Meditation Is Not About Clearing The Mind & Stopping Thought

Thoughts, thoughts everywhere. If only I could get rid of them all! Well, unsurprisingly, meditation is not about stopping thinking or completely clearing the mind. But this is one of the most common ideas about the practice. So what is it really about?

Transcript

Meditation is about clearing the mind and not thinking.

So this is surely the most common idea out there that there is about meditation.

If you asked a hundred people on the street what is meditation,

What's it about,

Chances are you would hear this come up more frequently than any other idea.

And it could be in different words,

It could be well it's about still in the mind,

It's about finding some inner peace,

Inner tranquility,

Or I mean it could be,

The words could be very direct and explicit,

Could be well it's about shutting up the inner critic,

It's about really slowing down and reducing the thinking process.

So there's so many ideas and thoughts ironically around this topic that we could talk for hours but here we're just going to try and cover the basics and really open up the conversation a bit more.

So you can imagine sitting down for your first meditation session with this idea in the back of your head and 10-15 seconds into the session you have a thought,

Quickly you try and shut it down,

You think this okay this is not what I should be doing,

Push it away,

Try and forget about it,

Get back to the meditation.

Five seconds later another thought comes and you think oh Christ I am,

Come on really like just concentrate.

Five seconds later another thought and it's like oh my god come on really you just you need to concentrate better you you know you've been here for what 20 seconds and you've been thinking like 90% of the time you're gonna fail at this for sure this is not for you you're just one of those people you know yeah maybe Mary,

Friend Mary at work,

She can do it but for you your mind is just too busy,

Too active,

Get used to it.

So many of us may have experienced something like this scenario I definitely have in the past and I'm not ashamed to say that there's still some days where this kind of attitude appears so this is kind of revealing because you can start to see that as well as being an idea about meditation it is also an attitude that we have towards meditation and therefore towards all of our experience so let's put a pin in that for now and explore a little bit more this idea that that's out there about meditation.

So roughly speaking there are two types of meditation practices,

There are focus,

Attentional or concentration practices and there are awareness or insight practices.

So briefly put in the first type of these practices attentional or concentration practices the goal is to focus and still the mind so that means taking an object could be the breath it could be a candle flame could be a sound it could be a mantra many different things could be an image in a visualization so in this particular practice the intention is to still the mind focus on the object and that means a hundred percent focus so we're blocking out everything else and reserving our complete attention for this object and through doing so we could develop deep levels of calm and kind of trance like states so this is is a common association people have with meditation that it's about transcending our everyday experience going deeper or higher or somehow somehow to another place that's not here or that's that's more special and as you can imagine this practice has a lot of benefits like I said finding deep states of calm and and really finding some escape from everyday experience so that brings us to our second type of practice and more directly to the topic of this talk today so although we can categorize meditation into two types we can also look at meditation as having these two types integrated into every practice and this is the practice of mindfulness meditation so in mindfulness meditation we have a strong leaning towards the the awareness aspect the ability to observe our experience and through that to develop and cultivate insight into our experience but at the same time we are also developing this attentional component this focus aspect that like two wings of a bird is essential in really getting anywhere in the practice without attentional skills without being able to focus on the breath for 30 seconds you're not really going to be able to become aware of what you're experiencing and without a sort of curious observational quality to the practice and just merely focusing on the breath then at the same time you're not going to see into your experience and notice the different patterns and the changes that are happening so these qualities really complement each other and work together and that brings us now to the attitude aspect of our topic today so as you can see when we follow the focus approach although we may develop levels of calm and stillness and maybe manage to block out thought for a little while we have a particular attitude and the attitude is trying to get somewhere else and why would we need to get somewhere else well we're judging our experience as being a particular way as not how we want it to be it's it may be that we're trying to push away an experience we're having of some kind of unpleasant thoughts or unpleasant feelings or it may be to try and achieve and get to a more pleasant state that feeling we had when we you know took whatever drug that night and then felt amazing or that feeling we had on holiday when we were calm and everything just flowed whatever it may be we're trying to change their experience we're having so as many of you may know who tried meditation this attitude this approach to our experience can actually cause the opposite effect we may find a bit of clarity and freedom or space for a while but ultimately the thoughts come rushing back in the experiences we don't want to have there we can't push our experience away forever so what can we do well might help here if we look at a brief analogy so say if there's a muddy pool of water and in order to try and clear that pool we start frantically pushing the dirt aside and brushing the leaves away stirring up the water even more maybe we'll get a brief moment of clarity a brief window where we can see through that water and and it appears like it's clear but once we stop once we look around and take a moment to see what's actually going on we see that actually we're just stirring up the murky water even more and making it even more difficult to see through so the mindfulness approach here would be rather than needing to get involved and trying desperately or trying at all to make to change what's happening and make the water clear we'd rather stop interfering with the water and sit back and observe and in doing this we may find that the water begins to gradually settle on its own and become clear so this may sound very abstract so let's try and bring it back down to earth a bit more so we have the first method of trying to push our experience away trying to change what we're experiencing and then we have this second method of kind of sitting back and observing and not getting involved with our experience not trying to make it different than how it is but what this does this actually look like does this mean in meditation that we instead of trying to push thought away we just kind of let it happen does that not mean we just end up getting lost in thought and mind-wandering well no this would be a bit like falling into the pool right and and as as we know sometimes diving into the pool getting lost in thought is fun it can be fun but it could also be the opposite you know there's rumination there's worry and all of these different things that happen when when we get lost in a train of thought so thankfully there is another way that sits between pushing away our experience and trying to clear the mind with force and effort and indulging in the mind and really getting lost in thinking and lost in our experience so this is the middle way and hopefully you're ready for another analogy because there's one coming so trying to forget the water analogy for the moment we can imagine there's a bunch of horses all tied together and these are our thoughts pulling us in every direction and these are wild horses by the way so it's it's absolute chaos so imagine one of these horses is a thought about all the work you have to do this week another one is a memory about the party you went to in 2016 another one is a craving for some chocolate another one could be about a terrible itch you need to scratch okay so we so we have all of this going on now when we sit down to meditate we bring in another thought our attention is already being pulled everywhere and it's it's absolute madness and hard to see what's going on but we bring in another thought maybe it's a stallion and we tie it on to the bunch of horses and this is the the thought of I need to meditate I need to change this experience I shouldn't be thinking these thoughts are bad this thought as you can see seems to be helpful but actually it's just adding to to the chaos and there's no end to how many other stallions we could add to this mix as long as we keep trying to change our experience then we're engaging and judging the experience as being a particular way and that involves thought that in fault involves taking a snapshot of what we're experiencing comparing it against how we want to feel what we should be experiencing and trying to trying to change number one for number two so so this is the this is a thinking process this is conceptualizing our experience not experiencing what's happening directly but rather having a commentary about it and reacting to the commentary what we want to do is step back and get back down to the direct experience of what's happening what are we actually feeling what's going on in our bodies and not just base what we do on on these ideas that we have about the situation so when we have a mess of thoughts like this when we have an experience of we could call it monkey mind or just constant internal chatter it's very hard to see what's going on so meditation helps provide a container for this and sticking with the horse analogy that would be like first providing a paddock for these horses so we have a space for them where they can roam of course they're still tied together so once we provide that space for these horses then we're allowed to let them free we're allowed to take off the ropes untie them and give them some space to roam around freely no matter how crazy or how difficult and unmanageable and challenging they may seem meditation is the act of providing this kind of safe container that says okay yes these thoughts are challenging and seem to be some seem to be too much kind of unbearable but I'm going to try to welcome them in try to firstly refrain from this this attitude of needing to need to change my experience because it's not how it should be and instead saying okay it's this is how things are and this is where we we need to start and as you can imagine when these horses or thoughts have some space to roam then we do we do manage to find a bit more space we do manage to experience a bit more calmness and that can can work work wonders for for allowing us to you know to get a better idea of what's going on why we have these thoughts in the first place maybe we drank a liter of coffee before sitting down to meditate maybe we have some really pressing issues that we need to you know work on and figure out in our lives or maybe we just have a pattern of getting really anxious and reacting to to stressful feelings and sensation in a dramatic or over-the-top way this is something we can only really come to see if we first cultivate this attitude of allowing things to be as they are so as you can see I have a lot of thoughts on this topic there's a lot of things to be said on this idea of not thinking so much in meditation practice and it's a conversation that we need to continue and it's something that really needs to be explored in practice so I hope this gave you some clarity around the topic and any questions feel free to send them through and I look forward to speaking with you again next time

Reviews

Thanks for this insightful talk - it's one I'll come back to again and again