Diana Winston, Mindfulness Educator at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), offers a guided meditation podcast on the topic, Working with Thoughts. Diana reminds us that mindfulness involves paying attention in the midst of present moment experience and doing so on purpose and with a spirit of openness, curiosity, and acceptance. She highlights the role of thoughts in our life and the possibility that they have been intensified and accelerated by the local and global experience of the pandemic. Thoughts can arise anywhere, at any time, and in any location. When we are in isolation, our thoughts may be about what we are missing out on or express fear about what might happen to us.
Our thoughts can be helpful and highly productive at times leading to creative endeavours, compassionate action, or timely interventions in our own life or that of others. Alternatively, they may be decidedly unhelpful, leading to self-loathing, inaction, or continuous suffering. Thoughts are integral to our human existence – we have active brains constantly processing information coming through our senses. We can manage our thoughts through mindfulness meditation if we understand how our thoughts can distract us and take over our everyday experience.
A fundamental principle espoused by Jon Kabat-Zinn is that “we are not our thoughts”. Diana refers to the related Bumper Sticker that reads, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”. We can easily become caught up in negative self-thoughts that become an endless cycle of devaluing ourselves and what we achieve in our daily lives. Mindfulness meditation can help us to experience self-compassion and develop a balanced sense of our uniqueness and our accomplishments.
We can become “lost in thought”, unaware of what is going on around us or inside us. This preoccupation with our thoughts can lead to self-absorption, a lack of awareness and insensitive words and actions. We can often relate to James Joyce’s comment in The Dubliners that “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body”.
A guided meditation to manage your thoughts – returning to your body
In her meditation podcast, Diana encourages you to focus on your body. She starts with a focus on posture and the sensation of your feet on the ground or floor and suggests that you first take a few deep breaths to help ground you in the present. Her light body scan helps you to be aware of tension points in your body and to release any uptightness that may have resulted from your thoughts. You are encouraged to be conscious of any manifestation in your body of any unhelpful or harmful thoughts and to let them go.
Release from your negative thoughts and attendant painful bodily sensations is achieved through focusing on your meditation anchor. You might begin with a focus on your breathing and progress to deep listening to sounds (without attempting to think about the source or to explore their emotional impact on you). Diana suggests that using your bodily sensations as an anchor can help to ground you in your body which exists in the present moment. You can focus on a particular part of your body to achieve this grounding, e.g., the heaviness in your feet, the tingling in your arms or the sensation of energy flowing through your conjoined fingers.
Your meditation anchor provides a means of keeping you connected to your body and to stop you drifting away in your thoughts. It becomes a point of continuous return – constantly revisiting your anchor builds your capacity to control your thoughts and develops your “awareness muscle”.
Diana also recommends “labelling your thoughts” – identifying what type of thinking process you are involved in, e.g., planning the next day, evaluating someone else’s performance, criticising another’s behaviour, or indulging in self-criticism. Like naming your emotions, labelling your thoughts enables you to tame them and create some distance from your thought process. Overtime with meditation practice, you can begin to discern any regular thinking pattern such as my pattern of continuously planning my “next steps” during the day.
Using imagery in meditation to dissolve your thoughts
Imagery in meditation can also help you to manage your thoughts. Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests that you view your thoughts as bubbles in boiling water that burst as they reach the surface of the water. Diana uses clouds as an image for your thoughts. She suggests that you view the sky itself as the openness and expansiveness of your mind while your thoughts are passing clouds. Sometimes the clouds are heavy and dark bringing a sense of sadness or overwhelm; other times the clouds might be wispy and flighty leaving a sense of lightness and joy. You can imagine the clouds coming and going, passing you by as you stay grounded in your body.
Using substitution in meditation to change your thinking
Diana encourages you at an appropriate time to cultivate compassionate thoughts or gratitude to push aside negative thoughts that persist. Compassion can enable you to substitute thinking about yourself with kind thoughts towards others who may be experiencing difficulty or suffering. Gratitude pushes aside any thoughts of resentment or envy and enables you to savour what you have in your life. These healthy ways of thinking can lead to happiness, ease, and wellness.
Reflection
Mindfulness meditation enables us to move from being captured by our thoughts to being grounded in our body. It builds the capacity to be fully present to the richness of the present moment – whether that is being alone in our room, experiencing the stillness and silence of nature or interacting with others. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, we can progressively gain control over our thoughts and become more open to the possibilities in our life. Freed from the tyranny of expectations and our own thoughts, we can experience happiness and the ease of wellness.
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Image by Benjamin Balazs from Pixabay
By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)
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