.

So relaxing in meditation is really good. It's possible to focus on it too much, it's possible to in a sense get too relaxed. Some of those gears in the clock stop working if they get too relaxed. But if there's identifiable tension in the system, in your body, it's really good to relax it; it helps the whole thing. Today we'll focus on relaxing the body so that you prepare the ground so the mind can relax the thinking mind. I use an expression called the "thinking muscle," and this is the activities of the mind that are constructing and spinning out thoughts.

Our brain is also a complicated neurological event, and when there's tension there and something's working too fast there, that also messes up the whole neurology of the mind. That thinking muscle, you identify it by the physical manifestation of thinking. If there's a lot of tense thinking, the jaw might be tight, the eyes might be locked, the forehead might be scrunched, there might be a lot of whirling and agitated energies in the skull, and the area of the brain itself might feel contracted and tight. There might be other parts in the body that get activated: the muscles of the hands even, or the shoulders, the belly, and all those together I call the thinking muscle, especially the ones that are up in the head.

At some point, recognize the physicality of this and then relax. Assuming a meditation posture, see if you can take a posture that allows you to be alert but also to be sensitive, aware of where there's tension in your body. The upright cross-legged meditation posture is not required or needed for meditation, but it has some advantages. One is that it is a posture that can reveal unnecessary tension while not relaxing and giving up or collapsing from it. Stay upright, reveal where it's tense in a healthy way, and begin to relax.

Lowering your gaze, relaxing the focus of your eyes, and closing your eyes. Enter into this body and mind that we're here with for these minutes, taking a few long, slow, calm, deep breaths. As you breathe in deeply, really feel the global body, whatever is easy to feel of your body, the three-dimensionality of the body. In a long, slow exhale, just letting go, relaxing, softening. Wherever in your body your mind lands where you feel there's tension, let it soften. Breathing in and feeling the body, exhaling, relaxing.

Then let your breathing return to normal. Continuing as you exhale to gently, without ambition, relax your body. Exhaling and softening the muscles of the face. Sometimes feeling a coolness in the face can help relax the heat of tension, maybe the coolness of the air around the face.

On the exhale, relax the shoulders, softening. Sometimes feeling the weight of the shoulders can help relaxing. Sometimes shifting where your hands are, if moving the hands someplace allows the shoulders to not be propped up, but we allow them to hang more.

As you exhale, soften the belly. Maybe in the belly, if you feel the warmth there, perhaps the warmth of the belly can give a kind of comfort to support some kind of relaxation.

Then take a few moments to notice your thinking. For these moments you have permission to think. Notice if your thinking is fast or slow, forceful or gentle. If your thinking is insistent or at ease. If you think in images, is there a location for where those images occur, like on a screen? If you think in words or an inner voice, is there a location where that voice is coming from? There doesn't have to be a location, but if there is, sometimes it's possible to notice if there's any tension in that area, that location.

There might be a physical association or manifestation of thinking: tightening, tension, pushing, pressure, contraction, something that feels stressful in the body connected to your thinking. As you exhale, see if you can relax the thinking muscle. Relax the tension in your body that you associate with thinking.

If there is a location for thinking, let the location get larger, spread out. Maybe like the surface of a lake, where the waves get quiet, the surface spreads flat out to the horizon. Sometimes a thinking mind has been working so long that it's tired, weary of all the ongoing thinking, which is often repetitive. Relax any ways in which you are investing in your thoughts. Relax even the interest that keeps you glued to thinking. Allow thinking to become calmer and slower.

Returning now to breathing. Wherever you feel the breathing most pronounced in your body, feel the inhales and the exhales. Gently on the exhale, either let go of your thoughts or relax around your thinking. Relax your thinking mind. Feel your inhale riding the exhale. Relax the mind.

On the exhale, relax the thinking mind, softening. Either feeling comforting warmth surrounding your thinking mind, or maybe you can imagine or feel coolness that relaxes an overheated mind.

For a minute or so, can you allow your thinking mind to become quiet? The kind of quiet you would have in a library, or a cathedral, or a sacred grove of trees. A quiet where you would listen better. Let your thinking mind become quiet so you can listen better to your breathing here.

As we come to the end of the sitting, not only are we individuals a finely tuned biological system with all these interlocking gears, so we are socially as well, societally. It turns out the society works best too if the individuals are relaxed, free of tension and stress. To learn something new about being relaxed, free of tension and stress from meditation, consider how you can bring it into your social world. How can you not sacrifice your ease? How could you learn to recognize stress as it begins, tension, and remember how important it is to relax?

In doing so, it's our gift to our society. A gift at least that we don't contribute to the ongoing momentum of stress and tension that's so much a part of many of our societies. But rather we contribute peace, calmness, care, love, respect. As we come out of this meditation, may we aspire that this meditation supports us in helping make this a better world for everyone.

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

Dharmette: Thinking (1 of 5) Studying Tension

So this is the beginning of the five-day series on mindfulness of thinking. We'll follow the pattern we followed over these last weeks of relaxation, recognition, respect, restoration, and release.

There's a tendency in meditation circles to sometimes be frustrated around our thinking, or even worse, to think that thinking is our enemy, that it's a problem to think, and "if only I didn't think, then I could meditate." In mindfulness meditation, we are learning the art of bringing a clear awareness, a clear attention to all aspects of our life. The inner life, the outer life, personal life, social life, and all that. But in meditation particularly, all the different parts become clear in the present moment, in our whole psychophysical system that we are.

One of the things that will stand out for some of us, sooner or later, is how much thinking there is. Some days there's a lot going on in life and we have a lot of concerns, and the mind can be going really fast, spinning out. Sometimes it seems like the mind has a mind of its own. We're just churning thoughts and thoughts and thoughts, and there's no chance to stop it. Rather than making it an enemy, what we can do in mindfulness meditation is turn our attention to be mindful of thinking.

The art of that is to make sure that the mindfulness is not thoughtfulness, it's not thinking about thinking. Some people will confuse mindfulness with thinking, that we're kind of thinking about what's happening in the present moment. I'll talk a little bit more about that tomorrow, but we're not having discursive thoughts, we're not having commentary or interpretations. It's not like you're having a conversation with yourself about how you're thinking or what you're thinking about. There's a kind of almost silent awareness that we're using in mindfulness. That kind of silence that happens if you have a dirty windshield in a car and you clean the windshield. The windshield now is clean, and it's still silent. It doesn't speak or say anything, but you see through it. You see through that silence, you see through that clarity to see clearly what's on the other side.

So too, the mind's ability to see or to sense quietly is the movement we're going towards. To listen like you're listening to your thoughts with a quiet mind, even though your thinking mind is busy. Or you're feeling, and some people find it very helpful with thinking to feel thinking. In terms of relaxation, these physical sensations that we can feel connected to thinking can be really key. Sometimes it's difficult to see the physical connection between thinking and the muscles, and other times you can really feel it.

There are times when I'm particularly sensitive and quiet that it feels like the mind is a puppeteer, and I'm the puppet. All these strings coming down from the thinking mind connected to all kinds of little muscles in my body. They're all kind of like micro-muscles being pulled or tightened or released as I think about different things. Some thoughts are really powerful resentments that maybe I have at some point, and I could feel my stomach pull up, or my shoulders go up. Or I think about the wonderful conversation I had with a friend recently, and something releases in the puppeteer as they relax the muscles, even though it was tense or holding. In thinking about this nice conversation, something says, "Ah, that's good," and I relax.

The more relaxed we become, the more we can feel these micro-muscle strings tugging and all the muscles that go on. If we're really tense or really preoccupied in our thoughts so we can't notice our body, we won't have a clue what I'm talking about. Chronic tension, where there's no relaxation at all, can become normal for people, as if this is the natural way to be. And there's no movement in the chronic tension for anything to relax. As people meditate, most people find slowly that the body relaxes. Some of the surface tension that we carry with us begins to soften and relax, and the same thing happens with the mind. Maybe the thinking doesn't stop, but thinking calms down. It gets slower.

I was going to emphasize again that we're not making thinking the problem, but rather we're calmly turning our attention, when thinking is strong and captivating, to be mindful of thinking itself. The whole week will be spent talking about how we can be mindful of it in different ways. But what I want to emphasize today is that we be mindful of the tensions there, the energetics of it. The stress, the forcefulness, the pressure, the contraction, the tightness, the insistence, the hesitation, the closed-down-ness, the shutting down, the dullness, the numbness. All these things can be associated with thinking, and those things need our care.

If we're distracted by the content of our thoughts, thinking the content is what's most important, we might miss the underlying tension that is much closer in, actually, to who we really are. It's like a deeper layer. A doorway into the depth of who we are is not by thinking ourselves and remembering and figuring things out and reinterpreting the past. The way to really have a doorway into the heart, into the deep inner life, is this ability to relax. So when there's thinking and we're really pulled into the world of thoughts, one of the things that can be really helpful to learn to do—and it takes time—is to relax the interest in thoughts. Break the enchantment with the content of the thoughts.

Some of us have had similar thoughts over and over and over again for years. The amount of repetition that goes on in many people's minds is astounding. If people could hear how often any of us think the same thing, they would wonder about our sanity. It's normal enough to be repetitive, but it's also not necessary. What's interesting for a meditator is to recognize that part of the reason there is a lot of repetition, part of the reason why oneself is often a central character or centrally involved in their thoughts, is that there's an intense interest in the content. Interest in self and me, myself, and mine. That interest, that investment, can be felt distinct from the content of what we're thinking about.

Sometimes I've had the feeling in my mind that I'm glued to my thinking, and I could feel the glue, or I could feel the bungee cord pulling me into it close by. It doesn't matter what I'm thinking about, I can feel the glue or the bungee cord or something that's there, and feel that tension. Sometimes you can relax it, but sometimes we can't relax the physical tension or the mental tension as an act of will, as something we "do."

Here's a real key to long-term mindfulness meditation, to really find your way with it: it really helps if you have a willingness to allow yourself to be tense. Allow yourself to feel the stress, the contraction, the pressure as if it has permission to be there. It's okay. But hold it in awareness. I love the image of two cupped hands that gently come along underneath and hold the tension, hold the stress kindly and supportively. Learn the patience that you can do that forever. Because some of the tensions that we carry within us are not amenable to being directed or told to relax by us being in charge. That's sometimes just one more insult, that we're in charge, that we're going to do something to this whole wonderful system we have.

But if we can come with respect and care and kindness and say, "Okay, here I am. I'll be with you for however long it takes," amazingly, things begin to shift under that kind of attention. Maybe something unexpected begins to relax, something unexpected softens. Our job is to bring that attention that is soft, the attention that is kind and caring, and the attention that's slow. The attention that's not in a hurry or insistent, the attention that's not forcing the issue, the attention which is not tense. So relax.

Learn about your attention. Become a student of your attention. Maybe before you can relax, you have to really recognize and get to know it. Chances are that for most of us, there's more tension through the day than is necessary. Study the unnecessary tension and stress that's there in the body and the mind. In the next 24 hours, in preparation for the teachings tomorrow, you might think of yourself more as a student of tension than a student of relaxation. Get to know it well. But if you feel like you know it and recognize taking time to know it, then if it's easy to relax, please do. Maybe this can be a fun day of studying and hanging out with tension and relaxation, and seeing what happens if that's the theme of the day for you. And then we'll continue tomorrow.

In some ways, this series I'm doing, starting with breath and body and emotions last week, and now thinking, each of what preceded is building up towards our capacity to really work with thoughts. Mindfulness of thinking is not meant for beginners, but really requires having the foundation of these earlier types of mindfulness. What I'm going to talk about through the week also builds on what precedes it. So the relaxation supports what I'm going to talk about tomorrow, and so forth.

I say all this with the idea that I'm not expecting you to be able to do all this suddenly, like if you're a brand new beginner, but really it builds on the skills and the understandings that have been growing by ongoing meditation practice. Hopefully that's the case, and that this is supportive. I look forward to tomorrow. Thank you.