This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Knowing Thinking; Introduction to Mindfulness (16 of 25) Aware of Thoughts Simply. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Recognizing Thoughts; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (16 of 25) Simple Awareness of Thinking - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 05, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Recognizing Thoughts

Warm greetings. As I said, the electricity was out at home today, so it was a slow start and there were a lot of different things to take care of and figure out to get down here to IMC¹.

This is also continuing the series introducing mindfulness meditation, and now we come to the week on emotions. Partly, the idea in this sequence is that it's easier to be aware of emotions if we are aware of the body. The more we can be embodied in a direct, simple, and relaxed way, the easier it is to get some wisdom and clarity about how to be present for emotions without being excessively caught in them, involved in them, or troubled by them.

To be aware of the body, it can help to be aware of breathing. Of course, breathing doesn't work for everyone as a foundation, but the simple rhythm of breathing in and out, the simplicity of just breathing, with maybe relaxing on the exhale and relaxing at the top of the inhale, just so that the breathing is a little bit longer—just slightly longer, not forcefully, almost naturally—the breathing can be relaxing. It kind of settles the nervous system, it can even be reassuring at times, and it's a place to go where we can be present for our life without being caught in our thoughts.

So for today, I want to say that what makes mindfulness sacred—at least in my understanding of my approach to this word "sacred"—is when there's no outside; nothing is excluded from awareness. There's a way in which awareness has space, has room, has the ability, and has the wisdom to include everything within it. And of course, some emotions are quite difficult, but we discover how to include them in a caring and open way so that wisdom can arise. So that we can see that every emotion is in some way connected to something profound within. Sometimes the emotion might be maladaptive, adapted poorly, or connected to something that's really profound about ourselves.

The simple art of just recognizing we're thinking and not being pulled into thoughts is the art of mindfulness. We'll go through this in the course of the week, but for today, let's keep it simple: recognizing and leaving it at that. Just recognizing when we're thinking, keeping it super simple, just recognizing, and then returning to the breathing, returning to the body.

So gently assume your meditation posture and close your eyes. In whatever way is grounding for you here and now in the body, let yourself be grounded. If that's the breathing, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. If there's a more direct way to the body than through breathing, you might use that. For breathing in deeply, allow for a long relaxation as you exhale.

Letting your breathing return to normal, continue on the exhale relaxing your body. Maybe different parts of the body. Relaxing the thinking mind, whatever tension or pressure is associated with thinking—physical sensations of pressure, tension, contraction, or tightness. On the exhale, imagine your mind is like the surface of a lake. As you exhale and relax, the waves on the lake flatten out, and the lake surface becomes calm.

And now, in the simplest possible way, the easiest possible way: if you're thinking, recognize it as such. Maybe with a simple word: "thinking." How the word is said or imagined in the mind is easeful and matter-of-fact. The recognition is free of any attitude about thinking, or preferences around thinking, or opinions about it being there. Almost like you hear a bird singing in the trees nearby, you hear or know there are thoughts happening. And then begin again with your breathing.

The exercise this morning is to discover how simply you can recognize when you're thinking, and then begin again with your breathing. Maybe on every exhale, you recognize your thinking, and then begin again with the inhale. If thinking is in the background and it's easy to stay with your breathing, there is no need to recognize that you're thinking. Only if you lose touch with breathing, or if the thinking predominates.

Recognize if you're thinking. The exercise is to recognize that as simply as you can, and then to begin again with your breathing.

And then, to bring this meditation session to an end, first, for a few moments, continue the exercise of recognizing your thoughts simply as thinking. The content of the thoughts for this exercise doesn't matter. Just know that you're thinking, whether it's in words or images.

Then, bring to mind people in your life. Maybe people for whom, for these few moments, you can remember, think about, or recall with the same simplicity. Just simply know them without any extra ideas, preferences, desires, or aversions. Simply know them.

And maybe with the idea that this simplicity of knowing, remembering, and thinking about them is a means by which goodwill² can flow in an uncomplicated way—simple goodwill, well-wishing, care, love, and kindness. May these people that you think about be well. May they be happy. May they be safe. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

And may your goodwill in its simplest form—so simple there's no need right now to act on it—spread out across the world in all directions. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (16 of 25) Simple Awareness of Thinking

Hello and welcome to this Monday morning's introduction to mindfulness meditation. We're now on the fourth week, focusing on thinking. We just had a meditation before this that I was happy to do. I think I arrived a little bit unsettled, and maybe I spoke a little bit in a confused way in the introduction about what we're doing this week. There was no electricity at home, and other issues going on at home, so to get down here this morning, there were a lot of steps involved, and in the dark.

So, thinking. There are not a few meditators who feel challenged by their thinking, and there are not a few people who are challenged because of their thinking. Some people are troubled by the fact that they're thinking in meditation and feel like that's wrong, kind of trying to bat their thoughts away. And some people are not troubled by the fact that they're thinking, but they're troubled by what they're thinking. Thoughts can sometimes have a huge impact on our mood or state of mind. So, in mindfulness meditation, we're looking to become wise about thinking.

We're not trying to get rid of thinking, and we're not trying to judge our thoughts; we don't have to be critical of them in a certain way. We're trying to understand how to be with thinking in a way that serves us the best, that is respectful to ourselves and our thoughts, and that allows us to source our thinking in some of the deepest places within.

This language of "sourcing," I think it's maybe an industrial term. When you source material, you're looking for the material with which to build something or make something, the place to make it. But we can do that with ourselves and our thinking. We source our thinking. Where is the source from which we're thinking? Sometimes the source, the origin, the place of thinking, is not really deeply connected within, even though the content of the thoughts affects all of who we are. It's possible to find a source within, to source our thinking in some profound place. If we think from that place, it will have a very different effect on our mood, our state of mind, and our relationship to this world of ours.

The way to become wise about thinking and include it in mindfulness begins by understanding that we're not going to be the enemy of thinking. Thinking is part of what we can be mindful of. This is the advantage of the kind of mindfulness practice we're teaching here: we're not limiting our attention only to breathing. Some meditation techniques, which are quite effective in their own way, focus only on a narrow subset of our human experience. Sometimes people use that to get concentrated and absorbed in that subset, like just the breathing itself. But in doing so, we're not being inclusive of the full range of what it means to be a human being and the full range of human experience. The brilliance of Buddhist mindfulness practice is that it can be inclusive of everything. Nothing is outside of its range.

As long as we're being mindful, there's a place of freedom. We can find freedom, we can find balance, equanimity³, and wisdom if we're mindful of anything. If our mindfulness is instead shaped by our emotions or shaped by our thinking, then we don't find the same degree of freedom and wisdom.

So, our life is not sourced in our thinking. Rather, we discover a different way of holding our thinking, holding our emotions, and holding our bodily experience. Over time, as we begin learning about how to be mindful, there comes a point where we feel and recognize that everything we experience can be held by mindfulness, held in awareness. Everything is something we can be mindful of. Because of that, we understand that the act of mindfulness, of awareness, is a certain kind of freedom in and of itself. The act of mindfulness is not being entangled, caught, or reactive. It's just a clear, simple recognition: this is what is happening.

I remember when I first came to this understanding. At first, it was theoretical: "Wow, in theory, I could have this mindfulness that I was learning directed at, or inclusive of, everything in my human experience. And if that's the case, then I can be free in all experiences." I became so happy; it was kind of like a revelation for me to say, "Wow, to be able to live with that freedom... that's possible. Now I understand what it takes."

That gave me a lot of enthusiasm to really rely on mindfulness, having faith in it as opposed to having faith in my thoughts or my beliefs. I stopped having faith in thinking worrisome thoughts about the future. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about how challenging things were going to be in the future for me. I no longer had so much faith in reviewing the past and the resentments I had, or in the idea that reviewing and reliving them had tremendous value. Of course, I didn't actively think that way, but I was behaving that way; that was what the mind was doing. When I really started to have faith in mindfulness, I began to understand how I had invested myself in all these areas of life—how to be, how to think, what to think about—as if those were the important places to live. I learned to shift that investment to something else: just mindfulness.

We want to learn how to be mindful of thinking, not just to let go of it. Part of that is so we can have a different relationship to thoughts—to hold thoughts lightly and openly without being caught in them. It's also because our thinking is often just the tip of an iceberg. Thinking is frequently very deeply connected to other parts of ourselves. If we're lost in our thoughts, caught up in our thoughts, or think that navigating and negotiating the world only happens through thinking, then we're just riding on the tip of that iceberg. There's a whole big realm below that tip to explore and discover. That's when we enter into the big fullness of who we are.

One example of this, which I was trying to say earlier but didn't quite manage, is that it's easier to be aware of thinking when you know how to be present for emotions. It's also easier to be aware of emotions if you know how to be aware of thinking, because the two are so deeply intertwined. It's fascinating to watch how we think certain thoughts and the emotion follows; other times we have certain emotions and the thinking gets changed accordingly. Learning to see these more clearly, to see that influence back and forth, is a way of stepping back and not being caught in that exchange.

It's easier to be aware of emotions and also thinking if we know how to be mindful of the body. The body is a rich area of attention. The body is not just a corporeal physical event; it's deeply connected to our deep life. And then, it's easier to do all of it from the simplicity of breathing. Breathing is a way of protecting ourselves from being swept away in endless thoughts that spin and spin and spin.

So for today, the exercise and suggestion was to experiment with how simply you could know that you're thinking. "Simple" doesn't mean that you're condoning, participating in, or condemning your thoughts. It just means you step back. Almost like you take two steps back and recognize, "Oh, that is thinking." It's a recognition where you are not caught up in the thoughts. We're using a kind of thought to recognize that we're thinking. It might seem like a paradox or confusing, but the thought of recognition is really simple. It is not sticky; you are not caught in or stuck with whatever you're thinking.

This is a powerful exercise if you can get the hang of it. One thing that might help you with this is to begin noticing whether you think in words or think in images. Some people predominantly do one or the other. Some people do a combination of them, maybe at different times. Some people have never even considered this for themselves! But if you can clearly recognize, "I think more in words," ask yourself: where's the source of those words in the mind? Where do you have a sense those words are being spoken in the mind? If you have a location, then you can step back and note, "Oh, I'm thinking. I'm thinking words." If you're mostly thinking through images, where are those being projected? Maybe a little bit in front of you. You can step back and note, "Oh, thinking. I'm thinking images. That's what's happening."

As you go through your life today, look for opportunities on a regular basis to recognize thinking, and recognize whether you're thinking in words or images. See how simply you can recognize that you're thinking without being caught in it, almost like you've stepped away and are looking back without being in the midst of the fray.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you and being part of this again tomorrow.