DevYou

The other day, I overheard a conversation in a coffee shop that made me think. Two women were sitting at a table near mine, and said, “I’ve been trying to meditate but I can’t do it. I hear people tell me all the time how great it is to clear one’s mind for 10 minutes every day, but I just can’t do it. When I try to meditate, my head is full of so many thoughts, and I can’t make them stop.”

I think this is a fairly common experience. After all, our minds are pretty unruly and don’t just stop thinking when we tell them to.

What I wanted to tell her was this: Just as an experiment, don’t try to stop your thoughts. Let them arise. Notice them. Let them pass. Don’t try to stop them. Don’t cling to them when they appear.

The idea here is that meditation isn’t an act of sanitizing your mind, forcing it to be sparkling clean when it’s not. Rather it’s an act of familiarizing yourself with how your mind works. Familiarizing. Not sanitizing.

Rather than be discouraged by the unruly nature of her mind, this beginner meditator would do better not worrying about all those thoughts (after all, those worries are thoughts too) and just let them arise and pass. Worrying about her uncontrollable thoughts can only lead to one result: she stops trying. Rather, being tolerant of them — learning to let go of them while gently bringing her attention repeatedly back to some of single thing to focus on such as her breath is more likely to allow her to strengthen her meditation practice. And a stronger, more balanced practice, is more likely to bestow the benefits she seeks.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Buddhism, Mind, Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.