Meditating and Thinking

I meditate twice a day. I do it when I first get up in the morning, and then again before I get ready for bed. Over the past few months, when mentioning this in conversations with friends, the most frequent comment I've heard has been something along the lines of, 'I've tried to meditate/I'm interested in meditating/I wish I could meditate, but I can't stop my mind from thinking.'

When I hear this, I say something like, 'that's kind of the point.' Then I get funny looks, which I've just had to get used to over the years for a number of reasons.

I want to talk about this comment in more detail, because it demonstrates that a lot of people don't know a whole lot about what meditation is, or what it's supposed to do.

Meditation, in the way I use it, is a type of brain training. There are many different ways in which to train one's brain. We train our brains in acquiring information, applying information, thinking critically, and comparing and contrasting, just to name a few. When I use meditation, I'm doing it to cultivate the ability to watch my thoughts and see how they affect my experience of the present moment, and of life in general. From that place of witnessing and knowing the thoughts, I can later work on understanding the role they play in my life and go about changing them or letting them go if that's what I want to do.

One of the most amazing things for me to discover, when I first sat down and began to meditate back in my teens, was that I was thinking all. the. time. I also thought that the point of meditating was to get your brain to stop thinking, and when I couldn't do it, I figured that meditating just wasn't for me and stopped doing it. This was untrue. All of those thoughts that I was having were the means through which I could acquire some awareness and insight into what I thought, how often I thought, and what happened if I shifted my focus. I started to investigate whether all of my thoughts were useful and were working for me, or if there were some thoughts that I could do without. Were there thoughts that were more persistent than others? Were there ones I didn't want to let go of because I enjoyed the emotional state into which they seemed to place me? Yes and yes. Part of meditation is experiencing the thoughts and their associated emotional states thoroughly, without getting stuck in the feelings or caught up in the thoughts, or mistaking it all for meaning something other than me being a person with a brain, and that my brain was just doing what it had learned to do over the years.

Through the process of meditation, I've learned that my thoughts have power. I've witnessed firsthand in myself how quickly I can get caught up in a spiral of negativity by thinking about situations in my life and drawing conclusions about how I have to act because of them. If I'm getting ready to do something new in my life, maybe I have thoughts like, 'I can't do this,' which cause me to feel afraid, or 'This is something I can learn,' which causes me to feel confident.

I have also learned that my thoughts are not all powerful, and am at the very beginning of understanding that my thoughts do not make me who I am as a person. I can think many things about myself, but the content of those thoughts isn't me, and not even the grouping together of those thoughts is 'me'. The part of me that's aware of what I'm thinking is as much 'me' as the thinking is, maybe even more so.

As I restarted my regular meditation practice a year and a half ago, I was initially unimpressed. I'm just sitting here and wasting time, I thought. I noticed I was thinking, and just watched the thought, feeling the restlessness and impatience that came with the thought, and it went away. Then it came back. It kept doing this for a week or two, every time I went to sit. Then something interesting started to happen in my day-to-day life. I noticed that I was going into situations that had previously been highly stressful and overwhelming but was no longer reacting so quickly to what was going on. I noticed how I was relating to challenging situations with a more balanced perspective. Joyful situations brought delight, but also the awareness that it would also pass. I noticed during meditation that I was sustaining chunks of time where I was not thinking...and then realize that I was thinking again. I began to feel calmer and more peaceful during the day as I kept this place of stillness in my life, this place where I could practice noticing thoughts and letting them move on through once I'd brought my full acceptance to them.

A few months ago, I decided to add a meditation session in the morning to my practice, and have learned a great deal about how old habits of negative thinking like to try to weasel their way in as early in the day as possible and take over. When I sit with them in silence, not judging them, not resisting them, but just realizing that brains are like computers and need to be re-programmed with new thoughts when an old program no longer works, I can become aware of the thoughts and then work on changing the ones that no longer serve a useful purpose. It is a process. It's not magic. But it brings me a great sense of calm, stability, and peace of mind that was not part of my life a few years ago.

So if there's anyone reading this, thinking they want to meditate but that they just can't because they think too much or don't have enough time, I encourage you to take 10 minutes a day (or whatever you can handle), sit down, and try it. Don't let the thinking stop you, because it's the thinking that will help you to learn how to meditate. From there, a new relationship to your thoughts, feelings, and life experience can form.