Dealing with Thoughts

[progressally_objectives]

Everyone is overridden by thoughts;
that’s why they have so much heartache and sorrow.
At times I give myself up to thought purposefully;
but when I choose,
I spring up from those under its sway.
I am like a high-flying bird,
and thought is a gnat:
how should a gnat overpower me?

– Rumi

---

When you sit down to meditate, you start to notice a lot of THOUGHTS!

And that’s TOTALLY NORMAL. You are human. You are going to think.

Remember, mindfulness is not about NOT THINKING, it’s about bringing awareness to our thoughts.

At the same time, meditation is not “thinking with your eyes closed.”

So what do you do when you notice thoughts?

First, you should be excited — that’s mindfulness!! Knowing you are thinking when you are thinking is the entire practice! You’ve observed that your mind has wandered. So don’t ‘beat yourself up’ because your mind wandered — be thankful that you noticed. The more you practice, the more you’ll notice your mind wandering. We don’t ever get “better” at meditating, but you will likely notice that you start to catch yourself thinking more toward the beginning of the thought, rather than getting lost in a long train of thoughts.

When you do notice a thought, you can practice what’s called “noting” — you can simply say to yourself, “thinking, thinking.” I think it’s important to say the word twice, and in a kind voice. A gentle “thinking, thinking” is much kinder to yourself than “THINKING!”

Once you’ve noted the thought, just observe it. You don’t need to engage it, follow it, or suppress it.

In one of my sessions a few months ago, after I led a brief meditation, a participant said, “I had a hard time pushing my thoughts away!”

That IS a hard practice. We’re not pushing anything away! Remember our foundational attitude of allowing — we allow the thought because it’s already there. We observe it, and watch it run its course. We invite it to float on past — and it might. But it might stick around. We allow that too.

Do you remember the show SuperNanny? The one with the sassy British nanny who helped American parents learn how to discipline their kids? (I smile now remembering watching that show before I had kids — I was SO convinced I would NEVER parent the way the parents on the show did. ?) Jo Frost (aka the SuperNanny) would teach parents the proper technique for using time outs (by the way, we’ll talk later about why those don’t work very well!), which involved repeatedly bringing the child back to the “naughty corner” (or whatever the timeout location was) every time the little cherub escaped.

This often happened over 60-70 times in a span of 10-15 minutes!

And that’s pretty much what we’re doing in meditation. We set the intention to pay attention to the breath. And then our mind wanders away. We gently bring it back. The mind wanders again…. and so on.

The SuperNanny also told parents that when they retrieved the escapee, they should not engage in dialogue — no scolding, no rationalizing, no questioning. They simply and wordlessly brought their little one back to timeout.

It’s the same in meditation. You don’t scold yourself for “letting” your mind wander. You don’t engage in dialogue with the thought (“yeah, you SHOULD be mad about that comment that person made three days ago because….”). You gently, non-judgmentally escort your attention back to the breath.

There are many other helpful analogies for this practice — you can imagine that your awareness is the vast, expansive blue sky. Each thought is a cloud passing through. Some are dark and stormy, others are light and fluffy. But they all eventually pass on their own time.

You can imagine your awareness is a river, and thoughts are passing ships.

I like to imagine that our awareness is like the ocean, and while it might be active and stormy on the surface, we can dwell in the depths below, in the gorgeous stillnessbeneath thinking and doing.

In mindfulness meditation, we discover that thoughts simply come and go… and they don’t require engagement. We realize thoughts are actually quite fleeting. And, more powerfully, we realize that we have a choice about whether to engage with a thought or not! This profound insight stays with us well after we end our formal meditation session.

Your practice will look something like this:

Repeat, repeat, repeat….

Click here for a guided meditation for working with thoughts.

Your turn: Check in in the comments below and let us know how you’re doing — how is your practice going? What questions do you have? Remember you can submit questions here for me to address in live coaching call on Friday!

---

This wraps up our first week — Mindful Mama! But becoming a mindful mama is a lifelong practice. We’ll come back to these basic principles of nonjudgmental awareness, acceptance, and anchors throughout the course.

This week we have focused on ourselves, on the powerful inner work of mindful parenting. To parent mindfully, we need to have a mindfulness practice of our own! Next week, we’ll talk about integrating self-care into our days, and continue to cultivate our mindfulness practice.

I look forward to hearing your comments and questions, and I’m excited to connect with you in our call on Friday. Have a lovely, mindful week!