This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Thoughts in Focus ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good evening, welcome. It’s nice to see you all and to practice together. I wanted to talk a little bit about thoughts tonight. In other settings, I’ve been talking about thoughts, and I’d like to talk about it some more here because there’s this way, when we sit down and meditate like we just did for 30 minutes, there can often be this sense of, “Dang it, where are all these thoughts?” Or there can be a sense of, “Why is the mind so busy?” or “If only my thoughts were different or would go away.” Even if those expressions weren’t explicitly said in the mind, there can be a way in which we have a little resistance or aversive relationship to our thoughts, especially when we’re meditating. When we’re not meditating, we love our thoughts, but when we’re meditating, we often wish they would go away or be otherwise.
In this tradition, as many of you know, it’s not about getting rid of thoughts. We don’t have to do that. It turns out you can’t in the way that you think you might be able to, anyway. Really, what’s being pointed to is just noticing our relationship to thoughts. It’s more about noticing how we are engaging with them, how we’re being with them. Are we all in love with them and being entertained by them? Or when we wake up from being lost in thought, are we thinking, “Oh shoot, I’m supposed to be meditating. Oh, here we go again”?
When you’re lost in thought while you’re meditating, there’s no problem because you’re lost in thought. There’s nothing to be done, right? You just are lost in thought. You can’t make yourself not be lost in thought. I know at the beginning of my meditation practice, somehow I thought that I should be able to wake myself up, but it doesn’t work that way. You’ve probably noticed that we don’t have this way of forcing things to be the way that we want them to be. I say this a lot: if you could, you wouldn’t be here at a meditation center on a Monday night. You would be out having whatever thoughts you wanted, whenever you wanted.
So maybe it’s helpful to just briefly say, why is there often this incessant flow of thoughts while we’re sitting down to meditate? One reason might be that it can support a sense of feeling safe. That’s probably not what’s top of mind. Instead, what the mind is doing is it has this sense of, “I got to figure this out. I got to solve this problem. I got to get to the end of this. I got to make this be different in some kind of way.” There’s this way that we feel like, “Okay, well if I only figure this out, then everything will be fine, and then I’ll be safe and comfortable.” Maybe that’s another way of thinking about it. But there’s this way in which trying to figure things out or solve a problem really takes us away from what’s being experienced, from what’s here right now.
It turns out if we want to be safe, really, it’s just to be with what’s actually happening. The harm is going to be in this moment. I’m not saying that we don’t have to plan; sometimes we do have to plan. I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. But if there is a feeling of wanting to be safe or feeling unsafe, then it’s to be with our experience: what’s being heard, what’s being seen, what’s being experienced with the body. I’m rocking like this. Often, you need to feel your feet on the ground and feel like, “Oh, I’m actually here.”
Or maybe there’s just a lot of thinking because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. That’s what we’ve been conditioned to do. Certainly, we have an educational program that supports a lot of thinking, of course. And many of us have had professions, jobs that really supported a lot of thinking, and we got rewarded for our thinking. So, of course, we’ve been doing this our whole life; it’s not going to stop all of a sudden.
Here’s one that I had, which I didn’t even really notice in the beginning of my meditation practice. It was with a meditation teacher who kind of pointed this out to me, and that was I had this discomfort with just not knowing. I felt like I just had to know everything. I don’t know, I just felt better, and I couldn’t say exactly why. Some of you may know I’m trained as a researcher, so this suited me perfectly: just go figure things out. And I loved it when I was a research scientist. I’d just have a question, “Hmm, I wonder if it’s because of this,” and then go design experiments and do experiments. I just loved it. It kind of supported this idea that to know things is the most important thing.
It turns out we don’t have to know everything. We feel uncomfortable not knowing things, but there’s this way in which this wanting to know is just thoughts talking to other thoughts, talking to other thoughts, talking to other thoughts. So often, in some ways, it’s just a distraction. It’s a way in which we’re trying to feel more comfortable because we figure if I just knew everything, I would feel better. But often, what’s going to help us feel better is to align with the reality of the moment. But so often, the reality of the moment is exactly what we don’t want. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, they didn’t talk to me the right way, I should have done that thing. There are just so many ways in which it feels not quite right. So we often just kind of escape into thoughts and try to figure something out. That can be a certain type of entertainment, but I’ll talk a little bit more about entertainment in a moment. But also, it’s just a distraction from the present moment experience. If we’re okay with what’s happening, then there isn’t this push to leave this moment.
Thoughts, you know, we can’t control them, of course not. Anybody who’s ever had a song stuck in their mind, like an earworm, knows. “Oh, why is this song still happening here?” You didn’t make it there, you didn’t put it there, and you can’t make it just go away. It just shows up again and again, right? So these things, they just arise spontaneously, out of our control. That’s what thoughts do. That’s the nature of thoughts. It’s not something that we’re intentionally trying to do.
So maybe instead of this idea that we have to get rid of our thoughts, instead, can we have aspirations for different types of relationships we can have with our thoughts? Instead of trying to control them, can we have some different relationships? One relationship is, can we not feel harassed or harried by our thoughts? Is there a way that we can say, “Wow, that’s kind of annoying that that song is stuck in my head. Well, okay, that’s just the way it is,” and let it be okay, even though it’s not what we want. Because there’s this way of trying to make it be different, or that little bit of irritation that shows up, or trying to figure out why this song is in my head. That’s the way in which we’re fueling them, interacting with them. But then if we have this idea, “Okay, I don’t want to interact with them, so I’m not going to, so that they’ll go away,” there’s still that secret, “I’m trying to get them to go away, so I’m not going to think about them.” But it’s that trying to not think about them, trying to make them go away, that’s going to have them persist. So can we just have a relationship where we’re just not harassed or harried? Like, “Yeah, okay, this is what the mind is doing.” We don’t have to take it personally. We don’t have to make it a problem. We’re not making it happen. We’re not choosing to have these thoughts. And just allow them to be there, the best we can. I’ll talk a little bit more about how we can work with some particular thoughts.
There’s maybe another aspiration we can have with our thinking: can we discern helpful from unhelpful trains of thought? The Buddha talked about this: “Whatever one thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of the mind.” So with this recognition that we, in some ways, are kind of making these grooves in the mind with things that we think about a lot. Whatever we think about a lot just becomes easier and easier to think about. So if we can notice what’s helpful and what’s not helpful, if these grooves are going to be made, can we have some helpful grooves made as opposed to some unhelpful ones?
The Buddha talked about this; this was part of his path towards Awakening. He discovered or noticed, “Oh, there are some thoughts that are helpful and some that aren’t, some that lead to suffering, dukkha1, and some that don’t.” And then he talked about when he started to investigate, he kind of boiled it down to: thoughts of cruelty are not helpful, cause affliction and dukkha for myself, and probably leak out and cause it for others too. Thoughts of ill will, just this aversion and wanting to push away, turns out not to be helpful. And thoughts of sensual desire, just thinking about how you’re going to satisfy every desire you’ve ever had or something like this, also turns out not to be helpful.
So there’s this way in which when we can feel into, or maybe just logically notice, and follow some trains of thought, like, “Yeah, that’s not so helpful,” then some of the power behind them, some of the authority or some of the momentum behind them can start to lessen. So just to make this observation: is this leading to something that’s helpful or not? Is this helpful or not helpful? And helpful we can define as leading to more ease, leading to more peace, leading to more freedom.
I’ll talk a little bit about what to do with things that aren’t helpful if you find yourself stuck in something that’s really not helpful. I’ll talk about that at the end here. But something that I think is really fascinating is, here’s the Buddha, his teachings preserved in the Pali Canon thousands of years ago, here’s somebody who’s saying, “You know, all this thinking is tiring and it’s straining.” He was just maybe pointing out how if we really notice this, like always trying to figure things out or always trying to entertain ourselves or whatever it is, it turns out to be taxing. But we don’t notice it’s taxing unless we have a meditation practice where we experience some calmness and then stability, and then we can realize, “Oh yeah, this calmness compared to what my mind is usually doing is quite something.” This certainly has been my experience, and I think this is one way we could describe this whole path of practice: just starting to notice more and more subtle levels of agitation. We think, “Oh wow, this is fantastic,” and then with a little bit more meditation practice, we start to say, “Oh yeah, there was that little bit more agitation I didn’t notice. That’s even a little bit more quiet,” and a little bit more, and a little bit more. We could say this is the entire path of practice. So in this way, we could say subtle is significant. Seeing subtle agitation, the subtle way in which thinking is tiring, taxing, and straining, can be a support for us to not always be pursuing it.
Then maybe the third aspiration we might have for our relationship to our thoughts is, well, can we, recognizing that planning is really helpful and appropriate, we need to do it. We do need to solve problems. There are plenty of problems to solve, big problems, small problems, lots of them. We need thinking. So is there a way that we can learn to think well? To use thinking to actually solve problems, to help ourselves, to help others, to make the world a better place, to help us find more ease and freedom? This isn’t necessarily during meditation practice, but is there a way that we can learn to think well, as opposed to maybe just simply agreeing or disagreeing with what we hear in the media, social media, or mainstream media, or whatever it might be? Instead of just like, “Oh, I don’t like that, that’s terrible,” or “Oh yeah, this is good, this makes me feel good,” can we do something a little bit beyond that to solve problems? Can we think in a way that really leads to a place that is helpful, that leads to a place that has more freedom?
Thinking well, you can say, includes asking questions like, “What do I know about this? What do I not know about this? What is not being said here? What if I were to look at this from a different direction?” We could say that the Buddha did this as well as part of his Awakening process. He asked some questions, starting with, “Well, what is it that is the big problem?” He identified it as death. Death is the big problem. And he’s like, “Well, what causes death? Why is there death? What is leading to death?” He came up with an answer, but then he didn’t stop there. He came up with another question, “Well, then what leads to that? And why is this like that?” Thinking in this way and pondering and coming up with a way that pointed to direct experience as a key part of finding our freedom.
So can we use our thoughts, most likely not during meditation but at other times, in a way that asks questions and has a commitment to finding the answer, a commitment to solving the problem? Otherwise, we’ll just spin around and around and around. I’m sure all of us have done this, right? There can be this feeling of stuckness, like, “I can’t figure this out, I don’t know what to do.” But there’s a way in which we can’t find our way forward.
One way to help with thinking outside of meditation, when we really do want to use thoughts to solve a problem or to plan, it turns out it can be really helpful to use a pen and paper. Kind of this old-fashioned way, remember those? There’s something about when we write something down, then it doesn’t have to be held in the mind in the same way. And then we can write something else down, and then we can draw arrows or draw X’s or circle things. There’s a way in which we can get the stuff out of our mind and onto paper. It can be a really helpful way. I’m not saying this is the best way for everybody, but for some people, many people, it’s really helpful. We’ve gone to keyboards, and we can do this if you have a facility in doing this, but there’s a way in which a pen and paper kind of engages the hand, of course, and the feeling of the pen against the paper. But there’s something about drawing a line connecting things or crossing things out or making a bulleted list in the margin or something like this that can be really helpful. This is what I do to organize talks. And it’s fun for me to look back at the chicken scratch I have, and it’s all kinds of stuff, and I turn the page this way and write little things, and then I look at it and I’m not quite sure, and then I go to the keyboard and start to organize some of the stuff that’s on the paper.
So if we want to have this aspiration to use thoughts to think well, that is to really solve problems instead of just swimming around in them, ask questions, have that real commitment that you actually do want to solve it. There’s a way in which we can get lost just there. I don’t know how to explain this. Maybe you have had this experience where you want to solve something, but it’s also a difficult thing. So you want to solve it, and yet you also want to be a little bit distant from it so that you don’t feel the emotional discomfort. Things that are hard to solve are often difficult because they have some emotional content, some of our buttons are getting triggered, or something is, maybe an underlying emotion is trying to bubble up in some kind of way. So can we say, “Well, I’m going to try, I really want to solve this,” whether this is a big giant thing like, “How do I prepare for my vacation in two weeks?” or is it, “How do I have this difficult conversation with my co-worker who is always correcting me?” or “How do I tell my partner that they’re not doing their share of the housework again, but I want to make this not be confrontational?” What are some ways that I can do this so that I’m not falling into these old patterns and so that we don’t get into the same fight that we often get into, whatever it might be?
I did mention this idea of entertaining thoughts, so maybe I’m transitioning now to talk about meditation in particular. We might notice that some of the thoughts are just entertainment. Thinking about, “Well, let’s see, so you know that room, I really should put up some different window coverings because it doesn’t really match the furniture in there. Or maybe I should paint it a different color,” or whatever it might be. We might have some decorating ideas, or we might have some thoughts about sports. “Well, who should play? Are they going to put that person in the infield in the next game?” I’m saying this not really knowing baseball very well, but you know, there’s this way in which we kind of just think these types of things. It’s just a way of the mind entertaining itself.
And then we can just, if we find this happening, we could just maybe drop in a question, or maybe you could just even reflect on it right now: is there a fear of boredom? Does this seem like the absolute worst thing that could ever happen? How many quadrillion bazillion dollars are spent to make sure that nobody is ever bored? It’s quite something, right? Boredom, it’s not so bad. And it turns out if you have a mindfulness practice, you can never be bored again. You can just feel like, “Oh, this feels like boredom. What does boredom feel like?” A sense of impatience, some restlessness, maybe there’s irritation with whatever I think should be happening instead, or something like this. But there’s this way we kind of fall into thinking, which often isn’t helpful, just so that we won’t be bored. But instead, if we notice this little thing that we just want to get our phones out, can we not take our phones out and just be with the experience of boredom and just get to know it? It turns out to be quite interesting, which is fascinating, that boredom is interesting. So just an invitation.
Here are some things to work with in meditation if you find that there’s a compulsive or obsessive quality to your thoughts. These are words that don’t sound so great, but there can be a way in which there’s a lot of energy behind thoughts and some spinning, feeling like they have a lot of energy behind them. So here are some things to do.
One, just drop in the question: “What will my next thought be?” Ask yourself now, what will your next thought be? This can be fascinating, to kind of be looking and waiting for a thought, and you notice there’s a small little gap while you’re waiting for the next thought. The next thought is most likely, “Oh, this is silly,” or “Wait, am I doing this right?” or something really fast that we often aren’t noticing as a thought. But just dropping in, “What will my next thought be?” does two things: it shifts our relationship—we’re no longer lost in the thoughts, we are now the observer—and it disrupts the momentum of whatever was happening. These two things can be really powerful, and you can just again and again drop in this question. There’s something about when I practice with this, that sitting back and looking at thoughts kind of connects to just this vastness, this openness, this space. Like there are no problems, they’re just hanging out, waiting to see what the next thought is going to be. There’s something that can be really beautiful about this because it makes it easier and easier for this vast spaciousness to open up.
So that’s one thing to do if you find yourself in meditation, or I guess it doesn’t have to be in meditation, in daily life: “What will the next thought be?”
Sometimes it’s helpful if we find ourselves with a lot of thinking and a pressure behind thinking to remind ourselves, “Okay, these are just thoughts.” Like nothing out there in the external world is changing. We’re just thinking. Because there’s this way in which we tend to link our thoughts with what’s going to happen or might happen or will happen. If we can just say, “It’s just mental activity, it’s just what minds do,” we don’t have to take it personally, we don’t have to make it into a big problem. This is just what minds do. There’s a way that can help support a certain amount of relaxation and ease with this recognition. Because thoughts are actually, if you really look at them, are only pointing to thoughts, which are pointing to other thoughts, which are pointing to other thoughts. Right? There’s nothing out here that’s actually happening. It’s just thinking. And so there’s this way of noticing not only the insubstantiality of them but how they’re just happening inside here in this thought space. So that’s a second thing you can bring to mind.
A third thing: can you bring some curiosity to the experience? The experience of thinking might be a little bit hard, so maybe just experience whatever is happening: sounds, sights, pressure against the body, bodily sensations, feeling the clothes against the skin, these types of things. Just bring some of the energy towards other sense doors and kind of take out some of the energy that’s going towards thinking.
If you’re meditating and you feel like, “Oh wow, okay, this is not helpful and I’m really caught up in this,” it can be really helpful to just systematically do a body scan. Tune into the bodily experience on the head, on the eyes, from the mouth, the shoulders, upper back, lower back, chest, belly, hips, legs, and feet. Just a few seconds in each spot, just checking in. This gives the mind something to do, which can be really helpful and kind of take up some of the bandwidth. It also starts to help you get more embodied, and when you’re more embodied, thoughts are less spinning around and going elsewhere. So a body scan can be really helpful, just intentionally doing this systematically through the body.
Then, if there’s a lot of energy around thoughts when you’re meditating, you could do some metta2 practice. Because metta practice is using thoughts, so it’s also kind of using some of the mental bandwidth, but it’s using the thoughts in a way that’s positive and supportive. For those of you who might already have a metta practice, it’s bringing to mind somebody who’s dear to you and you might send some goodwill: “May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you live with ease.” Just these four phrases, and we could just repeat them. This can really just change the inner ecology of the mind, this sincere wish for somebody that we care about, somebody that’s dear to us. To be wishing them well can really make a difference. And there’s something also about the rhythm of just saying these phrases over and over that just naturally starts to settle things down, bring some stability and quiet to the mind so that the mind isn’t just thrashing about.
So I offered quite a few things here. If you find yourself really lost in thinking, ask yourself, “What will the next thought be?” I love this one. I think this is fun. It can be surprising and it can be a little bit of a shock to the mind in some kind of way. It’s not used to being asked what’s going to be next. Recognize it’s just mental activity, they’re just thoughts that are happening, and there’s a way that noticing that can bring a little more relaxation and remove a little bit of the urgency that might be there. Bring some curiosity to the experience, like to other sense doors: what’s being heard, what’s being seen, what’s being felt in the body. Do a body scan, just systematically go through the body. Or do metta practice. These are some of the ways in which we can work with thinking, not because we have to get rid of thinking, but just so that we can have a relationship with our thoughts that really supports some well-being and that can support some greater peace and ease and freedom. Because when we start to pay attention, we start to notice we actually are wrestling with our thoughts or we’re lost in thoughts. It’s either one or the other usually. But they’re just useful companions. Can we have them be useful companions instead of being harassed or harried by them?
And maybe I’ll close with this short poem. It’s by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer. It’s called “Could I Say It and Really Mean It.”
a pomegranate a tennis racket a wide-open lily basically anything can act as a trojan horse to get those old ideas close to me and dang i’m confronted again with all the ways i’ve let down the world and all the ways i could have i should have done better how many times have i tried to escape these thoughts i’ve run mountain races and written thousands of pages and wept a spring flood and confessed and bled and still they find a way back to me sometimes they come knives drawn but more often they come wearing fluffy robes and slippers making themselves at home i cornered one today looked it right in the eye what i said what do i have to do it shook its head and said all i ever wanted was for you to say thank you
This different relationship to our thoughts. So I’ll end there and open it up to see if there are some comments or questions. Thank you.
Questioner 1: We’d like you to use the microphone so other people can hear. You mentioned you have a background in research. Can you tell us more about that if you’re comfortable sharing?
Diana Clark: I’ll just say I have a PhD in Biochemistry and I used to do cancer research in a laboratory, white lab coat, the whole nine yards. Cool, thanks.
Questioner 2: Hello, hi. I was just wondering if you have any advice in terms of people who struggle with chronic health issues and, whilst meditating and doing the body scans, how do you kind of not focus on the painful parts of that?
Diana Clark: There’s a lot I could say. I’ll say briefly two things. One is it’s really helpful if you can to not use the word that rhymes with the word “rain” and starts with the letter “p.” Instead, to really think about, is this a stabbing or is it a throbbing? Is it hot or is it cold? Is it moving? Is it dynamic or is it in one place? Is it diffuse or is it really pinpointed? That is to kind of zoom in and maybe describe the experience, because it’s there, it’s already there. That’s one way, because there’s one way in which we slap a label on it that then we have a relationship with this label. “Oh my gosh, this is further evidence of my imminent demise.” You know, there’s this way in which, rightly so, appropriately, we have this when there’s pain. It just sets off a whole cascade of thinking, thoughts about doctors and emergencies and what’s wrong with us and all these types of things. So instead, to maybe zoom in is one way.
Another way is to zoom out. And that is, I’ll just say briefly, to notice, maybe not during a body scan if we find ourselves getting sucked into, “Oh my gosh, this whatever the discomfort might be,” can you turn your attention to other sense doors? Sounds is a really good one because there’s a way, and just, “I’m just going to open up and listen to sounds,” and just let sounds arise. You don’t have to figure them out, you don’t have to know anything about them. Because opening up to sounds is a way that often brings a little bit more spaciousness.
And then maybe the third thing I’ll say is, is there a neutral or a pleasant experience in the body? And as best you can, can you rest the attention there? That’s often not easy when there’s discomfort; it really is compelling and calling for us. So I’m not saying that all these will be fast and easy, but they definitely are ways forward. Is that helpful? Thank you.
Questioner 3: I feel like when I am struggling with thoughts and I try different things like you’re suggesting in meditation, like doing the body scan or doing a metta practice, then I start judging myself that I’m jumping around to different strategies. And then I think that’s like wrong or something. Do you know what I mean? And how long do I do the metta practice? Should I just do that the entire time? Or can I then do a self-compassion, “May I be happy, may I be…” and then I start, “Well, I’ll think about her.” So then I’m like, then I just do that, and then I don’t know, then I judge that I’m having monkey mind as far as my strategies.
Diana Clark: Yeah, no, this makes perfect sense. You’re highlighting we could just spend the whole time doing like two minutes of this practice, two minutes of that practice, then jumping all around and this kind of stuff.
Questioner 3: And then one more thing is that I’ve heard like you pick one thing to focus on, like your breath, or feeling the breath in the nose or the stomach or the abdomen, I mean. And then like I’ll switch and be like, “No, I want to, I’m feeling it here. No, now I’m feeling it there.” And then again, it feels like I’m doing something wrong or something.
Diana Clark: Yeah, this is such a great comment. Thank you. There’s a few things I can say about here. So often, if we start our meditation practice with wanting to settle the mind and calm the mind, it’s really helpful to choose one thing and to stay on it, just as you’ve heard. But if you find that you just can’t do that, I think it’s really helpful to switch. Because concentration practice is just stay, stay, stay, no matter what. But here I’m not talking about concentration practice, I’m talking more about mindfulness practice, where we’re being with what’s arising. And if what’s arising is, “I just can’t settle, the mind is all over the place,” then we just work with what’s arising, a mind that’s doing something rather, and then do a body scan as best we can.
And I do agree, it’s probably best to, if we switch… I’m using this word “best” loosely. Maybe here’s what’s the most useful. Instead of saying rules, we could set a North Star. Where does it feel easeful? Where does it feel easeful? And yeah, maybe that’s the direction. So if you feel like you’re doing loving-kindness practice but you’re getting wrapped around the axle trying to decide who to do it to and all these kinds of things, which happens, right? If there’s this pressure of speech, a pressure of thinking, then there’s chances are there’s something underneath, some emotional thing that we don’t want to see. And that emotion is still there, so it’s going to pop up as thoughts or with the busyness with the mindfulness, or it’s going to pop up as a body scan jumping all around or something like this. So I didn’t say this, I could give a whole another talk on thoughts, but maybe you could drop in, “Is there an emotion that’s fueling this?”
So I just said a lot of things. One is maybe to choose a North Star: what helps with ease? If you find that you’re just doing this and then doing this and then doing this, maybe drop in the question, “Is there an emotion under here that’s fueling this agitation that’s showing up in all these different ways?”
Questioner 3: Thank you so much.
Diana Clark: You’re welcome. Okay, so we’re at 8:30 here. So thank you all for your kind attention. And you’re welcome to come up here and talk to me if you’d like. And I wish you a wonderful rest of the evening. Thank you.