Introduction
With the demands of modern life it’s no wonder our minds are busy.
We’re inundated with information and connected to others with technology that reaches out to us almost constantly.
Our thoughts bounce between memories, plans, fantasies, regrets about the past, concerns about the future etc. etc. etc.
Some thoughts are visual.
Some are auditory.
Thoughts trigger other thoughts trigger emotions trigger thoughts and on it goes.
It’s busy in there…
It’s no wonder so many of us are stressed and find it hard to sleep.
Amidst that whirlwind how can we find calm, ease and even great focus?
Well it’s not by trying to force our thoughts to STOP but instead working with the whole thing gently and skillfully.
Can thinking be a part of meditation?
Sometimes in pop culture the idea of meditation as ‘quieting the mind’ or ‘being chill’ means thoughts get a bad rap.
The rationale goes something like:
- Living in the moment’ or ‘being present’ means focusing on what is happening NOW.
- Thinking, which is often focused on the past or the future, is taking us out of the NOW.
The content of thought may be focused on the past or the future but the activity of thought as a sensory experience happens in the present.
Mindfulness helps us not to get lost in the content of the thoughts by focusing on thoughts as sensory events as they are happening. These events have qualities we can track and explore like beginnings and ends, locations, intensities, volume, pitch, colour, vividness and more.
Thoughts CAN be objects of focus for mindfulness meditation and a pathway to the benefits of practice.
How to meditate with a busy mind as the focus
There are many ways you can approach this.
Before we survey a few let’s take a look at how the Unified Mindfulness System divides up ALL Sensory Experiences into 3 broad categories.
Why?
Because this will help give us some options for working with our thoughts in Meditation.
Sensory Experience
- What we See
- What we Hear
- What we Feel
The busy inner world we described above includes inner versions of See, Hear and Feel.
- Visual Thoughts (what we See In our mind)
- Mental Talk (what we Hear In our Mind)
- Emotional Body Sensations (that we Feel In our Body)
When it comes to thought itself you could choose to focus on visual or auditory thought (or both).
Focusing on Visual Thought with Meditation
If we focus on visual thought with the attention skills of mindfulness we would likely discover the huge impact it has on our lives as it shapes how we see ourselves and the world. In our daily lives, how we react to the people, situations and struggles in our lives is enormously influenced by the stories that visual (and auditory) thoughts feed us.
Focusing on visual thoughts with Mindfulness Skills helps us take a step back allowing us to not just accept our thoughts as gospel. We are witnessing an activity without getting lost or caught up in the content. This gives us a window into how much our sense of self is influenced by visual thinking. Practising like this can become a source of personal insight and the beginning of change
When we focus on the space where we experience visual thought you might, at times, also discover no image activity happening (restfulness). Instead of images there might only be the grayscale of light and dark mixing behind our closed eyes. This can also be rewarding discovery and an enjoyable, relaxing sensory experience to explore with meditation.
Focusing on Auditory Thought (Mental Talk/Sounds) with Meditation
Had we chosen to focus on thoughts that we HEAR in your minds (self talk) as opposed to those we SEE our discoveries could also be similarly rich, fascinating and empowering.
It might be a little surprising to hear the suggestion to embrace the mental chatter. A lot of us think that quieting the mind is what meditation is ‘all about’. For some that idea can be off putting because ‘there’s no way I can quiet MY mind!’ It’s cool to discover that we don’t need to in order to meditate.
In fact as embrace the activity of mental talk we may discover that there ARE periods of mental quiet. That in itself can be a valuable inner resource and an enjoyable one to explore.
Once again we are applying our Mindfulness skills to thought as a sensory experience. As with visual thoughts the opportunity to observe self talk can help loosen our habit of just accepting thoughts at face value.
Multiple Sensory Experiences
You could also choose to focus on more than one category of experience at once in a meditation.
Earlier we mentioned:
- Visual Thoughts (what we SEE IN our mind)
- Mental Talk (what we HEAR IN our mind)
- Emotional Body Sensations (that we FEEL IN our body)
In everyday life these three are very dynamic and interactive. That activity goes on pretty constantly to some degree or other. When we feel stressed or overwhelmed the interaction between these elements has ramped up to a degree where we now feel strongly affected.
If we don’t practise mindfulness we are likely unaware of that process of interaction taking place. More likely we just find ourselves overwhelmed, stressed or anxious and not aware of how we ‘got there’ – we’re just caught up in it all.
Mindfulness can help us see how this interactive process happens. The ability to track and separate out the component parts of an experience in real time can have a dramatic effect on lessening the overall levels of stress and anxiety.
You can learn Mindfulness skills and techniques to help you do this.
Imagine how impactful this could be in dealing with any number of challenging situations. That could be a difficult conversation, dealing with our nerves while delivering a presentation or even just getting off to sleep at night.
Coda
Mindfulness impacts how we relate to our Sensory Experience.
In essence:
- If it’s a pleasant experience your improved attention skills make the experience more vivid and fulfilling.
- If it’s unpleasant you can work with these experiences with various techniques and strategies that help lessen their impact.
Taking the time to learn the attentional skills of mindful awareness helps us to really make the most of your time in meditation – no matter what technique we’re doing. When you know the skills you’re training that helps orient you. It also means that you can take techniques like those mentioned above and (others too) into your everyday life and effectively use them to help work with challenges and make the most of opportunities.
Here’s a few really useful daily life practice strategies from Unified Mindfulness:
Background Practice
Keeping practice going with a technique ‘in the background’. The technique is not occupying your full attention but running with a smaller percentage of your attention.
Micro-Hits
These are brief periods of mindfulness dotted throughout the day when you have a few seconds to a few minutes where you can give a technique your full attention. This can be incredibly helpful when you are facing challenges in your day. Sprinkling these across your day (toilet breaks?) can have a big impact on your stress levels, energy levels and more.
Mindfully embracing a busy mind means all the activity is no longer a problem.
In fact it can be a rich pathway to transformation, insight and ease.