How to Meditate (7 page)

When you come back from drifting away from the breath and say “thinking,” there’s a strong tendency to be harsh because you’ve traveled so far away from your meditation. Notice your tone of voice when you say “thinking.” If your tone is harsh, if the word “thinking” feels equivalent to “bad” or is accompanied by depression or a sense of discouragement, notice that. This is a place where you can bring relaxation and gentleness into the practice. Say “thinking” to yourself with a friendly attitude.

In postmeditation, it’s the same. Start noticing this sense of aversion or critical voice to your thoughts and actions, and just lighten it up. Give yourself a break. You can change that voice and be more gentle and more kind, more compassionate, toward this whole process of your life. The labeling of thoughts as “thinking” is actually training in developing an unbiased attitude.

Criticalness is an obstacle to meditation, and harshness is an obstacle to awakening. This tendency to be hard on ourselves does not come from the buddha nature, the basic goodness within all of us; it comes from the ego and our conditioning. We all have the seeds of this basic goodness within us—we only have to nourish them. Nourishing the basic goodness within includes not judging ourselves for all the wild thinking that takes place in our mind. We can’t control how many thoughts we’re going to have. And we can’t control what the next thought is going to be. As you practice, try to be faithful to the instruction with a gentle attitude. We train in attention, but it’s friendly attention. We train in labeling, but it’s friendly labeling.

Trungpa Rinpoche suggested that you adopt a young, innocent attitude to bring your mind back from thinking. He equated this to when you’re trying to get an infant to eat some food, and the baby’s attention keeps wandering. You have to be sweetly repetitive with the baby, reminding the baby to eat, to see the spoon, and then you pop the food into the baby’s mouth. You just try to keep bringing the baby’s attention back.

Fantasy and far-gone thought is one level of discursive thought. The second level is being gone, but not completely. You are maybe two or three sentences into a thought or story line, but you’re not gone for long before you wake up and come back. You’re not completely in a fantasy. You’re just drawn off by a sound, for example, and then the mind follows on the sound. Or perhaps you are drawn off by the feeling of hunger, and you start thinking about what to have for lunch. You realize this quickly, and you come back.

In the case of the less far-gone thoughts, the instruction is the same. You are sitting in meditation posture, placing your attention on the breath; the thought comes, and without making it a big deal, you just come back. You’re allowing for the buddha-nature quality of your mind to come forward and manifest and be more present. If you let the thoughts take you farther away from the present moment, you are training in discursiveness and distractedness. It takes time and commitment to counteract this very well-ingrained pattern of not being here. The average life is characterized by a few moments of presence, maybe one in every hundred moments. Recognizing these small going-offs is really important, because they certainly add up!

As you spend more days and weeks with your commitment to practice, it might seem that your mind wanders even more. Many people, even seasoned meditators, say, “I’m thinking more than I ever did before!” They feel like their distractedness and thinking are getting worse, rather than better. The fact is that before you started meditating and trying to develop mindfulness, you weren’t aware of how many thoughts you have. Now you are, and that’s why there appears to be more of them. Becoming aware of the monkey mind is actually a very good sign; it indicates an increase in your awareness and your ability to see what’s going on.

The third category of discursive thought includes the thoughts that don’t draw you off at all. You’re sitting, and you put your mind on the object of the breath, and you’re staying with it; then there’s this little vague conversation or in-and-out of thoughts that’s happening on the side, but it doesn’t draw you off. It’s like you are a witness to the on-the-side vague hint of thoughts, but you don’t enter them completely. In this case, you don’t have to label the thoughts as “thinking,” and usually you won’t experience any criticism of yourself around these thoughts. It is important, however, to recognize this level of thinking in meditation, and to distinguish it from the kind of thinking that takes you to more faraway destinations.

As your meditation practice develops, you are likely to experience this third kind of thinking more often. You remain present to your meditation, you experience thoughts arising, but they don’t draw you off. They’re happening in the background, and you’re still with the object, which is your breath. Remember, you don’t need to struggle. You don’t need to struggle to not have thoughts because that’s impossible. So in the case of these background thoughts, say to yourself, “Good! This is fine, absolutely fine. I actually don’t have to label anything here, and I don’t have to try to sharpen this up. This is fine.”

With all three levels of discursive thought, there are three words—three concepts—that might be a support for you in your meditation in terms of allowing yourself to relax around your thoughts. The first word is “gentleness,” which I have already discussed. Have gentleness around the fact that you can’t avoid thoughts; you can’t control the fact that you’ll be distracted, and you can’t control how long you’ll be distracted for.

The second word is “patience.” Patience brings relaxation into your meditation, into your practice, into your life. You can’t underestimate how helpful it is to be patient with yourself. You might have weeks where your thoughts take you on a complete roller-coaster ride. You might have an hour of meditation in which you never connect to your breath and you obsess about something from your past. The path of meditation is not a linear process. One day there may only be these little blurps of thought that don’t distract you at all, and you think, “I’m really getting the hang of this! I feel so alive, so present.” Then the next thing you know, you sit down and
bam!
—you’re completely gone in a fantasy until the gong rings, and you get so frustrated that you feel like throwing yourself off a bridge.

Trungpa Rinpoche used to say that this kind of experience is very good because it humbles us. He said, “Our minds are great teachers because we have just enough growing awareness and alertness, or increasing kindness, to encourage ourselves.” And as he pointed out, we can even get very arrogant about that. In other words, our humanity, this discursiveness and this inability to completely overcome the wild and drowsy mind, keeps us in balance.

The third word I’d like you to hold when it comes to your thoughts is “humor.” Gentleness, patience, and a sense of humor. Have a sense of humor about the fact that your mind is like a wild monkey. In his book
Wake Up to Your Life,
Ken McLeod has a great quote from the Theravada meditation master Henepola Gunaratana. He says, “Somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you never noticed.” Our thoughts are like the weather—they’re just passing through. In our practice, there’s no need to cling to them, no need to see them as totally solid. They are thoughts, after all; they’re not the present moment. Let them pass through the big sky of your mind.

Listen to more about relating with thoughts.

10

THOUGHTS AS THE OBJECT OF MEDITATION

I
n
Part One
, I offered basic meditation instruction, and I suggested that you make your breath the object of meditation. You place your attention on your breath, specifically the out-breath, and when your mind wanders you return to the breath.

As you start to get into a routine with your meditation practice, you can begin to play with using other objects for your meditation. For instance, you can actually use thoughts themselves as the support for wakefulness. It sounds counterintuitive, but thoughts can become a support for stabilizing your mind. And we have so many thoughts to work with!

Tsoknyi Rinpoche said that a good analogy for using thoughts as the object of your meditation is like being the doorman in an expensive, elegant hotel. The doorman opens the door and lets the guests in. The guests come in and then go out the other side, but the doorman doesn’t follow them to the bathroom. Similarly, our thoughts come in and the thoughts go out, and we, the doorman, just open the door, notice them, close the door, open the door, notice, close the door. Thoughts come and thoughts go; they come and they go.

exercise

USING THOUGHTS AS AN OBJECT OF MEDITATION

Set a timer for a short fifteen-minute meditation period. To begin, run through all the points you learned in
Part One
of this book: allow yourself to get settled, find your posture, connect to your breath. For a brief minute, relax your body, relax your mind, and return to your breath.

Next, look at your mind. Notice your thoughts, and determine whether there are a few thoughts or many thoughts. Are they continuous flow-thoughts, or are there a few thoughts with a little space and then some more thoughts? Do you have a few sentences, a few paragraphs, then there’s this sort of space, and after that the thoughts start again? Or is there a lot of space, then a few words, and then a lot of space? Do your thoughts create one continuous dialogue? Are you feeling tired and experiencing a lot of nonsense thoughts? Just notice. These are your thoughts, just as they are right now. The intention is to place your mind on the thoughts themselves, and the method for doing this is just to observe.

When you are done observing your thoughts and how they are working, just relax.

Mingyur Rinpoche points out that when you’re just with the mind and thoughts as an object, and then you go completely unconscious and get swept away by them, you often have this little “oops” moment when you call yourself back. He pointed out that this “oops” moment is actually a moment of pure meditation, a moment where you are totally centered in the present moment. At this place, the mind just naturally comes back. It’s unforced. You could meditate for years and years and you never make it happen. And yet it happens here in this fresh, unmeditated moment of catching yourself to come back. Thoughts will arise, and when they do, let those thoughts pass through. It’s a very radical notion that thoughts could be a friend or an ally rather than an obstacle or something you have to struggle with. When thoughts call our attention to the discursiveness of our minds and call us back to the present moment, I’d say they are worth the price of admission.

11

REGARD ALL DHARMAS AS DREAMS

A
nother lojong slogan that I like to work with when teaching meditation is: “Regard all dharmas as dreams.” This is basically saying, “Regard all thoughts as being the same as a dream.” This is considered a meditation instruction; it points out that as we sit in meditation, we could begin to realize that we create everything, all our thoughts, with our mind.

They are not solid. They are not something tangible that we can grasp onto. They are concepts, interpretations, made from our conditioning. In other words, whether we are thinking about a beach in Barbados or a lover or our spouse or what to eat for lunch, it might feel very real. But Barbados isn’t in front of you, and lunch isn’t happening until later.

So again, when we realize that this process is going on, we acknowledge it by just calling it “thinking.” When we say “thinking,” it’s as if we’re acknowledging that all our thoughts are like an illusion, or like a dream. The illusions that we create with our mind while we’re sitting in meditation—illusions that we call “thought”—can create fear, joy, sadness, wonder, anger: the whole gamut of emotions. Thoughts can cause us to cry, they can cause us to smile. Many thoughts have a lot of emotional content. In our everyday lives, we are run around by these thoughts that we make so solid with our mind and our thinking. So when we say, “Regard it all as a dream,” we lead ourselves toward something that many people have discovered throughout the ages about the nature of reality: it’s not as solid as we think.