Thinking As A Contemplative Process

Here, Serge talks about thinking as a mindful, contemplative process. First, he describes the three stages of the process as he sees them. This takes just a couple of minutes. Then he goes at much greater length into a specific example of him going through this process. Serge Prengel has been exploring creative approaches to mindfulness: how to live with an embodied sense of meaning and purpose.

Transcript

Today,

I will describe thinking as a mindful,

Contemplative process.

I will first describe the three stages of the process as I see them.

This will be just a few minutes.

Then I will take you at much greater length into a specific example of me going through this process.

I see this process as having three stages.

First there is the pause itself,

The interruption,

The break.

Any shifting from mindless to mindful requires pausing.

Now unlike when you pause a video or an audio recording,

It's not stopping that's neutral where everything starts back the same way it was.

Something occurs to us human being when we're in the middle of an active pause.

What happens is stage two.

We no longer have that autopilot.

So we're a bit lost.

We don't know where we are.

It's something very similar to what happens when you're in a car,

You follow your GPS and you veer off the main road.

Suddenly your GPS doesn't know where it is and it takes a moment to recompute.

When we're able to stay with this instead of just trying to immediately go back to the old route,

Insight comes and that's the third stage.

That insight comes with a sense of release,

A sense of relief,

A sense of reprieve from the tension,

A sense of something new opening up.

Now that may be a little abstract so I'm going to take you through a personal example.

It is early morning and I am walking in the woods.

It is pleasant.

After a while I start noticing how much I am lost in my thoughts to the point of only paying peripheral attention to what's around me.

It occurs to me that it's a pity that I'm not taking more advantage of being in such a good moment.

That is the beginning of stage one,

The pause without which it is impossible to notice that we're in default mode.

So what is happening now?

I have some curiosity about what it would be like to not be lost in thoughts.

That's stage two where I start exploring that.

What happens is I get few glimpses of not being lost in my thoughts,

Of being able to notice more what's outside but time and again I get pulled back into my thoughts.

As part of this train of thought it occurs to me maybe I'm failing in what I had attempted to do.

I'm not able to get out of my thoughts.

No sooner do I hear myself thinking that,

That comes an aha moment.

So stage three that we were talking about and that insight is well maybe trying hard is not going to work but I might approach it differently.

I stay with that and the aha continues.

What if I try to understand a little bit more what is keeping me into these thoughts?

All of this as I continue walking and so there are moments of looking around,

Of feeling the air,

Of hearing the birds and there are moments of being pulled again into the thoughts.

What you're hearing here is just the thoughts.

Imagine that it all comes interspersed with moments of not being in the thoughts.

And all along that idea of paying attention to what is at the source of this inner distraction comes back in my mind.

At some point I notice that as I walk there is a different quality between when I am very much lost in my thoughts where all the energy seems to be pulled upwards and it's as if I'm hovering on the ground and moments where I am more consciously having a sense of the foot touching the ground and of some heaviness in a good way.

Not heavy in the sense of tired but heaviness in the sense of having more substance instead of just being pulled upward into the realm of thoughts.

I realize that this is a continuation of that earlier insight where I had realized I have to do it differently.

Then consciously I noticed that quality of energy.

And what's happening now is both an insight,

Paying attention to the energy of walking,

But also a phase one,

Pause,

Stop in my track,

Bringing a new focus for my curiosity.

And so with that in mind comes stage two.

That pondering,

That exploring,

That recalculating at a gut level how my whole organism is responding to that new perspective.

And so now I notice that I'm not so much going into thoughts as I am putting my mindful attention into sensing,

Into my body and my energy.

And what helps taking me away from just the thoughts is that my curiosity has been engaged because there is now something to be more focused on,

Pay attention to that sense of body energy.

My energy is not coming from worry.

If anything it's from a good place.

It's a lot of stimulating ideas that open up new possibilities.

I'm excited about them and it's hard to let go of them because I want to go where the excitement and the opening is.

There is that.

And there is also something about energy that comes from.

.

.

I sense something in my stomach.

I had a very nice dinner last night.

It's still very early morning.

And there's probably some energy that has nothing to do with ideas and is simply of having a lot of food.

So now comes that aha,

That kind of release,

That stage three,

That insight.

I have more of a handle on where that energy is coming from.

And so I'm more accepting of it.

I don't have to fight it.

It's totally legitimate that I would be excited about stuff and maybe also having all that food related energy in my body.

Now I am continuing my walk with a sense of curiosity about what it's going to be like to find a way to accept that a lot of my energy is going to be going out in thoughts.

Now I'm going to be able to balance that with also being more in the moment,

Paying attention to the birds,

Paying attention to the morning light among the trees,

The moss on some trunks,

The dead leaves,

Everything that is around me.

And I walk.

And as I walk,

I notice that I am paying attention to what's around me.

There is a tree with some moss at the bottom and light coming just on the side.

My eye is drawn to it.

It occurs to me that by thinking about what it was to look at,

I have a little bit more of a focus.

My attention is primed to pay more attention to those things as well as to some things I hadn't thought about earlier,

Like that crinkling of the path under my foot.

Here again,

This noticing has been happening without making an effort to think about it.

I am a bit curious about what is happening with the energy and with the thoughts.

I just notice the question.

I'm not trying to answer it by either thinking about it or trying to tense up into finding an answer,

But just kind of thinking of it as an opening.

And so that's very much like stage one,

Pausing and getting into that road without knowing where it goes and letting that process percolate inside.

Stage two has that quality of not consciously processing,

Not efforting,

Not making it happen,

But letting it happen.

As I walk,

It occurs to me that there is no longer that very strong opposition between being present in my walking and in my surroundings versus being drawn into thoughts.

I still have moments of having thoughts and I'm also looking around or paying attention to the experience.

There is not a sense of opposition between both,

But a sense of integration,

A sense of flow.

There's one,

There's the other,

And there is kind of an intertwining of both.

And so this aha moment,

This stage three,

Is not just a release,

But very much a sense of satisfaction.

I keep walking with that sense of satisfaction,

Which at some point turns into curiosity.

And so again,

Coming from that aha moment and that energy of release or satisfaction comes a new possible pause.

A stage one,

And this time there's a curiosity about what it is that might have been helping me shift to that more integrated state.

So now it's stage two that exploring the unknown,

Exploring not in a thinking way or a forced way,

But simply knowing that the question is there somewhere and allowing it to process itself,

Allowing my whole organism to process it unconsciously.

I look at the path,

The gently winding shape of the path.

I look at the trees having a little bit more light on them because it's a little bit later in the morning.

As I'm looking around,

This processing is occurring.

So I'm aware that there is probably something going on.

It's not in contradiction with my experiencing the pleasure of walking in the woods and of being more present in my walk in the woods.

As I walk,

A sense of aha that's forming.

Really,

Literally the sense of aha itself as opposed to the insight.

I first have the sense that there is something,

That there is some kind of a response from inside,

But I have no idea yet what that response is.

So I stay with it.

And of course it's much easier now that I've been into this process for a while.

I have that rhythm of curiosity,

Gentleness,

Allowing that's really present in my body.

It has that quality of curiosity,

But in a very gentle way.

Little by little,

As something that might be appearing more and more clearly as the fog dissolves around it,

I have more of a sense into what it is that that insight is.

And at first it's difficult to put words into it.

It's kind of a broad sense of it.

And little by little some words come about.

It's something about having become more conscious that there was energy there and that energy needed to be paid attention to.

And that as I paid attention to it,

It needed less to be so obtrusive.

And there's something that feels right about it.

It's not necessarily totally clear.

I'm curious about whether there can be a little bit more clarity.

So that curiosity is kind of introducing another micro stage one.

I stay with it as I walk,

Which is kind of continuing a stage two,

Being in the inquiry.

And now,

Aha,

A question comes up.

So when I say not paying attention,

Was I not paying attention to these thoughts and this energy when I was lost in them?

It seems I was really very much in them.

You have to keep remembering that what you're hearing here is just the process of words.

It's all happening as I am walking.

A large part of the time is in just enjoying the walking,

In looking around,

In being into that experience.

The thoughts come in as a periphery,

And there is this rhythm of pause,

Inquiry,

Insight and release.

It is coming as if superimposed on the visual of being in the woods.

If it was a video,

The whole screen would be about the woods,

And the soundtrack would be the birds or the crinkling.

But the thoughts would be just like a subtitle at the bottom.

But it's not the major part of my awareness.

So it's kind of a side process.

It's happening while something else is happening that is engaging my attention.

And so that question to myself about was I not paying attention to thoughts as I was involved in them,

Which seems to contradict my other insight.

It's not about trying to answer this question logically,

But noticing that these are two perspectives,

Two different angles on the situation,

And that I am not trying to resolve them as much as living with them while I continue living my life,

Which is at this moment walking in the woods.

And so while I'm walking,

That inquiry below the surface is continuing,

And at some point that aha,

That release,

That comes without that clarity of the contours of what the answer is.

But first that sense that something is kind of an answer,

And then little by little that answer becomes more defined.

It's something about the fact that when I was lost in my thoughts,

I was so lost in my thoughts that I was lost to myself.

I was as if completely drowned into these thoughts.

All these metaphors come up,

That sense of when you're inside the forest,

You cannot see the forest as you only see the trees,

Or the idea that thinking inside the box,

That if I'm so much inside the box,

I cannot see the outside.

Little by little,

Something comes up.

I was not really conscious of that energy because I was lost in it.

And it took realizing there's more to me than that energy,

Or than these thoughts,

For me to be able to actually see them,

Because as the metaphor goes,

You cannot see the forest if you only see the trees because you're in the midst of them.

There's a sense of pleasure about having had this insight.

And now as I am walking,

I notice that there is a quality of happiness in the way I look around.

Of course,

It makes sense,

Thinking is not just a cognitive process.

It's relying a lot on these inside implicit bottom-up processes.

What I've done there is essentially find a way to get out of my own way in order to allow these natural processes to keep going.

I have been trying to observe them as opposed to micromanage them.

And there is this profound sense of satisfaction when it works,

To notice that there is something inside that is coming up with all that.

There is something very scary about going into the unknown,

But conversely,

It is so gratifying,

Having gone there,

To see that there is something inside that is very alive and that can come up to the surface when you allow it.

And now,

As I talk,

I hope that you can hear in the recording the sound of the little stones crinkling under my feet,

That you might hear the birds.

I hope you can imagine the woods in the relatively early morning light on a beautiful summer day.

A sense of all of this happening in this context.

This is not thinking in isolation.

The strain of thought happens in the midst of all of this.

The time and place are as much part of the process as the inner process that I described.

And that's the experience that I'm happy to be sharing with you now.