In this 12-minute guided meditation, I invite you to try a little experiment: view all of your incoming thoughts as equally irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how interesting or important the thought seems — we simply let them be there and don’t pay them any more or less attention.
I wonder what’s for dinner…
Do penguins have knees? I need to look that up…
Oh there’s a great idea for a book…
Why don’t I have more hobbies?
I wish I could be a cat…
How long have I been sitting here…?
Doesn’t matter. All of it is irrelevant.
On average we have 40-60k thoughts per day. Most of those are repetitive, and a large chunk of them are judgmental. As one teacher said, we could do without 90% of our thinking and live very happy and productive lives. This is the nature of our minds.
“The mind produces thoughts like the saliva glands produce saliva.” — Buddhist teaching
If we allow ourselves to think our thoughts, or get ‘embedded’ in them without being aware, then we can get lost in them. This happens countless times per day - not being aware that we’re thinking, just caught in the loop.
So, when we do a practice like this, it can feel really freeing when we choose to let go of the content of thoughts and see thinking as simply a process created by our brains. This allows us to become less attached to our thoughts, in turn giving us more freedom to choose which thoughts to follow.
Jack Kornfield talks about becoming aware of these deeper levels of our experience.
Content : specific details of your thoughts and emotions (we’re usually stuck and operating on this surface level)
Process: seeing bodily sensations, thoughts and feelings as all part of a continuous flow
Awareness : resting in the field of awareness and watching all your experiences come and go (and further, becoming awareness itself)
The more you sit and label your thinking as just thinking, the more you descend into deeper and deeper depths. The deeper you go, the more freedom you feel. It’s a simple practice but one of my favorites, and one I go back to every day.
I hope you enjoy this one, and feel free to share, like & leave a comment. Thanks! :)
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