REPLAY: Mindfulness of Thoughts

First published on February 6th, 2023, this is the final talk in a replay of a series of four mindfulness talks by Don Thompson.  We hope you enjoy.

Embark on an enlightening expedition through the winding paths of your own mind as we uncover the elusive nature of thoughts. Grasp the profound realization that our thoughts are mere suggestions, not the concrete facts we often mistake them for. Through our conversation, you'll learn to navigate the intricate dance between your mental narratives and reality. We draw wisdom from mindfulness experts Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach to heighten your awareness through three transformative levels, ultimately leading you to the liberating discovery of the observer within. This journey will not only alter how you perceive your thoughts but also promises to reshape your inner dialogue for a more peaceful existence.

As we anchor our exploration in the steady rhythm of our breath, I guide you through a meditation practice designed to help you become an impartial spectator of your own thoughts. Discover the art of acknowledging your mental chatter without entanglement, and find solace in the gentle return to your breathing. By the close of our session, you'll be equipped with the tools to maintain this mindful equilibrium, influencing not only your own well-being but also casting a serene ripple across the lives of others. Join us as we celebrate the culmination of our four-class mindfulness series, looking forward to future discussions where we continue to foster the wisdom of intentional presence.

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Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi everyone, welcome to our fourth and final talk in our series of talks on mindfulness meditation, and this particular talk is going to be about the mindfulness of thoughts. I find this topic to be quite fascinating and if I convey to you what I want to, I believe it can be quite a revelation to you related to the mindfulness of thoughts, particularly related to the conceptual nature of thoughts. Just to go over an outline briefly first I'll talk about the conceptual nature of thoughts and how thoughts and concepts are not reality, even though oftentimes we are told they are reality. They are not in fact reality per this line of thinking. Then we'll get into perspective and how thoughts reflect our own unique perspective. We'll talk about aspects of thoughts and how thoughts can be judgmental, but they are natural, even the bizarre ones. And after that we'll get into levels of awareness and talk about the three levels of awareness of thoughts and mind, and then we'll end up with a guided meditation at the end. There's a little cartoon here that has Alex looking sort of forlorn and the woman perhaps is spous and saying Alex, you're getting more aloof by the day. You've been binge meditating again, haven't you? Alex doesn't look too happy. So let's jump right into the conceptual nature of thoughts. I find this rather fascinating and to me it's been a revelation. To me it was really a sort of a quantum leap in my own meditation and my own process with mindfulness.

Speaker 1: 2:21

The bottom line is we often believe that thoughts are reality and what they really are is a framework and conceptual framework to help us cope with reality. They allow us to create frameworks really that help us to cope and to help us to. You know, they provide sort of a navigational map, you might say, to reality. Really, what thoughts are is they reflect different perspectives and really perspective will change everything, will change the conceptual framework you're using or will refer to. So I've got a cartoon here with a turtle turned upside down on the ground and he believes he's flying, based on his perspective, but of course he's not flying, it's just his perspective. So the idea here is that you know, we each have our own perspective, but there is no really true perspective. There's no absolute true perspective. Each one of us has a perspective, but none of them are absolute. They're just reflections of different perspectives, like the turtle lying on his back and thinking he's flying.

Speaker 1: 3:38

Another thing to realize is that thoughts are often judgmental in nature. The brunt of criticism of our judgmental thoughts is often directed at ourselves. Thoughts can also be repetitive. You'll find that, you know, if you do some analysis on your thoughts, about 80% of them to 90% of them you could consider junk. Really. Thoughts are sort of nonsense thoughts, or repetitive thoughts, or thoughts are really aren't very, you know, helpful, but everybody has them. So you know not to worry. I mean, everybody has a lot of thoughts and sometimes the thoughts can be bizarre. It's okay, I mean that's the way it is. We can observe all thoughts like clouds in the sky. If we take a step back mindfully, we can hold our thoughts lightly and not go to war with them or go to war with ourselves regarding our thoughts. So judgmental, if you're going to look at it from a definitional point of view, means having or displaying an excessively critical point of view. Critical, disapproving, disparaging, negative these are all synonyms for judgmental from the dictionary. It's a nice quote from Dustin Hoffman. A good review from the critics is just a stay of execution. I think you know Dustin was commenting upon the critical nature of our own thinking process and the process of others that are criticizing us.

Speaker 1: 5:23

According to the Bhagavad Gita, for him or her who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends. But for one who has failed to do so, his or her mind will remain their greatest enemy. So the mind can be our friend from the standpoint of we can use the powers of the mind, the powers of the analytical aspect of the mind, to look at ourselves, to do a little bit of analytical investigation if necessary. And the thing I find interesting about thinking is that a lot of people you know, sometimes in the spiritual world, will disparage thinking. You know they'll think it's a bad thing or it's. You know we need to have more faith, we have to move away from the rational mind. But the rational mind can also be a key to our liberation, because the rational mind can reveal to ourselves if we use it. You know, in terms of analysis, we can use it to step back mindfully and look at the thought process itself.

Speaker 1: 6:33

And ironically, it's the analysis of the thoughts, by stepping back mindfully and looking at them, that allows us to see how they are conceptual. And I know that might sound a little heady and a little heavy, but it's actually true. I found it in my own experience. It's a real irony about thought and thinking Is, it allows you to, in a way, get beyond it. You know if you use it correctly. And that's really you know what we're trying to get out here in terms of mindfully meditating and resting in a state of presence, mindful presence the three levels of thought in mind, according to Jack Cornfield and Tara Brock, are that we notice the content of experience, we notice that thoughts are insubstantial and then we notice that we are a witness to everything. These are the three levels of awareness of thought in mind. So we really need to understand you know types of thoughts and know that our thoughts are not real, that they are really. You know conceptual frameworks, and then we can step back from it all and come to know the observer that is witnessing the thoughts.

Speaker 1: 7:52

I'd like to talk a little bit about. You know the Bible, because I think the Bible has a good metaphor for this process. Initially, in the creation myth you have in Genesis, you have the God created everything from the void and there was the light, and then in the garden, there was the human beings. So the human beings really were, you know, formed using conceptual frameworks. They were. They started to name things in the garden. They started to name the lion, the lion, the lamb, the lamb. And once they got into the naming of things, once they started to label things, it's really to me it's a metaphor for entering into a dualistic state of mind and you could say it's sort of a fall, you could say, I guess, from a non-dual state of mind to a dualistic state of mind. So the metaphor of the creation myth is a metaphor for that process is, I think, quite strong actually. So languages introduced to human beings, they begin to label things, they begin to conceptualize things and they begin to think that the word that they're, you know, conceptualizing about, you know, the lion or the lamb or whatever, is the thing itself. And that's really not the case. If we can step back mindfully, we can see that it's not the case. It's they're just ideas, concepts, perspectives.

Speaker 1: 9:25

I'd like to quote a little bit from Walt Whitman, and it's a beautiful poem called the Song of the Open Road. A foot in, light-hearted, I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose. That's a beautiful poem by Walt Whitman, really. You know, showing the fact that, as I've tried to allude to in this talk and other talks, is that we have an amazing amount of freedom through mindfulness and just through. You know, reflecting on our lives and our own ability to take a step back and look at things mindfully gives us a really kind of a liberation. And it can be a daunting liberation, it can be something that's a little bit. You know, we want to hang on to our concepts, we want to hang on to the way we think about things, and maybe we should in some cases. I'm not saying all of them are bad or anything like that at all. You know we want to have our friends and family and love people and believe in things and have faith in all of that good stuff. But I do believe that if we can take a step back mindfully and look at our thoughts, it also leads us to a place where we can find something else, and that something else is really what's in the moment. What's in the moment is a sense of presence. It really doesn't have anticipation for the future and it isn't, you know, ruminating over the past. It's just feeling and sensing and resting, you might say, in the present moment. And there is to me actually a clarity that comes out of that process. It's a clarity, not of a clarity of definition, but it's a clarity of mind that you would. It's almost like looking through a sheet of glass. When you look at through a sheet of glass, there's the clarity of the glass. It doesn't really have to do with anything related to thinking per se, you're just experiencing the clarity in front of you, the clarity of presence, you might say. And that can be, you know, quite a wonderful thing. You can actually feel a lot of compassion in that state of mind, you can feel a lot of love, you can feel a lot of empathy for other people. It seems, for me at least, to evoke that. And it evokes that because I feel compassionate for all of us. You know, because we get so caught up in our thinking process, we get so caught up in our emotions, we get so caught up in our lives and the stories we tell about ourselves that we, you know, sometimes just forget to look at the beauty that's in front of us. And I think that's what, you know, walt Whitman is reminding us. He's just saying here's the open road. I'm looking at it, I'm healthy, I'm free, the world is before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. It's a beautiful thing. He has the choice to go where he wants. We have the choice to go where we want.

Speaker 1: 12:45

And on that note, why don't we move into our guided meditation? I appreciate so much you being with me through these classes and hopefully you got something out of them, and I look forward to you know other talks in the future. And until then, namaste, so this will be our fourth and final meditation for our mindfulness meditation class. Thank you so much for going on this adventure with me. And now we're going to do a mindfulness meditation related to the mindfulness of thought, and what we're going to do is basically the same thing, or a similar exercise with the thoughts that we did with the emotions and with the bodily sensations and with the breath and with the rain practice. We're going to go through a similar exercise in terms of recognizing the thoughts, labeling them, whispering them perhaps, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1: 13:50

But before we get into that, I'd like to take a little bit of a look in terms of what our style of thought is, because the style of thought will vary from person to person. So what I'd like to do is to have you go ahead and count your thoughts and I'll go ahead and set a timer for a minute and we'll go ahead and count the thoughts that arise during that minute. Now, that thought can be a word, a sentence or even an image, and there are a variety of different ways that thoughts can arise. So whatever you naturally feel inclined to identify with as a thought, go ahead and count that. Consider it a thought. So let me go ahead and set the timer and we'll go ahead and go through that. So let's go ahead and start now. Music, music, music, music.

Speaker 1: 15:41

So now let's go ahead and reflect on the number of thoughts that we had. You might have had five thoughts, you might have had fifteen thoughts, you might have had twenty-five thoughts or more, and the idea here is not that less thoughts are necessarily better than more thoughts, because you might have had less thoughts, but they might have been longer thoughts. Maybe you had five thoughts that were longer thoughts than the person who had twenty-five very short thoughts. So the point is, this isn't really a compare and contrast with what's better or worse, but you just want to be able to recognize the style of thinking that you have. And again, you might be thinking predominantly in images, and that's the way some people think and that's the way it is. We just want to have some mindfulness behind this and be able to recognize what kinds of thoughts we have, because as we go through the process of mindfully looking at our thoughts, we really want to be able to recognize and understand what is the style of thought for me. So now we're going to go ahead and go into a guided meditation related to thoughts.

Speaker 1: 16:48

So please go ahead and get into a comfortable seated position Perhaps you already are. Just go ahead and feel free to close your eyes. Just feel the tension move out of your body, out of your neck and shoulders. Just feel all the tension leaving your body. It's just being removed. Just let it go.

Speaker 1: 17:27

So, as you're relaxing, I invite you to just notice your stream of thoughts, the continuum of thoughts in your mind. As your thoughts arise, you just want to gently name them, label them and perhaps even whisper what that thought is. Maybe the thought is a planning thought. Maybe the thought is of a person arriving tomorrow, or thought of getting to work on time. So these various thoughts, you can go ahead and label them, name them, whisper them and perhaps bring a loving presence to them, a sense of loving kindness to the thoughts. So let's go ahead and do that. Just bring a sense of loving presence to your thoughts, and let's just take a minute or so to go ahead and do that. So let's just take a minute or so to go ahead and do that. So let's just take a minute or so to go ahead and do that. So now, once we've gone through this exercise, you probably are noticing you are getting caught up in your thoughts. You're getting caught up in them and you're getting caught up in the storyline associated with your thoughts, and that's really important to notice. You want to know that that's happening, you want to be aware of it, you want to notice it.

Speaker 1: 20:16

Now, what I'd like to do next is to have us incorporate the breathing practice that we've done before, using the breath as an anchor, into our mindfulness of thoughts meditation. So you can go ahead and incorporate the breathing through your nose, through your mouth, through whatever feels comfortable for you. Go through that exercise of breathing and perhaps having your hands on your lap or on your thighs as an anchor, and you can go through the exercise of observing and witnessing the thoughts with a gentle, loving presence and just notice them. You can label them, you can name them, you can whisper them, and you can notice if you're getting caught up in that and if your mind is wandering. And if your mind starts to wander, just bring the thoughts back to your anchor, bring them back to the breath, bring them back to their hands on the thighs or the hands in the lap. Just go ahead and continue this exercise and do this for another minute or so.

Speaker 1: 23:01

Now, once you work with your thoughts like this for a while, using the breath and using an anchor either the breath or another chosen anchor in conjunction with this analysis, you will likely notice that your thoughts will dissolve like clouds in the sky, and, ideally, you'll notice that your thoughts are incredibly ephemeral. Thoughts are, in fact, I would say, much more ephemeral than emotions. Emotions can persist in your body, in your emotional body, for quite a while. Thoughts are very ephemeral, whether words or images or whatever, they just flash by. What's not ephemeral, though, are the storylines that thoughts get associated with.

Speaker 1: 24:01

You might be, you know, stringing together a narrative, so to speak, using words or using images, and this narrative is what you get caught up in. This is what the mind gets caught up in, this narrative, this storyline. So when you start getting caught up in this narrative or whatever it is that you're thinking about. Just realize it's natural and it's part of our daily lives and don't get angry with yourself. But what you want to do with mindfulness is to be aware of it, that this process exists, and become a witness to it. And then, once you become a witness to it, then just bring a loving, gentle, kind awareness to the process, particularly if the mental story is taking you into some uncomfortable place, particularly if the mental story is bringing you pain, pain and suffering. You don't want that. So you want to be aware of it, aware that the storyline is bringing you pain, to take a step back, to look at it mindfully and to bring a gentle, loving, kind awareness to it, to the process of that storytelling.

Speaker 1: 25:23

Ultimately, ideally, the thoughts will dissolve. The negative thoughts will dissolve Again. They'll dissolve just like clouds in the sky. So, because thoughts are so ephemeral, as we've noted, they really are not reality, as we talked about in the talk. They're really not what's real. They're just conceptual frameworks, storylines that we've come up with, narratives, you might say, to define who we are and what our lives are. But we don't necessarily need to identify with them all the time we can in a sense detach ourselves from them, become a witness to them, become an observer of these things, rather than getting so caught up in them. And that's really the idea of mindfulness, and that's what we want to strive for, because it allows us to be freer, allows us more choice, allows us to move more fluidly and freely in our lives without getting so caught up and triggered by negative emotions or thoughts or whatever. That's the idea.

Speaker 1: 26:46

What ends up happening in meditation or through your daily life is a sense of calm, and peace can begin to pervade your life. You may not feel that all the time at first, or even after years of practice. You may only feel it once in a while, but ideally, over time, it becomes more and more predominant. This sense of peace, this sense of calm, this sense of clarity, this is what's telling you that the process is exceeding. You're feeling calmer, you're feeling more centered, you're feeling the ability to distinguish between delusion and reality, and that's a good thing. It helps us make better decisions, it helps us be more effective. So let's just take another minute or so and just rest in this loving, kind presence again, observing our thoughts, our emotions or perhaps even bodily sensations as they arise and just see them just like smoke in the room or clouds in the sky, and just let them move through you and eventually dissipate. Let's go ahead and do that for this last minute. You can go ahead and feel free to open your eyes when you like and just look around the room and notice the sense of presence that you have once you've gone through this process.

Speaker 1: 28:40

Ideally, I feel. For me it's a sense of clarity, it's a sense of ease, a sense of calm that pervades and you become a calmer presence that becomes a cause in the world that can have an effect on other people, certainly on yourself, by making yourself more happy. But you'll notice that this calming presence that you bring into your life with this kind of practice actually has an impact on other people. You might notice that they treat you a little bit differently and they might ask you you know, sally, something has changed in you or Bob, something's different. What are you doing? And you might just tell them well, I've been meditating. You might just mention it to the people and say, well, you might want to give it a try. It's not that you need to proselytize, it's not that you need to try and convert anybody to anything, but maybe, if they're open to it, you might want to mention it to them.

Speaker 1: 29:59

So the idea is we just want to bring happiness to ourselves, ideally, and perhaps be a calming presence in the world and be able to influence others in a positive way, and I think that's really all we can ask for any mindfulness practice, and it's what makes it worthwhile. You know, you might just again let people know about it if you'd like to, if you feel comfortable with that. So well in the meditation there. Again, I've appreciated you so much for going through this mindfulness training, these four classes, and there'll be more talks coming down the pike, so to speak, and I look forward to speaking with you again soon and chatting with you more about mindfulness. Thank you so much.