Letting Go of The Struggle
The question: Hi Roger. I’ve been meditating most days for a while now and it feels like I’m in a losing battle with my mind. No matter how hard I try my attention always finds a way to elude me with daydreaming and tangential thinking. In some of your posts you mention how difficult it is for modern humans to meditate because we’ve been programmed to think about everything. This leaves me wondering if it is even worth trying to meditate because my thinking habit is too far gone.
And my answer: No, you’re not too far gone. For sure, we have a more difficult task in meditation than people in the Buddha’s time, when life was simpler and people’s minds were less saturated with information. But my own experience tells me that the daily attempt to meditate past all the mental concocting is still extremely beneficial.
So here’s the thing, and it’s probably the most significant point I’ll make in this post – you must stop judging your meditation practice by whether it’s having an effect on the thought activity in your head. Just do the business of sitting down to meditate each day. Don’t think about it or fuss over it. Make it routine.
As I’ve said in many other posts, it’s natural for your mind to generate all kinds of thought activity. So your problem is not that thinking is happening – not at all. It’s that you’re much too focused on it, which is possibly leading you to being a little heavy handed in your attempts to control it. The existence or non-existence of thought activity as you meditate is irrelevant – what is relevant is your reactions to the thought stuff that’s passing through your mind. If you’re not reacting, the thoughts will pass on through and disappear like fleeting dreams, with no effect at all. Regardless of how fizzy with thinking the mind is, so long as you’re not reacting to it, the meditation process goes on – muscles relax, tensions unwind, organs get a chance to rejuvenate, the blood is cleaned, excess hormones are metabolized and waste is processed.
But if you’re struggling with the thought activity, getting frustrated and disappointed, that anxious reaction energises the body and, by extension the mind, which lapses into a ridiculous tussle with itself and sabotages everything you’re reaching for as you meditate.
So you see, meditation is not about stopping things, or struggling with mental activity. It’s about training your mind to develop a new habit of simply being aware, without feeling the need to engage with what you’re aware of – to be passively aware of the noise your mind naturally creates, while your meddlesome attention remains poised and still, riding the breath.
This is why we use a main object in meditation, of the breath as it appears in the rising and falling of the belly. As the safe place for your attention it serves three purposes:
- It gives your attention somewhere to go when it’s disengaged from other things.
- Being in the centre of your body, the main object of the movement of the belly gets your attention out of your head and into the centre of your body, where you can begin building body awareness – which, as I will expand on later in this post, is very helpful, because it lessens our ‘head-centricity’ and makes us more aware of what’s going on in our body.
- With the attention on the movement of the belly as you breathe, there’s nothing for your mind to think about or react to. This gives the attention the opportunity to begin to experience, and get used to being still.
The other thing is, I think you’re much too focused on your struggle with what’s going on in your head, when the origin of all this mental activity is actually coming from your body as a whole. I wrote about this in my recent book ‘Being Still’, when I related a wonderful insight one of my meditation teachers gave me:
“I was in the middle of a month-long retreat and having a lot of difficulty with uncharacteristic storms of thinking and body tension. Though I was used to this happening when I meditated in retreat, this time it was more intense than usual. And as much as I was prepared to put up with the struggle for a few days, after a week I realized I needed help. So at the morning interview, I explained my problem to the Acharn.
After listening carefully, he said, ‘Beneath all thinking are feelings. Feelings create thinking. If we did not have feelings, we would not think. Sometimes the feelings are subtle, so the thoughts are also subtle. But if the feelings are very strong, then the thoughts will also be strong, and very hard to let go of.’
I thought about this, then said, ‘But I’m not aware of feeling anything beneath the thinking … not that I know of anyway.’
Acharn Tippakorn nodded and he said, ‘That’s because you are not looking. You are too busy swatting at the thoughts like mosquitoes. So don’t bother noting the thinking. Look past the thinking into your heart and into your body … in this way, you go to the cause, not the effect. Look for the feelings that are causing the thoughts, then note those feelings.’”
This fixation we have with what’s going on in our heads is a common problem, particularly with Westerners – we assume meditation is all about pacifying our mind. And because we assume our mind is specifically located in our head, it leads us to limit the meditation process to doing battle with what’s happening within the walls of our skull – while the rest of our body is forgotten.
Of course, this misconception that ‘my brain is the command center of me’ is understandable. After all, the world inside our head is where we spend most of our life. Our brain is the processing center for all the data we have to absorb and appraise each day simply because, in the information saturated culture we live in, our survival depends on it. And that doesn’t take account of all the leisure time we spend in our heads, passively absorbing entertainment while our body sits forgotten on a couch.
But while for sure, the mental concocting we recognize as ‘thinking’ is most noticeable in our head – nevertheless, as Acharn Tippakorn said, the actual source of that activity is coming as feelings and intuitive ‘knowings’ from the entirety of our body.
Of course, the conventional view of medical circles supports the ‘my brain is me’ assumption– and it seems supported by EEG readouts that show various parts of our brain lighting up whenever we initiate different activities – all of which implies that the command center of everything we are is, indeed, our brain.
But recent research is showing that this conclusion is false.
While for sure, the brain lights up the EEG readout in different ways as it processes different types of information, the truth is, the brain activity is secondary to the actual source of the information. In fact, our brain is actually processing intuitive signals that are constantly arising from our body. It’s known as the “embodied mind”, and the network of nerves the body uses to pull it all together is the vagus nerve, otherwise known as the ‘wandering nerve’, which connects every part of our body with every other part.
And in this network, the brain is not the most important component. That role is held by the gut – the central player in our community of ‘me’. Our digestive tract contains 100 million neurons, forming an enormous neural network which lines the entire digestive system. It’s called the enteric nervous system, and it contains more neurons than our spinal cord, which shows just how powerful its processing abilities really are – and why scientists refer to the gut as ‘the second brain.’ Interestingly, a large part of how this ‘second brain’ functions is the influence of gut microbiome – the trillions of microorganisms residing in our intestines, which influence our mood, emotional well-being and cognitive functions.
Consider the phenomenon of ‘gut feelings’ – the mysteriously instinctive knowing that gamblers, chess players, sports people and artists depend on to do what they do – the ability to know without needing to think. Most of the breakthroughs of our history have come from this kind of instinctive ‘knowing’. Einstein often said that the Theory of Relativity came to him very easily, as an almost visceral understanding. He just knew. His biggest problem was figuring out how to conceptualize it and explain it to other people.
David Bohm, one of the most innovative physicists of the twentieth century trusted what he called ‘this interior, intuitive display’ as a more reliable way of arriving at solutions than mental cogitation. And later, when he met Einstein, he learned that he too experienced subtle, internal sensations that appeared to lie much deeper than ordinary rational and discursive thought.
Picasso said: ‘Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.’
But this kind of intuitive knowing is not limited to genius. Gut feelings also play a part in all of our lives. Though we might not be aware of it, we depend on intuitive body intelligence to survive as, throughout the whole or each day, it acts as an inner compass, helping us make myriad instantaneous decisions about everything we do. These signals might appear as a sudden sense of danger, or of an instant understanding or realization of opportunity, or as an almost prescient knowing of what is about to happen. However it happens, intuition initially arises as subtle momentary feelings in our body rather than thoughts – but because they’re happening all the time, we usually don’t notice.
So one could say, in its secondary role to the body, our brain is a bit like a coordinating secretary – codifying, organizing and recording what’s handed up to it from the body, but incapable of producing anything original itself.
As such, focusing our efforts on what’s going on in our head as we meditate is a bit like trying to put out a fire by waving at the smoke.
So then, what to do.
- For a start, stop worrying about whether your mind is creating thoughts. Allow them to pass on through as you meditate.
- Develop an interest in the main object – pay attention to whatever you can feel of your belly as you breathe – not what you imagine of it, but the actual sensations.
- Use the noting method I describe in ‘Being Still’. By simplifying the thought reactions that happen with each distraction, it helps the attention to let go.
- Whatever distracts your attention from the main object of the breath, note it and immediately let go and return your attention to the main object – or note the next distraction, and the next, until you return to the breath. If it helps, treat it like a game of Wack-a-mole – how many distractions can you note as you follow your attention around your body. And always, as soon as you can, return to the belly as you breathe, and start again.
Meditation is a process of constantly starting anew. After all, like falling off a bike and getting on again, the only way we can build the skill is to always be starting again.
I hope this helps.
…………………………………………………………………………………….
Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
…………………………………………………………………………………
