How to Skillfully Work With Thought

The idea that we must silence our thoughts in meditation is the biggest myth that exists. 

And it’s not just a myth: it prevents you from serious engagement with meditation, it has you reinforcing all your old mental habits, and it’s extremely demotivating and discouraging.

You will not progress with meditation if you believe this, nor will you yield all the wonderful benefits of it.

Let’s debunk this myth a little and look at a powerful technique for working productively with our thoughts.

The Great Myth

So let’s begin talking about the myth.

People who come to me to learn meditation, particularly newbies who’ve only dabbled with the popular apps, come with the goal of calming their mind, of not thinking.

And in most meditations out there, teachers will say “just calm your mind”. Just calm your mind? What?

My theory is that the popular apps have hijacked some of the deeper spiritual teachings and diluted them.

For example, we’ve confused “calm abiding”, a concept that appears in many traditions, with “calm mind” or “no thoughts”. Calm abiding doesn’t depend on having no thoughts, but on how much you’ve developed the core skills of meditation, which don’t require the mind being silent.

I understand why people want to silence the mind, especially those who haven’t trained themselves to see through and beyond it. In some sense it’s a legitimate goal. It would be nice if we didn’t have that monkey up there all the time.

The Problem(s)

The problem? There’s many problems. In short: it’s not possible, it’s not necessary, it’s not the right goal, and it’s too narrow. Let’s look more closely at each.

• Not possible: You can’t control your thoughts. When you turn off a light at night, it will stay off until you put it on the next morning. You have 100% control of the switch, unless your child gets rebellious and wants to annoy you. With thoughts, you can’t command them to be quiet. It just doesn’t work! There’s no tap or switch. You’re almost guaranteed to fail if you attempt it, and soon you’ll give up.
  
• Not necessary: It really is not necessary. You can do very good meditation even when your mind is wild.
  
• Not the right goal: You’re chasing your tail. You’re addicted to thought, and this need for control over it is part of the same mechanism that creates your addiction to thought. Think that through. You only want to silence it because you’re addicted to it and tyrannised by it. Besides, meditation is about inducing higher states of consciousness. In these higher states, we go above and beyond the mind. The mind can still be active, but we’re disidentified with it. We realise we never were the mind.

• Too narrow: meditation does a lot of things for you, if you receive good instruction and are very diligent. It does way more than calm your mind for a few minutes, let me tell you. Trying to silence the mind, as though it were the ultimate goal, is very naive.

The paradox to all this? Your mind does calm down, over time, as a general trend. This is scientifically, neurologically proven. But this doesn’t happen because we force it to happen, or because we neurotically pursue that result. It’s because we train our attention, we train our concentration, non-resistance and clarity.

Now, I could continue with this, but let’s get to the practice.

Work Skillfully With Thought

This is mindfulness of thought. Note: we’re not trying to silence the mind, we’re not trying to avoid thinking. We’re trying to observe thinking. We’re not trying to intellectually understand it or dissect it. We’re trying to experience it as a raw phenomenon. We’re trying to penetrate it, see through it.

Here is the fundamental meditation practice for this.

• Get into your posture, take a moment to stretch up through the spine and loosen the body, including the face.
• Place your attention around the head and face area. You’ll notice that mental chatter spontaneously comes and goes, without you willing it to appear or disappear.
• When you notice a piece of mental chatter, zoom in on it, make it the object of your attention. Use the mental label Hear to help.
• Pour your attention into it, detect the qualities of it. This is called sensory clarity.
• No resistance. No holding on or trying to get rid of your thoughts or anything else in your sensory experience.
• Run these cycles over and over.

Now, in our mind we don’t just have chatter, but images too. You can do the same meditation practice with your mental images.

Why do this?

Practice this repeatedly, and thoughts will lose their grip on you. You’ll experience them in a way that probably less than 1% of people do.

Bring enough concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity to your thoughts, and you’ll realise, experientially, that they are:

• Impermanent,
• Constantly appearing and disappearing,
• See-through, translucent,
• Paper-thin,
• Not you.

When you can consistently see one or more of these features of thought, you’ll realise why you don’t have to silence it. You only want to silence it because you don’t see these features, which is because you haven’t trained yourself to see them.

Let me tell you, seeing these features are totally life-changing, and the deeper you go, the more life-changing it is.