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One thing that I have often heard people say on the subject of meditation is something like, “I can’t meditate [or some variation like, ‘I find meditation painful’, ‘meditation is not for me’] because I’m not able to stop my thoughts.”<\/p>\n
Obviously, I’m a meditation enthusiast, and I think that meditation is a great activity for all people to do. So, I invite you to take on the practice of meditation equally when your mind is busy and chattering as when it is calm and clear.<\/p>\n
My main meditation teacher often says that there are two ways to make use of mindfulness meditation when it comes to any human experience \u2013 to intentionally turn away from it and ignore it, or to intentionally turn towards it and experience into the depth of it.\u00a0 Different meditation techniques work with thoughts using both of these strategies.<\/p>\n
Some meditation techniques involve intentionally anchoring and settling awareness on some phenomena other than thoughts, for example on the breath, body sensations, or external sound. With techniques like this, the instruction is to ignore thoughts, to let them drop into the background, and to choose instead to spaciously and patiently fill attention with the chosen object of meditation.\u00a0 When people have the impression that to meditate they should “stop their thoughts”, they are talking about techniques like this.<\/p>\n
It is understood, however, when doing techniques like this, that most modern people will still have days where their mind is filled with swirls of thought, and almost all days will involve some degree of thought. With enough effort and persistent practice, people can sometimes get their chattering minds to calm down and be still for periods of time.\u00a0 However, accomplishments like that are like running marathons – eventually possible for most people, but taking sustained, robust, and dedicated effort to get there.\u00a0 Wherever we are on our meditation journey, however, one part of the meditation instruction set is to be patient and accepting with thoughts as they arise even as we, when able, do our best to chose to spaciously return awareness to a different object that we are trying to concentrate on.<\/p>\n
And there are also other techniques that involve having thoughts be the actual object that one is choosing to pay attention to during the meditation. An example of that is letting the attention wander anywhere and everywhere – including thoughts – and just noticing where it goes.\u00a0 An even more relevant example would be to meditate by specifically paying attention to the rising and passing away of thoughts. When meditating in this way, the arising and passing of thoughts is definitely no obstacle to the meditation, because it is the substance of the meditation.<\/p>\n
Either way, my recommendation to you is, please feel free to meditate whatever high or low level of activation of thoughts you encounter.\u00a0 The journey of meditation travels through many different landscapes of the human experience, including those with lots of thoughts happening, and the invitation is to relax and open to all of it.<\/p>\n
Byron Katie, in her book “Loving What Is”, said:<\/p>\n
Do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, \u2018I think I will not think today\u2019? It\u2019s too late: You\u2019re already thinking! Thoughts just appear.\u00a0 How can you control your thinking?\u00a0 It\u2019s thinking you.\u00a0 Thought appears.\u00a0 You either think or you do not.\u00a0 Thought either appears or it does not.\u00a0 Can you control the wind too?\u00a0 What about the ocean?\u00a0 Let us stop the waves.\u00a0 Not very likely.\u00a0 I do not let go of my thoughts – I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me. Thoughts are like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling. They appear like that, and through inquiry we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop? Raindrops are not personal, and neither are thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I invite you to take on the practice of meditation equally when your mind is busy and chattering as when it is calm and clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[74,21],"class_list":["post-5692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-beginners-instructions","tag-meditation-technique","category-1","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5692"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5742,"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5692\/revisions\/5742"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intromeditation.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}