This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Friendliness with Thinking; Befriending Thinking. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ines Freedman at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
So, welcome again. Welcome, all of you. I’m happy to be back with you again, sharing the dharma with all of you. It just warms my heart to see many familiar names over here on the chat and also just being aware of how far and wide this online sangha extends. It’s very moving to me.
The focus this week will be on the various aspects of mindful thinking. Before we begin the meditation, I want to share a few thoughts about thinking. Most of us like feeling calm and not having a lot of thoughts running around the mind. And because of that, it’s easy to judge thinking in meditation as being undesirable. But we all think. It’s important not to place thinking outside of the meditation process.
What we want to do is encourage thoughts that are helpful to us and discourage thoughts that are harmful to us. Thinking can be a wonderful tool in meditation. We use thoughts to bring us back when we’re distracted, to remind us to relax the body when we’re tense, to encourage ourselves to recognize the hindrances when they arise. We might use thoughts to guide ourselves to look deeper, to explore, to investigate, or just encourage ourselves to persevere.
But thinking, like many tools, can also be used unskillfully, such as habitually judging ourselves and others, getting lost in regrets, in useless planning, in worry, in rehearsing, or judging, or indulging in fantasies while meditating. But we can let thoughts be. We don’t need to get rid of them. We just don’t need to pick them up and get lost in them. When we’re mindful of them, friendly with them, we can let them come and go. So let’s sit.
So take a comfortable but alert posture and gently close your eyes.
Taking a few deep breaths. And with each exhale, settling into the body, relaxing any obvious tension or holding.
Allowing the breath to return to normal. You might get a global sense of the body, allowing the attention to meander freely throughout the body, relaxing any obvious tensions.
And staying close to the body, intimate with the body sensations, you can begin to notice the movements of the breath, allowing your attention to rest on the breath.
Settling into the rhythm of the breath, however it is. Resting in this body, in this breath.
You might consider the mind as having a foreground and a background. Placing the breath, the body, in the foreground. As long as thoughts remain in the background, we can let them be there. They’re not a problem.
Staying intimate with the body, breathing in and out, we can allow everything else to be in the background. There’s room for everything. Nothing needs to be pushed away.
We can be like a mountain, rooted in this body, still, strong, here. The mind might wander away, but you can easily return and feel yourself here, rooted in this body in the present.
And when thoughts arise, they’re just like clouds floating past the mountain. The mountain doesn’t chase them. It doesn’t judge them. It doesn’t try to hold on to them.
Thoughts can come in words, in fragments of sentences, even whole sentences, in images, stories, or even just knowing. However thoughts are, be alert to any strong pull or compulsion that comes from them.
If the thinking becomes prominent and it’s in the foreground, we can bring mindfulness to it. A kind curiosity, an affectionate curiosity.
How does it feel to be thinking? What’s the tone of our inner voice? Is it relaxed? Is it harsh? Gentle? If the tone is not friendly in any way, see if you can encourage a kinder attitude.
How does it feel in the body to be thinking? Do we feel it anywhere in particular? If there’s a lot of thinking, sometimes we might feel like bees are buzzing in our heads. Is there a location that seems to generate it? Is there extra tension associated with thinking? Can we relax into it?
And if thoughts are no longer prominent, just allow them to fade away.
And if thoughts are very charged, is there an emotion underneath? Some form of aversion or anger or fear or wanting or desire? If so, you might shift the attention to see how those feel in the body. We can come out of the story and into the body.
But if nothing is prominent, you can allow the awareness to rest in the body, on the breath, with an attitude of friendliness, simply allowing any thoughts to come and go.
If the mind has drifted, gently bring it back to the present moment, to this breath, to this body, to home.
My first several years of meditation practice, even though I understood the basic teachings of mindfulness—I’d even sat a few retreats—it took me several years before I began to understand the importance of being mindful of thinking. There’s a quote that paraphrases and simplifies one of the Buddhist teachings: “With our thoughts, we create the world.” And all of us have experienced both wonderful worlds in our minds, and we’ve all had very painful worlds in our minds, each one generated by our thoughts.
And so even though I knew better, I had a really strong bias that meditation meant not thinking. I could relate to the breath. Emotions seemed very rich, even mind states and moods, but thinking seemed inferior to me. But as my practice developed, I began to realize, “Wait a second, thinking is everywhere in my life.” It just permeates every day of my life, and this was really a natural human activity. And we want to know life as it is, not as we want it to be. And I began to learn to respect and eventually to appreciate thinking in a very different way.
But the first thing we need to do to befriend our thinking is to get to know it, to really get close to it, not reject it. You don’t get to know anything you reject. So the kinds of thinking we have can vary very, very widely, from the more extensive thinking we use in daily life to the subtle thinking that might arise in the calm mind in meditation. I’ll start out with the grosser, more coarser thinking.
In daily life, there are two kinds of thinking that can easily dominate the mind, and that’s discursive thinking and focused thinking. Now, discursive thinking is a diffuse thinking without purpose, when the mind just jumps from one thing to another. It might seem to meander gently or just jump radically. It’s a very common kind of thinking in daily life, which also shows up in meditation practice. We often refer to it as the monkey mind, where the monkey just jumps from one branch to another, one thought leaping to another, and often ending up miles away from where we started.
Focus thinking, on the other hand, is purposely focusing on a specific problem, a task, or an idea. We use focused thinking in paying attention to the breath or directing the body, directing muscles to relax in a systematic way. We’re focusing on it. In daily life, we might be solving a problem, decision-making, analyzing something, studying, learning anything. For instance, we might think, “Should I sign up for a particular class?” “Should I go on this trip?” Or we might be considering dharma ideas, “You know, what does the Buddha say about karma?” Or maybe we just figure out how to do something, “You know, how do I fix my car?”
But both discursive and focused thinking can be done in a wholesome or helpful way, or in an unhelpful way. With discursive thinking, we can spend quite a bit of time dwelling on what’s wrong with our lives, with ourselves, with the world, with other people, allowing the mind to jump from one thing to another, compulsively worrying or needless planning, rehearsing, judging. Sometimes we call this type of unhelpful discursive thought rumination, kind of a repetitive, prolonged negative thinking about ourselves or feelings, past experiences that were upsetting, over and over again, trying to solve something that can’t be solved by thinking. We can repeat a particular theme in frequent rumination year after year.
Rumination tends to add to our suffering. It adds to negative moods. It makes us less effective in our lives, and it doesn’t resolve by ruminating. But discursive thought can also be quite wholesome. It can let the mind meander in a relaxed, enjoyable way, you know, maybe daydreaming. It can be an easy subconscious mode that can foster creativity and actually helps integrate our thinking. Many of us have had the experience of trying to solve a problem, you know, using our focused thought and getting stuck, just stuck, and going for a walk and letting the mind just meander in a relaxed way. And when we’re returning from the walk, the solution shows up easily. So it’s this subconscious mode that where the mind’s at ease.
And we can do the same thing with focused thinking. We can do it in a way that’s relaxed and at ease, or doing it in a way that’s quite tense. For instance, I used to write short stories, and it was something I did that was very relaxed and enjoyable. I’d find myself wrapped with interest, you know, many times with a smile on my face. But it took me years of mindfulness practice to be able to do my taxes with a relaxed body and even an occasional smile.
In meditation, discursive thinking is usually not helpful. So we train the mind to prioritize the body sensations over the countless stories the monkey mind can generate. Discursive thinking in meditation can be very, very seductive. Maybe some of you had a little bit of that today, I don’t know. It can be a form of entertainment. You know, some of the fantasies we go to can be very, very enjoyable. Gosh, I’ve written books in the middle of a retreat sometimes, you know, got so seduced by a good story. But we can also get just as easily distracted with unpleasant versions of discursive thinking, with ruminating about worries about our lives, fears of the future, regrets of the past.
So the idea isn’t to eliminate these kind of coarser types of thoughts, but to do them in a wholesome way, in a wholesome mental environment. Another kind of thinking that occurs in both daily life and meditation is what can be called functional or practical thinking, or I like to call it present moment thinking. In daily life, for instance, let’s say we’re cooking dinner. The thought obviously enters, “Well, let’s see, what do I do next? I need a lemon next. I need to stir the vegetables. I need to set the timer.” So whether or not those thoughts are wholesome depends on the mood of the mind, depends on the environment of the mind. We might be cooking in a rush and be very tense and worried about time. “Where’s that lemon? Oh, I want to stir.” You know, it can be a very different quality to these thoughts. Or we can be very, very relaxed, enjoying the process, enjoying the smell of the lemon, stirring those beautiful-looking vegetables, appreciating the fact that we have a timer to set.
Now, in meditation, functional thinking might look like, “Oh, my knee hurts. I’ll shift my attention to it, pay more careful attention.” Or maybe, “My shoulders are above my ears. I’ll relax them.” Some of us have a narrator that lives in the background. It comments on the moment: “Oh, that was a smooth breath. What’s a little bit warm now?” This functional thinking about the present moment can also be wholesome, or it can trigger unhelpful reactions, again, depending on the environment of the mind. In a tense mind, we might get reactive to the knee pain instead of exploring it with a curiosity, an affectionate curiosity. “What is this? What’s this pain like?” Or we might add judgment if our breath isn’t to our liking. “That was, that breath was way too short, and it was a little rough, and it should be different.” So this present moment thinking can be wholesome or unwholesome.
And the subtler form of thinking that occurs in meditation and in daily life is the knowing and recognition that’s part of the realm of insight practice, part of Vipassanā.1 One of the principles of mindfulness or Vipassanā practice is that we shift the attention from focusing on the content of our thoughts to the process of thinking, to the activity of thinking, to exploring what the experience of thinking is actually like for us. Knowing and recognition can be wordless, or it can be accompanied by brief thoughts. For instance, if you turn on the light in a dark room, suddenly you see all the objects of the room. You recognize them. You know they’re there. You don’t have to figure it out. “Oh, let’s see, what is that? Oh yeah, it’s got four legs. It’s a desk.” We don’t have to do that. It just shows up. We recognize it.
So if during meditation we recognize that we’re worrying about one thing after another, we can shift the attention to the body, to any tensions in the body. Maybe the forehead’s contracted, or the shoulders are tight, or the belly is contracted, or we’re holding our breath. So we know those sensations. Recognition is essential for seeing the hindrances to meditation, when aversion or desire take us away from the moment, when we’re caught in afflictive emotional patterns. Vipassanā means seeing clearly this simple recognition of what’s present, however it is, whatever it is.
When the discursive thinking is calmed, we enter the world of knowing and recognition. We might recognize the different objects of mind that show up and many, many physical sensations that come and go, the emotions that come and go, the attitudes that show up. And we can choose to shift from the stories of the discursive mind in favor of what we feel. In short, we drop the story and find the feeling.
So, later in the week, I’ll talk a little bit about reflective thinking, a deeper kind of thinking that can arise from the silence.
So as you go through your day today, you might periodically give some attention to how you’re thinking. You might notice if you’re thinking in a relaxed, easy way or if the thinking feels contracted or tense. And if it does, see if you can bring a kind attitude towards it, relaxing into it without rejecting it.
So thank you for listening. I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow. Thank you.
Vipassanā: A Pali word that means “insight” into the true nature of reality. It is a form of meditation that involves observing one’s own experiences to gain this insight. ↩