How Do I ‘Watch My Thoughts’?
Hi Roger, I’m hoping you can help me with a confusing thing that happens when I meditate. I go to a local meditation group and the teacher told us to watch our thoughts while staying detached from it. This doesn’t make sense. How can I watch my thoughts with the same mind that’s thinking my thoughts, without thinking about them? Any input would help because I like the idea of being able to meditate but I’m finding it extremely confusing.
And my reply:
I think the problem is with the instruction you were given, that you should ‘watch the thoughts’ – it’s a little glib. It carries within it the assumption that a singular mind can watch itself – which is like trying to see your face without a mirror. But it becomes more clear when we make a distinction between two aspects of mind – those being our attention (a tool of our active thinking mind), and awareness (the passive watching mind).
The key to the idea of ‘watching your thoughts’ is in that distinction.
So briefly, let’s look at ‘the watching mind’ – awareness:
Awareness is our most basic sense of being alive. It is the subliminal unity of all our senses at once. Put simply, in being aware, we ‘know’ – we know what is seen, heard, felt, tasted, smelt, and intuited. Being the aggregation of all these senses, when we’re aware we know everything all at once, in the moment they happen.
Awareness doesn’t think or remember, or desire or fear. It simply knows in each moment, with no sense of discrimination, judgement, or desire.
So now lets look at ‘the thinking mind’, the main tool of which is our attention:
Within the field of what we’re aware of, in each moment we pay attention to various things within it. In this our attention is a kind of information scoop for our ‘thinking mind’. We pay attention to various things in order to gather information, so we can figure out how to react to them.
For example – right now you’re paying attention to these words. But at the same time, you’re subliminally aware of many other things around your attention– temperature, light, sounds and so on. And until you pay attention to all these other things, your awareness of them is passive.
So your attention is the interactive part of your mind. It flits from thing to thing, freezing some of them in place as concepts in your mind so you can think about them – to evaluate them and knit them into your living experience as something you like, don’t like, or don’t care about.
So then, to your teachers instruction that you should ‘watch your thoughts while staying detached from them’.
What we’re doing in meditation practice is, we’re training our attention to stop – to be still. That is, to let go of all the ‘information scooping’ it does throughout our daily life – to stop and rest on the breath. So, given that our attention takes up 90% of our mental energy each day, when we finally train it to stop, the mind naturally reallocates that mental energy to awareness.
But here’s the thing – just because our attention has gone still, doesn’t mean the mind stops thinking. The mind is always generating thought energy in one form or other – that’s what a mind does.
The difference is, with our active attention now dormant, and awareness enhanced, we know the thinking is happening, but we’re no longer actively participating in it. And we see the thoughts come and go very quickly – sort of passing through awareness like tiny dreams.
So it is indeed as if we’re watching our thoughts – without actively thinking them.
Our mind continues thinking, hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling and hearing – but we’re passively aware of these things – still, poised in a field of momentary awareness – detached from it all – in the ‘watching mind’.
But here’s the thing – we cannot consciously will this to happen.
The only way to get our attention to go still, and awareness to spread and strengthen, is to use meditation practice to train the mind to develop that particular skill – to build a habit of being still.
Only then does what your teacher suggested become a reality. Only then do we truly understand what is meant when we’re told, ‘to watch our thoughts while staying detached from them’.
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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
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