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Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation with Tanya Wiser and Kodo Conlin: Class 4 Thinking - Tanya Wiser, Kodo Conlin

Introduction and Recap

Tanya Wiser: Testing. How's that sound? Is that still a little bit loud? Yeah, a little bit. Not too much lower there, because I get so quiet sometimes. Okay, thank you.

Did you all see the handouts on the stage when you came in? Right on the end of the stage. And then there's also a small little handout for a daylong that's coming up September 9th. It's an introduction to mindfulness daylong here on a Saturday. So there's a handout for today's class plus the flyer. And for people on YouTube, the handouts are going to be attached to the recordings. So when you go to AudioDharma and you look up the recording, you can find the attachment, the handout that we're giving.

Kodo Conlin: Great. So welcome, welcome, welcome back. Welcome for the first time. Nice to see you again. This is the fourth night out of five, an introduction to mindfulness meditation. My name is Kodo, this is Tanya. It's a real pleasure to share in this. I'm noticing as I say that, it's a pleasure to share in this, in a way that is a sense of pleasure that is more like well-being or more like a deeper sort of happiness than the pleasures of chasing after and getting what we want. So settled. So nice.

These last weeks, just to situate us, we've been giving a sort of progressive instruction in mindfulness meditation. The way we've been doing it is beginning, in a sense, at the center of our experience with our breathing. Using this very simple faculty of attention to direct to the breathing, settle in with the breathing, find a home or a companion with the breathing, and then gradually with that basis including more and more of our experience in this mindfulness meditation. Nothing is left out, everything is included. So we've extended from breathing, then we included the body. It emphasized with the body this feeling, sensing, awake, aware through the body. Sensing that kind of sensibility, this body alive. It's wondrous. So including the body and our wise attention, and then opening the circle even a little wider to include emotions.

Wise relationship to emotion is such a rich territory. It gives so much color and shape and beauty to our lives. Part of our task is to learn to train how to relate wisely to our emotions. So one of our instructions last week with regard to mindfulness of emotions was a sort of guideline to aim toward a very simple relationship with one's emotions. The idea here is that the emotions will come part and parcel of our human life. If they're uncomfortable, that may be like getting pricked with a dart, or the metaphor is an arrow. The emotion itself, if it's uncomfortable, that's like the first arrow. And then how we go about complicating it with our interpretations, our reactions, our responses, identification—just layer after layer making what was one arrow into two, two arrows into three, into four, and on and on and on. So as best we can, to use our wise attention to recognize, "Oh, I'm adding difficulty to this direct experience of emotion," and return as best we can to a simple relationship.

Tanya introduced some of the ways that we can do that using this acronym RAFT: one R, one A, one F, and two Ts. Each could be thought of as different ways to relate wisely to emotion, and they all kind of work together. The R was to recognize. Simply to recognize, "Oh, there's an emotion here," maybe to recognize what it is. A is to allow or accept. And I like to think of allow or accept as not having any conflict with the fact that this emotion is going on. It is indeed true this emotion has arisen. And then F, feel. Just what we were practicing with mindfulness of the body: how is it that this emotion is showing up in and through the body, through the language of the body? What's being said? So recognize, allow, feel. And then the Ts: tease apart. I love this image that Tanya used of a tapestry made up of many, many threads. As we hold or attend to this emotion with care, even if you rub it between your fingers, maybe these threads start to loosen up and show themselves. The different colors—you can see green for green and red for red, and so on. And this whole process is supported by the last T: trust. One of the things we can trust is that the body is always experiencing in the present moment. If we can be in contact with the body, we know we're right here, and we're receiving the resource of right here and right now. So recognize, accept, feel, tease apart, and trust.

Reflections on Mindfulness of Emotions

Kodo Conlin: Some of the guidance we talked about last week, and I'm really interested to hear how it went for you, anyone who was practicing over the week. Anything you might have done with this RAFT practice or anything you want to report in your sitting? Questions you have, or if you had an experience of what we talked about—riding out an emotion? If you felt an emotion arise, set yourself down and be still and just say, "I'm going to sit here and ride this out." Anything you'd like to share, please.

Participant 1: I wanted to share that it's very useful for me. I've been trying the techniques I learned in the first three classes, and I already had familiarity with trying to feel my emotions from other practices. It's just really liberating, because, for example, one of the things that's been a long time in the background has been different types of fear, like social anxiety or dreading things. Today I did my meditation practice and it was just really amazing to feel the fear, feel my heart beating fast, and just sitting with it. Afterwards, I just felt so liberated, even 10 minutes later. For the rest of the day, I was able to be just more present to other things and enjoy things. Even doing my work, I was enjoying that as well. So yeah, thank you for teaching us.

Kodo Conlin: Wow, I feel so much joy for how that's happened for you. Thank you so much for sharing. I don't know if anyone else feels that, but it puts encouragement in the room to hear a story like that. Great observations. Maybe there were other things that came up, maybe questions or even challenges?

Participant 2: I find that if I look really closely, I have a lot of aversion, especially to any kind of discomfort. So it's almost an automatic thing for me to think of something else. And it's mostly with subtle things. If it's a strong feeling in my body, I usually will try to let it go through my body, but it's those subtle things that happen more often where I just find there's a lot of conditioned mind-habit aversion.

Kodo Conlin: It's so fortunate that you're seeing a process. What I'm hearing is that there's this experience of discomfort and aversion, and it seems like you're getting closer to it and seeing that there's a variety of aversion that you can stick with pretty easily, and another where it's almost like because it's subtle, it doesn't register that, "Oh, there's aversion here and I'm going to slip away." But I hear you feeling it in your body and returning to your body, and that's exactly the practice. It registers for me as akin to the way we train with the breathing, where frequently there's a place in the breathing cycle where we tend to lose contact. Often at the very end, it gets really subtle and soft. So the instruction there, just as the instruction I'm thinking about for this aversion that you're working with: when you notice you're in that field where the slip usually happens, what's a way you can give just a half a notch, a tiny little bit of deliberate energy to hang in there just a little longer? That intention will sort of work itself through the practice. Thank you, sounds like it's going great.

Participant 3: I have a little question. I noticed that quite often when there's a lot of thinking going on, I ask myself, "So what's the emotion? Is there something on the line?" Usually, 90% of the time, I don't feel anything. There's this resistance: "No, we're not going to go there." Or I would call it "We're not going to go there," but I don't know what it is actually. Like, we're staying here in the thinking realm, and then I feel like it's like a war. So what I do is I'll shift to my body, and I feel this resistance at the body level. It's not pain which is in some specific place, but it's kind of like this tension everywhere. One thing that I tried deliberately recently: what if I just voluntarily think about something? I know what topics my mind usually goes to, so what if I just seed something that I know is emotional for me and it's kind of intense? Yesterday I thought about—I was not home and I thought about the stove. Did I turn off the stove? I knew I turned off the stove, I made a mental note, but I just thought about it, and I felt this wave of fear through my body. It was pretty intense. But the interesting thing is that it's not easy to go there. Thinking wants to be there, and I feel like I'm emotionless very often. Do you have a comment?

Tanya Wiser: Thank you for describing your process. One drop-in-the-bucket thought is that the resistance is worth spending time with itself. So when the time is right and you have a thought come up and you're sort of wondering, "What's the emotion, or is there emotion?" just start with: "If I have this thought, can I feel where it lands in my body?" Maybe even getting rid of the "What am I feeling?" but just going, "Thought. Okay. When I have this thought, do I notice anything? Tension? Oh, a little bit here." You might not notice where you feel it until the next thought comes. Just starting to track how a thought impacts your body. The other is when you feel like—because you felt that resistance very clearly. By trying to turn toward the emotion, something was saying no. Just right there, that is an emotional response. Giving that some space. Being with the resistance, feeling the resistance, where do you feel it? Because it has a purpose, it's trying to protect you or trying to defend from something we're afraid of. Getting to know that and being curious. "Wow, this is so quick to come up, I can't even feel what I'm feeling." That may be the emotion that's the most immediate, actually. There might be other emotions, but they're not activated at the moment. The emotion that's activated is behind the resistance.

A lot of times, resistance is really important to pay attention to. Sometimes we're trying to practice with something, and we know we're sad or upset, or we know that this thought isn't good for us, but there's resistance to anything going deeper or changing it. Just being with that resistance can reveal a lot. We don't need to run away from resistance; it actually also can be thought of as how we're clinging, how we're wanting things to be different than the way they are. That's a beautiful place to hang out. It's really working with the First Noble Truth^[1], and then it can help us recognize the Second Noble Truth^[2] or the cause of our clinging. What is it we're resisting, which is we want things different?

Kodo Conlin: Where are we for time? A couple more minutes? I was just going to invite, even if you haven't been attending the class, if you had a question about working with emotions, now is a great time to ask it. Otherwise we can move on. Maybe I can swap mics with you. Thank you.

Mindfulness of Thinking

Tanya Wiser: So tonight's topic is mindfulness of thinking. I just want to invite you to do an imaginary exercise to start. I'd like you to imagine yourself as a young child, really little, two or three. And I'd like you to imagine storytime with whoever you felt safe with and cozy with as a child. Imagine that one of your favorite books was brought out, and the name of the book is You Are Not Your Thoughts. Imagine being read this book from the time you were two or three years old.

You open up and you see this beautiful little baby in this picture, and it says, "Thoughts come and go, they never last long. One minute they're here, the next they're gone." Imagine learning that that little. And then you read the next page and it says, "When you look up at the clouds in the skies of blue, try to see the whole sky as the clouds pass through. The clouds are like thoughts, the sky is like you." Can you imagine if you'd been taught this, and you knew this your whole life, that you are not your thoughts? That thoughts come and go, that they move through, and that awareness itself is like the sky. Knowing we can know the thoughts, the clouds can move through our sky, move through our awareness. What if you really knew that now because somebody's been reading you this book for all those years? It would be pretty cool.

Here's another book I'm going to read to you a little bit from. It's called Can't Stop Thinking by Nancy Colier, and the subtitle is How to Let Go of Anxiety and Free Yourself from Obsessive Rumination. She's clearly a meditation practitioner. She's endorsed by Sharon Salzberg and Tara Brach and others. She wasn't read this story when she was a kid either, but she writes about an experience that I'll share with you. I'll read you a couple of paragraphs from the beginning of her book. The title of this introduction is "Addicted to Thinking."

"It was a magnificent spring morning, and I was walking in the park near my home. Well, that's not really true. I was walking, yes, but not exactly in the park. I was oblivious to the colorful flowers blooming, the warm sunshine, the smell of cut grass. I was missing all of it, having disappeared inside my own head, into my own personal prison: thinking. No matter how delicious that May day may have been, I wasn't experiencing it. I was trapped inside my mind, obsessing about what was not working in my life, replaying and rethinking the same problems I've been replaying and rethinking for years. And then something remarkable happened: my inner lens spun on its axis. Instead of being inside my thoughts, I was now the one looking and listening to my thoughts. Instead of being inside my thoughts, I was now the one looking at and listening to my thoughts."

Do you see the shift? Can you feel into experiences where you've gone from being inside the thought to being able to witness? Great. So that's what we want to support in our practice with mindfulness of thinking, is the connection with awareness. Being aware of thinking as it's occurring, or as it's starting. Sometimes we get lost and then as it's ending or later we start to become more aware. There's not a firm boundary between the thinking and being aware of it. We can absorb into it and we can come out of it. There's no fixed line that helps us keep that boundary. Another way to think about this that's often talked about is foreground versus background. Letting the thoughts be more in the background. When we have a little more awareness, the thoughts can be a little bit more in the background. That can help us not get so merged with them.

I think another really important thing to start to pay attention to when we're working with thinking is there are two things that I find people tend to do. One is to try and change the thinking. Another is looking at our relationship to the thoughts. Sometimes it feels like it's a little easier in a way to—I mean, I'm going to get really busy trying to change the way I'm thinking. I want to have more kind thoughts or be more supportive, be less critical. And that all helps. That all helps, and we're still kind of merging with thinking often in that way. Another way to try and relate to thoughts is actually to look at our relationship to the thinking. To notice: we like this thought, we don't like that thought. "I am this thought. This is me. This thinking is who I am." This is all a reflection of our relationship to our thoughts. "This is how it should go," right? These are all ways that we relate to our thoughts, and many of those ways I just described lead to merging and agreeing and building with the thinking.

There's another thing to think about. There are thoughts, which are like the clouds, and then there's the thinking, which is like a train, a little engine that could: "I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking." There's this energy of keeping it going. So it's a lot easier to be mindful of thoughts than it is to be mindful of the thinking, makes sense? To be mindful of the thinking, we're usually starting to get in it, become it, to merge with it. But noticing this, noticing when you feel like the little engine that could, climbing up the hill with those thoughts, pumping them out. "Oh, I'm actively thinking." It pretty much means I'm bought in, I'm buying in, it's me. I'm agreeing, I'm working on it. In that moment, there's a way to shift. How do we let ourselves open up a little bit around the thinking? "Oh, there's this thought. Oh, there's agreement." More like watching, like the clouds. What happens is when we're not so engaged with them, they start to lose their momentum. They peter out, they dissolve, they transform. Guess what? A new, more tempting thought will come up. It's a wonderful thought-making machine in here, and its intention is to engage us. The work is in learning how to witness. When we're sitting on the cushion, as much as possible, to watch and not become the engine that powers it.

One of the things that's easy and nice to say is, "I'm not my thoughts." Remind ourselves. We have so many thoughts every day, and many of them are repetitive, but there's no one thought that is going to capture who you are. Sometimes you have thoughts you don't even agree with. So how is it you are a thought? How can I be that thought? It's helpful to work on seeing thinking as part of my experience, but it's not who I am. I'm not my thoughts. In this book, the woman has a question that I really liked. She said ask yourself, "What if I am not my thoughts? What if I am what hears and sees the thoughts? The awareness within which the thoughts are appearing?" Like that sky metaphor. I'm like the sky, and the thoughts are the clouds that move through the sky.

One of the things that can be really helpful when we're trying to recognize we're thinking—which is not always so easy to do because of the permeability and the merging that happens with our thinking—is to recognize there are different kinds of thinking, and we all think in different ways, actually. Who here thinks in images? You see images in your mind. Not everybody, right? Some people sometimes, some people a little bit, a lot, all the time. So that's one way we think. Who hears words being spoken? Okay, so some people are here, and other people who were up here before are now here or down here. So there's the auditory, the hearing of the speaking is one way we think. Not the only way.

There can also be a subtle layer of thinking. This is one I've been working with lately. It's almost like an opaque feeling or image in the background that just is enough to generate an emotional response in the body. For me, the best way I can describe it is like knowing there's a yellow light flashing: caution, caution. Then there's this feeling in the body of like, "Oh, what do I need to be paying attention to?" When I look in my mind and I watch my mind, it's not like I'm sitting around talking. There's no conversation happening. Maybe every once in a while a word or two or a sentence might string together, but it's just more of this holding of this perspective, a sense. What else have you noticed about thinking? Have you noticed any other ways that you think?

Participant 4: Imagining myself doing things in the future, and then I can catch myself and be like, "Oh, I'm not here, I'm trying on different scenarios."

Tanya Wiser: Yeah, great. So the movie-making mind, it's how I tend to be. I'm the star of the show. I'm trying on things and I'm imagining them and how it's going to go, and how I'm going to respond to this or that. Rehearsing or visualizing. It can be very powerful, actually. It can be really, really helpful, but it also can be really harmful. We can get lost, and sometimes I feel like I'm working with people and it's almost like they're living in that instead of in the real world. I see nodding.

Participant 4: I feel like just even having more spaciousness from that is useful, so maybe when I want to be there I can, but being aware, and if I choose, not being there.

Tanya Wiser: Yes, beautiful.

Participant 5: So it was very interesting to hear this third way that you mentioned, like holding on to something a little bit. I often find myself having a combination. I maybe have an image and a couple of keywords. It's like a little cluster, and it represents a topic for me. I don't really hear sentences or see a sequence of images, I just have this cluster. It comes to my mind and it's kind of there, and I don't even know what exactly is happening, but I can recognize the cluster of these data points, a mix of words and...

Tanya Wiser: That's right, absolutely. Thinking is different for us. It's also different when we have memories versus when we're imagining. When we hear somebody else's voice versus our own voice. Sometimes we don't even notice our own narrator because it's so normal to us. We don't even recognize we're meditating and talking to ourselves: "Okay, just keep breathing, keep breathing." We're trying to help ourselves, but we're actively thinking and narrating, right? So that's another form of it. And sometimes we need it. But still being able to recognize that what's happening is thinking can be very, very helpful and liberating too. Let's do a little bit of practice.

Guided Meditation: Observing Thoughts

Finding a meditation posture that supports you being in your body. In your body here in this space, in this time. Taking your time to get comfortable, to adjust your posture, to find maybe something like lifting the shoulders up, rolling them back to help counter the forward and closing habits we have. And just let the breath come in. Feeling that sense of uprightness but relaxed, in a position and posture that you feel you can hold for 15 minutes. Seeing if you can't start to connect more deeply with whatever your anchor is. We've been referencing in general the breath is the anchor.

Taking a few minutes to help ourselves settle. Like when we come into the harbor in our boat, we find the right spot and then we lower an anchor into the water. It takes a while to lower it down, and then we've got to pull on it a bit and make sure it's nice and firmly caught. Then you can feel the tension pulling on the anchor, holding the boat in place. As we cultivate that connection to the breathing, if that's our anchor, it starts to feel like that anchor, the tug of the rope that's connected to the anchor on the bottom of the ocean that's holding us here. The water is moving, things are happening, sounds, and there's that feeling of connection to right here. Right here. It just happens one breath at a time, one sensation at a time.

Maybe, like if you were a sailor on this boat and you put your anchor down and you tug on the rope and you know you've got the anchor kind of settled, there's a feeling of trust that can come up. A feeling of like, "Okay. Okay." Inviting this sense of okayness, the sense of "I've taken care of my body, my presence, I'm orienting myself to the practice." And then noticing the attitude and the way you're speaking to yourself might be a form of thinking, and see if there's some kindness. Invite some kindness in there, some kind orienting, kind thinking. Invitational: "Let me just be here, breath by breath."

[Meditation Period]

At some point, you will find yourself thinking. Yay, mindfulness of thinking! "Yeah, here I am seeing a thought. Yay, I see a thought." It's okay, thoughts happen, we don't have to stop them. Let them be those clouds moving through the sky. Some of the things that can help us with that are to distinguish the kind of thinking that's happening. Maybe just "Oh, talking, or seeing, or movies." First noticing what kind of thinking it is, kind of the process of thinking that's happening in this mind at this moment.

A second thing that we can be aware of that's different than the process of thinking is the content. You might just say "A story," or "Remembering," or "Planning." Just somehow noting the content. It might need to be named, lightly labeled.

And sometimes the thoughts just keep moving and slipping through, and sometimes they stick around, they feel sticky. Sometimes if that's happening you might say, "Is there an emotion connected here with this thought? Is there a physical sensation in the body connected to this thought?" If it feels really, really sticky, and you're the little engine that could, powering those thinking thoughts, it can be helpful to consider dropping the anchor back into the ocean and reconnecting with the breath. Re-establishing that anchor. Breathing here, right here.

And then once we reconnect to the breathing, when we're ready, we can open up again a little bit more gently. Just watching for that next little puff of a cloud. How is it showing up? What's the process of thinking that's happening? Maybe noting the content: planning, remembering, imagining. See if you can just breathe right into it and through it. Being gentle and kind, patient. Maybe: "Thinking's not me. It's not who I am. Thinking is happening. Thinking is here, thought is here. My mind's job is to think. Thinking just is something that happens. It's natural."

Maybe just dropping in the question: "What am I aware of now?"

Discussion and Experiences

Tanya Wiser: So what did you experience? What did you learn about the mind and how it's thinking, or engaging with thinking, tonight in the last 15 minutes?

Participant 6: Hello, good evening. Sorry I was late. I was noticing that I was thinking a lot. Apart from that too, just with the meditation practice, I found that, if guided or not guided, it's nicer and easier for me to be able to just sit with it and not try to resist or force anything. But still, when thoughts or emotions arise, I can still find myself in the midst of it rather than being the observer of my thoughts. I'm still trying to practice that, but meditation has helped me with awareness.

Tanya Wiser: Sweet, sweet. How does it feel different to be more aware and less entangled?

Participant 6: I remember in one of the sessions I had attended on a Sunday, holding on to things, whether it be enemies or something... by letting go of that, how does it make you feel? This week at work, at one point I could just almost imagine myself seeing what would happen if I reacted in a way that was more reactive rather than responsive. I'm like, "Oh!" That was the first time I'd ever had a chance to do that, and it was good. It would not have happened had I not been doing this, had I not been meditating. It's still a practice that I have every day. Yesterday I was still pretty upset about something, but I also had to let myself be in that emotion and not resist it. Because if I kept fighting it, I'm like, "Okay, I know I'm upset right now and I'm frustrated, but what can I do with it?" You kind of just have to be with that emotion and not force anything.

Tanya Wiser: Thank you. It reminds me of talking about being the riverbed, right? Letting the emotions move through. Beautiful.

Participant 7: What I noticed is when the resistance comes up, the more you pay attention to it, or the more you try to avoid it, the stronger it gets. That's what happened for me. The more I tried to tell myself, "Stop resisting, stop paying attention to that, don't look at the elephant in the room," the more I wanted to stare at the elephant in the room. About halfway through, when I remembered what you said about the foreground and the background, all of a sudden the observer came to the foreground and the thoughts went into the background, and I felt more relaxed immediately. I felt like when I stopped resisting, things got easier. But I also feel like we're trained our whole lives to think, to do something, to be thinking about something. It is very difficult to tell yourself not to think about things. I also want to know about that children's book. Is that a book that I can buy for my someday grandchildren, or is that a made-up book?

Tanya Wiser: No, this is a real book. I think I bought it at Spirit Rock^[3], but I'm sure you can find it online. It was done by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn. So you're welcome to come up and take a picture of the cover, absolutely please do.

Participant 7: Everybody should be reading this together.

Tanya Wiser: I think so too. Thank you.

Participant 8: One thing I noticed as I was noting each of these different thoughts, at first there seemed to be so many different thoughts, and eventually I realized they were all variations on a core thought, which would be sort of a core belief, I suppose. I had never thought of that before, that a belief is sort of a core thought that keeps repeating itself, looking in a million different ways. Now I felt like I can see that thought disguised as all of these other manifestations.

Tanya Wiser: Oh, that's so wonderful. It's like all these variations are like the leaves, and somehow there was a recognition that they were all pointing back down the branches to the trunk of the tree. What was that like for you?

Participant 8: It made it much easier not to hop on the thought train of this or the thought train of that. It helped me stay more centered, and I started hearing that one thought rather than 50 or 60 different thoughts. I could hear it more clearly.

Tanya Wiser: Oh, wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so much.

Participant 9: I wanted to share something too. So I noticed that at one point I was lost, and probably not for long but it was very obvious. Basically, I noticed that because I felt shame. I felt shame and, "Okay, that's because I was lost." And then something interesting happened. I noticed how my mind was ready to jump on the shame thing and go there like, "Oh, that's because... well, I'm not supposed to be lost. It's a short guided meditation and Tanya is guiding us, and I'm a good meditator, I'm not supposed to be lost like that." What is interesting is I noticed this, my mind prepared me for this new cycle around the shame, and I just kind of went, "Okay, that's what's happening." And I felt really amused. It was actually quite amusing that I noticed that. So it was actually a very pleasant experience to see how these things happened in a sequence.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah. I just want to appreciate the clarity of observation of process, and you hanging in there. The place you ended up was a friendly relationship with what could have been a really juicy, captivating thought train to get onto. Nice, thank you. Shall we go ahead? Yeah, I'll just add. It's very obvious what I'm going to say, super obvious. But the main thing that I heard that, for me, would have helped me was disbelief. There was that space of like, "I'm not just believing this thought. This thought doesn't have to be a fact. It's a thought that's being produced, and oh, I can see where it's going to take me, but I don't have to go there." Which is so empowering, right? So freeing. The cover of the book says it all: You Are Not Your Thoughts. Oh yeah, for us meditators too, the identity of "good meditator".

The River Analogy

Kodo Conlin: So the experience of thinking and our relationship to thinking: the little engine that could driving up the hill. We're in the thought. Other options for relationship to thinking—I get to introduce one of the classic IMC^[4] analogies now.

I'd like you to imagine maybe you're out taking a walk. It's the end of the week, taking a walk somewhere on a trail. Brought a little snack with you, you have everything you need, and you're feeling quite happy. You find yourself under a tree by a riverside. You decide to sit down. You can feel the air on your skin, the light is just right, the temperature is comfortable. You want for nothing, just perfectly content right there as you are, watching the river go by. How pleasant.

So there you are seated, and before you know it, up the stream comes one of these party boats. The music, the decor, the dancing. Maybe they have a jazz band on board or something. And before you know it, you're on the boat. How did that happen? You're dancing away, you're dressed differently, having a great time. And then you realize, "Oh, I'm a little tired from dancing. Oh wait, I was sitting under that tree. That was so lovely. Okay, I'm going to make my way back." So somehow or another, you make your way off the boat, back up the trail, sit down under your tree. So nice. Just there, just right here, not carried along, just watching the flow go by.

And then comes a battleship. Before you know it, you're on the fighting boat. A little surprise. You're the hero, you're the star of this show, or alternately you're hiding in the hull. But you're on this battleship, and you're on it for months, maybe. Then you realize, "Oh, where was I? Where am I? I have lost the riverbank. I'm going to get off this boat, go back, sit down." Ah, here I am. So glad to not be dancing on this party boat. I'm so glad not to be fighting. I'm just here, just here for a while.

And then comes this meager, barely a raft. It's like sticks tied together with a little grass. It's hardly holding up. And before you know it, you're on the raft, and you're like, "Oh, I can barely float!" How did that happen? Before we know it, we're on the raft. Then we recognize and make our way back, just to here, just to here again.

Such an apt analogy for the varieties of really juicy thoughts that can captivate us, some of our favorites. And the relationship that we can have with them before we even realize we've hopped right on the boat and we're riding right along. We're going for the ride, we're the little engine that could going up the hill. But there's another option. Another option we can exercise with the practice, and that is just sitting under the tree. Just being content here, just here. We see a boat coming down, we can have the intention, "Oh, there's a boat. I know that I could get on it, but how many boats have I gotten on? This one time I'm going to try just watching it go by." And you know what, you get to stay right here. Stay right here. So with some little bit of wise relationship to thinking, we don't necessarily get taken over.

To develop these ideas about thinking, something I really want to make sure we talk about: thinking gets a bad rap in meditation circles. Don't you find that's true? Or maybe some of you have heard that being around meditation communities for the years that I have been. So many times I've heard, "Oh, you know, meditation is not for me. I can never get my mind to stop thinking." There's this understanding that meditation is only when there's no thinking going on, or thinking gets seen as the problem. Nothing gets left out in mindfulness meditation. Thinking is such an important part of our experience, so I wanted to give a little time to recognize and respect thinking as an actually fruitful and really powerful influence in our lives.

I was taking a walk just this afternoon, and I noticed a block over there's one of these give-and-take book libraries. I thought how much joy, how much depth and profundity in our life has come to us through books. Every Shakespeare play: thoughts. Every poem you've ever read that's touched you: those are thoughts. They get documented and they represent something. They've had an influence in our lives. Every speech by Martin Luther King: thoughts. What an important part of our lives. This too gets to be included. Our whole life gets to be here.

I think something this is closely connected with is that, of course, thoughts have their place in meditation. They have their difficulties, but often they're pointing at something else really valuable in our experience. Oftentimes a thought, as we've been exploring, might be connected to an emotion underneath, or a thought might point us back to some core belief or an identity that we have. Maybe a thought connects us to something in our body or it arises based on something in our body. All these different connections in our lives that thoughts may be pointing back to. So in some ways, a thought might be a signpost.

When I was a boy, I grew up in a place where it was very warm, and I was learning how to water ski. If anyone's learned how to water ski, you pretty much hold on to a rope and you have these two boards on your feet, and the boat goes, and if everything goes according to plan, you go up on the water and you stand and ski. Now it's lovely. I was quite young, and I was learning. So I got my rope, I got my little skis. The boat starts to take off, and I stumble and I hang on to the rope. I didn't want to let go, and before I knew it, I was under the water. I was still tenacious, I was like, "I'm not letting go." It's just like that with thinking. Sometimes we think the thoughts, and sometimes the thoughts really think us. Sometimes the thoughts take us for a ride, and that can contribute to all sorts of difficulties and complications in our lives.

So again, this wise relationship to thinking, being able to have some wise space from our thinking. Or even to pick up the boat analogy again, say we wanted to engage some thought. Say the party boat comes down and we're like, "Okay, I'm deliberately going to pick up this thought and I'm going to artfully dance with this thought, and then when the time comes, I'm going to get off the boat." But doing it with some choice. Some choice.

I was talking to someone recently who has been practicing for maybe 40 years, practicing mindfulness practice. And she said the thing that she has gotten from the practice that she appreciates the most is that now she has an affectionate relationship with her mind. An affectionate relationship with her mind. That opens up some possibilities in my heart and mind for this practice with mindfulness of thinking. How we can get wrapped up in our identities and really suffer our thinking, or there can be the possibility of friendship with our thinking. Kindness with our thinking. Goodwill toward our thinking. And freedom with it, freedom with it.

Maybe one last comment. We've talked about a lot of different aspects of mindfulness of thinking. An important thing Tanya said that I want to highlight: it's not about getting busy around our thinking, it's still about simple awareness. Awareness with what's right here. So say we're practicing with the anchor of the breathing, and the thinking can just be there in the background, and we can stay with the breathing. Let's continue with that. If a thought is persistent or compelling, maybe then turn toward it and investigate its process. What's its beginning and ending? What's its quality? What's the tone of voice like? If it's really repetitive, is there something physical going on? Is there an emotion underneath? Is there something fueling the thinking? You might turn toward that, all the while a simple relationship with thinking. So why don't we do a little more practice together.

Guided Meditation: A Spacious Relationship to Thinking

Kodo Conlin: You can take a moment to renew your posture. Finding yourself upright with an alert spine, a relaxed body, maybe opening the chest. Feeling your way into alignment through the body with the support of the breathing. Allowing the earth, allowing the seat to hold your weight. To invite a little relaxation into the limbs. Having a minute to connect with your anchor, perhaps the breathing.

A breath comes in, a breath goes out. A thought comes in. The thought goes out. Let thoughts begin to blow through like clouds. If they can stay in the background, just to allow them to pass by.

If you find that there is a thought that's persistent, perhaps giving it a name. Planning, planning. Replaying, replaying. If you recognize a thought has visited you many times before, repeat, repeat. Maybe giving it a name. And perhaps something in us can trust that it's okay to not pick up this thought this time.

As we bring this sitting to a close, take a moment to notice: just now, what is my relationship to this present thought, to this present thinking?

As you hear the bell, when you're ready, you can open your eyes. [Bell rings]

Discussion and Daily Life Practice

Kodo Conlin: So an affectionate relationship to the mind. Maybe so, maybe so. How was the practice for you? Are any questions coming up? Are any comments you'd like to share?

Participant 10: Hello. Well, I was having a coughing fit, but at the same time I realized, "Oh my gosh, I'm finally getting comfortable meditating on the floor." I've been practicing, sometimes doing a mix of sitting on the chair and on the floor. I was like, "Okay, in the midst of all these coughing spasms, I can still find myself anchored to the fact that I'm breathing in and breathing out, so it's okay, I can still still my mind." I thought it was kind of representative or symbolic of the mind too. Kodo, as you said, getting on or finding yourself on that ship. I do get on the ship a lot, or a sinking ship sometimes, but I do want to stay under the Bodhi tree^[5]. I really do. Sometimes it's a free ride and it is very seductive to just hop on, but before meditation I know I would just easily hop on. But I know now there's a bit of hesitation in a good way, like, "You know what's going to happen, so pause for a bit or just breathe." In this practice I've been able to extend it to others or the whole loving-kindness, put your hand over your heart and just know, "I have everything I need," and it's really cool. So I'm very grateful for this. Thank you.

Kodo Conlin: Thank you so much for your practice. So much to appreciate there. One thing that's standing out to me is that there's such a variety of experiences happening, and all of it gets to be included. All of it gets to be included in the awareness practice. It seems really skillful, some of the ways you're relating to having a bodily experience in the foreground and the background. Even bodily experience can be related to that way, not just thoughts in the background. So thank you for revealing that. Thank you.

Participant 11: What I find sometimes is when I am sitting like this to meditate, I'm actually more still than in my regular life. My thoughts are really going through my mind really fast, and sometimes they can feel disturbing if they're upsetting thoughts. I notice it in my body first. I may not even realize that I'm thinking thoughts that don't serve me, but then I start to have almost like a pain here in the solar plexus area. But for whatever reason when I sit, I'm in a quieter space. So I almost feel like I need to stop and meditate when I'm getting in that whirlwind that's not serving me. But a lot of times that whirlwind is not happening when I'm sitting. Obviously if you go to a retreat where you're sitting all day, you're going to get the whirlwind. But I just thought it was an interesting observation on my part, like, "Oh, I'm sitting here now, I feel really comfortable and at ease, and nothing disturbing is coming into my mind." What do you think of that and how to work with that?

Tanya Wiser: It sounds like it's restful. It sounds like it's nourishing. And so when we're offered good food, eat it, enjoy it. Let yourself be aware that that's your experience.

Participant 11: But I was just thinking of when it's the opposite, and I'm not meditating, how to deal with that?

Tanya Wiser: Are you familiar with any of Andrea Fella's^[6] teachings? No? If you're interested in this, she does a lot of teaching about being mindful of the mind in daily life. You might look at—are you aware of what the Five Hindrances^[7] are? Okay. So when you have a lot going on in your mind, you might just stop and go, "Okay, what hindrances are at work here?" Or what emotions are? Because they're the fuel, right? They're the lighter fluid that's really catching and burning things, keeping it going. So then you can start to hopefully have a little more awareness in the midst of it. "Oh, there's a lot of aversion." And then you said you were aware of your body. So just like you said—I loved what you said about "I often become aware of my thinking through my body"—that to me is really powerful practice, mindfulness of the body. You could even cultivate that during your daily life, being more tuned in, a more consciously active mindfulness of the body practice. And then as you notice tension, you might start to notice things sooner. Is that helpful? Okay.

Homework and Closing

Tanya Wiser: Maybe time to bring it to a close already? Yeah. So there is—a few people came in late—there is a handout on the end of the stage that has a good overview and some homework suggestions. This week we're encouraging you to bump up your practice to 30 minutes. Did we do that last week actually? I think we did. Okay, so 30 minutes. If you can sit that out one time, great. If you need to break it up, great. Just if you can make that amount of practice, it's helpful. During the practice, and even just during your daily life, just kind of noticing more your thoughts and your beliefs, just getting a little bit more familiar with what's repetitive and what comes up, what tends to fuel a lot more energy or upset.

There's a suggestion to do a two-hour period of tracking different kinds of thoughts. Just sort of taking a couple of hours to track: "Thinking is still happening with imagining, visualizing, movie making, words, talking." Just track the type of thinking. And then there's a suggestion to do a two-hour period of tracking of intentions. We didn't really talk about intentions tonight, so if you didn't read the handout before today... I'm not sure what it says in there about intention, so if it's not clear don't worry about it, and we can talk more another time.

And then I'll just repeat, I really like this question: just dropping it in, "If I'm not my thoughts, what if I am what hears and sees the thoughts?" Just playing with that a little bit. Sort of dropping that question in. "What if I am what hears and sees the thoughts?" Just seeing how that lands.

And may this time together be of benefit to you, and of benefit to all the people you come in contact with, and then the people they come in contact with, and so on and so forth. Thank you for being here, and Kodo and I will be here if you have any questions afterwards or you want to take a picture of the book. All right, thank you.