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Guided Meditation - Exploring the Edges of the Wandering Mind; Exploring the Edges of the Wandering Mind - Andrea Fella
The following talk was given by Andrea Fella at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on November 24, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Guided Meditation - Exploring the Edges of the Wandering Mind
Whatever practice you do with mindfulness meditation, we ultimately open to whatever is happening in our experience. More than a guided meditation, what I'd like to offer this morning is a little reflection to drop in before the meditation to encourage a particular kind of curiosity about your experience.
However you begin your meditation—whether with a primary object, an anchoring of the attention with the body or breath, or with a more open, receptive exploration of just what is happening, noticing how the attention shifts from one object to another—you will all, at some point, experience the mind losing mindfulness and returning to mindfulness.
The moment that mindfulness returns, we often judge ourselves. We think it's a problem that the mind has been wandering. And yet, in that moment when you notice that it had been wandering, you are mindful; you are already aware.
That is one of the things I'd like to encourage you to recognize. Settle into your practice in whatever way you normally begin. It may be sooner, or it may be later, that you notice you're back. It may be recognized by a sense of "I've been thinking" or "I haven't been paying attention to whatever my primary object is." [Laughter]
See if there can be a little curiosity about the experience of the mindfulness returning. It may be a little bit after the fact that you notice it. Sometimes we automatically yank our attention back to our primary object without really taking a moment to notice what it means for the mindfulness to have returned. What is that experience? What is the experience of mindfulness itself? And what is that mindfulness noticing? Often it's noticing thinking, or maybe if it's a little bit later in the process, it's noticing judging.
One exploration I began to be interested in was seeing if I could notice the moment that mindfulness returned. Now, that's not exactly something we can "do," but there can be an intention or a curiosity about that moment which begins to allow the mind to connect with it a little sooner.
So, whenever you notice that mindfulness has returned, see if there can be a curiosity about what that is like. Mindfulness is back. Celebrate that moment. You didn't even have to do it; it just happened.
Notice what you're aware of in that moment. Take a moment to check in with what is happening before you automatically pull yourself back to whatever object you use. If you have a primary object, just take a moment to notice what had been happening and what is happening now. If there's thinking happening, sometimes it can easily be released, but we don't have to push it away. Just the recognition: "Oh, thinking is happening."
If you're exploring a more open or receptive awareness, then just continue noticing what's happening in that moment. If you're practicing more of a directed attention to the breath or body, just give yourself a few moments to take in the experience of mindfulness. This moment when mindfulness returns is one of the best moments to get a flavor for the experience of mindfulness—what it's like to be mindful. And you don't have to hold on to it. Just continue with your practice and explore the possibility of opening to that moment, noticing what's there.
If you do use a primary object, you might also explore—rather than pulling the attention back to the breath or body—seeing if that primary object can come into the mindfulness that's already there. A receiving of the breath, a receiving of the body, a receiving of whatever experience is happening in the moment.
Let yourself settle into your body and your posture. Relaxation is often very supportive for whatever form of meditation you practice. See if the body can soften and relax. Connect to experience in this moment. For some, that may be connecting to the experience of breathing, receiving the experience of breathing, or receiving the experience of the body.
At some point, you will notice that the mind had been lost, not connecting to experience. That moment of noticing—what's that like? What's it like for mindfulness to return? And what is mindfulness knowing in that moment? Thinking, perhaps? Take a moment to have some curiosity about the experience of mindfulness returning, and simply continue with your practice.
Exploring the Edges of the Wandering Mind
As I said earlier, with mindfulness practice we ultimately explore opening to everything that's happening in our experience. Whatever is happening in our bodies (body sensations, sights, sounds, smells) and whatever is happening in our mind (emotions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs).
It seems useful as a meditator to begin to get curious about those patterns or habits that happen a lot for us. For myself, aversion was one of my strong habits. It was actually my first meditation object—noticing anger. I spent quite a bit of time in the first few months of my practice just having some curiosity: "What is it like when anger is happening?"
These habits and patterns of mind can be really useful to explore with mindfulness. We can learn a lot about our own habits. We all have our own flavors—my favorite pattern of aversion and anger, for instance. We all have our own flavors of things that happen to us a lot.
Then there are some human patterns, things that happen to all of us. These are also useful to get curious about, to explore, to begin to understand something around what's happening with these human patterns. One of those human patterns that we really begin to notice as we meditate is that our minds wander. We sit down, we explore the possibility of staying with our experience in the present moment, and our minds wander. We get caught by something or other.
There's so much we can learn by being curious about this as opposed to judging ourselves for the fact that it's happening.
We could call it "wandering mind," but sometimes it feels more like a charge out of the present moment. The mind doesn't wander; it leaps or charges out when there's perhaps a thought, a pattern, or a memory that arises with some emotional charge. Often our mind picks up on that and leaps out of the present, starting to think about it quite quickly. Other times it feels like a wander—the mind maybe gets a little bit less connected to the present moment and kind of drifts out. That's another way it can feel.
It can also be just active reflection—thoughts that are coming up about the day. Sometimes the mind can wander without words; it gets lost into states of mind. For instance, we can get lost into a state of calm and not be aware of it.
Basically, the wandering mind is a state of low or non-mindfulness. Mindfulness has disappeared. When we say "the mind wandered," what we're really saying is that mindfulness disappeared. We usually didn't decide for that to happen. It's not something we said, "Okay, I'm going to stop being mindful now and think." It just happens.
Likewise, the moment when we remember, when mindfulness comes back, that's the moment we usually recognize in meditation. We recognize, "I have been thinking," or "The mind has been lost." That's often the way we frame it to ourselves: "I've been thinking" or "I'm not mindful." But that moment of recognizing that we haven't been mindful is mindfulness in that moment.
It is a really interesting moment to begin to be curious about. We could call this talk "Curiosity About the Edges of the Wandering Mind." We can begin to be curious about where mindfulness slips out, and we can begin to be curious about what happens when mindfulness comes back. This exploration begins to help us learn and understand something about what's happening when the mind is wandering.
We can't make ourselves stop wandering any more than we usually decide to have the mind wander. We can't decide to stop the wandering; it just happens. It just re-arises. Sometimes the mindfulness returns kind of "behind our backs." Often we notice that we have been thinking, or we are in the middle of thinking—thoughts are still happening when mindfulness returns.
But sometimes, as the practice deepens a little bit more, I've noticed that the mind can wander and come back, and I'm mindful. I'm with whatever experience is there, and then it's like, "Wait a minute, there were some thoughts happening a few moments ago." There can be a wander and comeback that we miss entirely. If we're not really clearly mindful, we wouldn't even notice that the mind had wandered because the mindfulness returned, and we were simply noticing what was happening when it returned. We missed that gap where the mindfulness was gone, only knowing it after the fact because we remember what had been happening in that gap.
There is a lot we can learn about ourselves through being curious about the wandering mind. We begin to learn about our habits and patterns. This is one of the instructions around thinking: often when we wake up into thinking, we begin to be curious about the familiar patterns of thinking that we have. We're less interested perhaps in the details of what we've been thinking about and more about the flavor of the thinking. Is it planning, remembering, judging, fantasizing, arguing? We can begin to get curious about the habits of mind. We can also begin to see where the mind tends to go when it wanders. We can recognize this in the moment that mindfulness returns.
Another thing we learn—and we don't think this is good news at first, but it can begin to be something that gets very interesting—is that we see that we don't have ultimate control over our minds. We sit down to meditate, we explore the possibility of being present, and without our choice, the mind wanders. We did not do that. And without our control, mindfulness returns.
This is actually evidence for the teaching of anatta, or not-self1. A lot of times we think about the sense of self as being the one who controls, decides, chooses, and aims. This experience of the mind wandering and returning points out that when we think we might have control, we don't. It's not a mistake. It's not a failing that the mind wanders when we're meditating. It's the nature of our minds. It's what has been conditioned. Our habits and patterns of getting caught by a thought have been what has happened.
So the mind is wandering lawfully. It's wandering based on conditions, based on what we have practiced in the past, where our minds have tended to go. The loss of mindfulness is something that's dependent on conditions, and the return of mindfulness is also dependent on conditions. The more we practice and cultivate mindfulness, the more we can notice that moment of mindfulness returning. The more we value mindfulness, the more we recognize it when it comes back.
We tend to judge ourselves for the fact that we don't have control over our minds. We judge ourselves for the wandering mind. We think, "I should be able to do better. Why can't I do this?" That very judgment, that sense of "I'm not doing this right," is in response to the uncontrollability of the mind.
The teaching on not-self is not an obvious teaching in some ways. We feel like we're a self, and because of that, we look at our experience through the perspective of "me," of who I am, of what I do. It's a self-reinforcing experience. We experience the sense of control over certain things, and we explore experience from that perspective. We don't tend to look for evidence that disconfirms the sense of self. [Laughter] We could almost call it one of the strongest confirmation biases out there: we believe there's a sense of self, and we look for things that reinforce that belief.
The sense of self is a view, a belief—often a sense of stability of a "me," of an "I," of "one who has control over what's happening." We find things that confirm that belief, but we dismiss or don't notice that there are many experiences that actually point to this understanding that there's not an "I," a "me" traveling through time. It's just conditions unfolding. The loss of mindfulness is one of those conditions. The re-arising of mindfulness is one of those conditions.
So we can have some curiosity around the loss and return of mindfulness. Maybe the recognition that mindfulness has returned could be, "Oh, seeing not-self," instead of judging, "I'm not doing this right."
In terms of noticing the edges of the wandering mind, the easiest place to explore that is when mindfulness returns. It's also possible to begin to explore the slipping out of mindfulness. That comes with some practice. But mostly I want to explore noticing that moment of remembering, because there's a lot to see there too.
The first thing is developing a skillful relationship with it. That moment when mindfulness returns is a moment to celebrate, in a way, because in the moments before, we were not connected with mindfulness. When we're not connected with mindfulness, our habits and patterns tend to be running the show. When mindfulness is arising, we have a little bit more capacity to recognize when skillful things are arising and when unskillful things are arising. The very exploration of mindfulness helps to support and reinforce the skillful and to weaken the unskillful.
When I began to explore this practice of "Can I notice when mindfulness returns?", it was like it didn't matter if my mind wandered a hundred times in a 40-minute sitting. It didn't matter because I was curious about the moment of mindfulness returning. Having that curiosity helped to diminish the judgment that I had about the mind wandering.
It also acts as a pointer: if we notice it as it arises, we see that that moment of mindfulness was effortless. You didn't do it. It arose, and mindfulness is there. It's effortless. It's a pointer to how light of a touch can happen with mindfulness.
We can get familiar with the experience of mindfulness there. What's it like to be mindful? It can feel like the light is coming on. There can be a lingering memory of what it was like before. It's not exactly that we're aware in the moments before in terms of being mindful—there is a form of awareness, consciousness, perception, and feeling happening—but the mindfulness, the awareness that we're aware, has returned.
In that moment, there's a lingering memory of what the quality of the mind was like in the moments before and what the quality of the mind is like now. It may feel now like there's a brightness, [Laughter] a clarity, a connection with experience. In the moments before, it might feel like a whirl, or a swirl, or being pulled into a rabbit hole. We can get a sense of what it's like to be mindful.
We usually cultivate mindfulness through what might be called "prompted mindfulness." We remind ourselves to be mindful through connecting to the breath or body sensation, knowing what's happening. Sometimes we use the noting practice as a way to connect. We're prompting mindfulness.
There's also what's called "unprompted mindfulness," which is this moment of mindfulness returning. We can cultivate mindfulness through recognizing those moments.
This is a great practice for daily life. This moment when we recognize that we're mindful happens so much during our day, but often we don't notice it consciously. We may notice something and then start thinking about what we've noticed, missing that mindfulness has returned. So this curiosity about "What is it like for mindfulness to return?" can happen in daily life as well.
Set an intention. Put a note on your mirror where you brush your teeth in the morning that says, "Try to remember to notice the moments of mindfulness returning today." Just as a prompt. At first, you may recognize it a couple of times, maybe once or twice a day. But don't give up after a day or two. Keep going. Keep trying, because the recognition of it helps us to recognize it happening more often. It happens way more than we think.
What I found is that this practice in daily life begins to almost pull a thread of mindfulness through the day that is effortless. Sometimes it lasts a little while; it's like riding a scooter—it just goes for a few moments, and then you're off to something else. You don't have to try to hold on to it in daily life.
In sitting practice, when you've noticed that moment of mindfulness returning, you can then notice what's happening in that moment. Notice the quality of awareness, notice what it was like a moment before, notice the difference. Then, if you're doing a directed practice, see if you can explore allowing the experience that you're focused on (breath or body) to come into awareness, as opposed to directing the attention—allowing a receptive quality of orienting. It's more like attunement. It's like a radio receiver: we attune to a particular channel or station and then let that experience come to us.
This can be a really useful exploration in terms of beginning to be aware of thinking. Often when the mind wanders, it wanders into thinking. If we have a relationship with that moment of thinking—"Bad! Not supposed to be doing that while meditating!"—and come back to the breath, it can often have a yanking quality.
In that moment of noticing that the mind has been thinking, I like to do an almost Aikido move. Give yourself a little bit of exploration of what that mindfulness has arisen with. Mindfulness has arisen with thinking. The main question I find useful to explore there is: How has this thinking affected my experience now?
Thoughts are so powerful; they shape our experience. They are very strong shapers of what happens in our bodies and minds. The mind has wandered, and we come back. What's happening now has been shaped by what had been happening in the moments before. This is cause and effect. A thought of a partner that we've been arguing with arose; the memory of the argument arose; the frustration, the anger, the confusion arose. And then mindfulness returns. And what's happening? Frustration, anger, confusion. The mind has been shaped by that. It's not a mistake. It's the nature of conditioning.
So in that moment when mindfulness returns, notice that you're aware again. Then explore: "How is your experience now, having been thinking?"
Sometimes I think of this as the "What planet am I on?" instruction. Mindfulness wakes up and it's like, "I'm on a new planet. Where am I?" Have some curiosity about the landscape of where mindfulness has returned. You can explore that for just a few moments—give yourself an opportunity to know what has happened there before turning the attention back to your primary object. If we go right back to the primary object, unwittingly we can be bringing the anger, the confusion, and the frustration with us and not really clearly recognizing it.
Give yourself a moment to know what's happening. Sometimes feeling into that is really what's appropriate in that moment—feeling the body, settling back with body sensations and the breath. But give yourself a few moments; don't just yank back. It's more like an arc back to your primary object. You notice what has been happening. What's here now? What's been shaped? What planet are you on? [Laughter]
One of the great things about that instruction is that when we've stopped judging ourselves for the wandering mind, sometimes we notice when mindfulness returns that the mind is more calm than it was before the mind wandered. This happened to me more often than I expected earlier in my practice. I was completely surprised when I started to notice this. When mindfulness returned, there was calm, there was ease, there was balance of mind.
It happened way more than I thought. When I was judging myself for not being mindful, that obliterated the calm. You've already made the mind not calm by judging yourself. But when there's not the judgment, you might begin to notice a little more calm, a little more ease, a little more settledness. And then you can be with that. The breath can come back into that calm or that ease. [Laughter]
Just a few things about the other side of the equation: where the mindfulness gets lost.
I'd like to encourage you to be curious about where the mind gets lost. Often at the beginning, this will happen in retrospect. As mindfulness returns, we'll notice the habits and patterns—the flavors of where the mind gets caught (judgment, fantasy, planning, remembering).
We also may notice, especially in daily life, that our mind gets lost in particular activities. Maybe at the end of the day, be curious: Where was there mindfulness? Where wasn't there mindfulness? Maybe you notice there are big "sinkholes" of mindfulness in your day. You walk into your office, and mindfulness doesn't return until you're leaving. Or you're focused at the desk, but as soon as you start talking to somebody, there's a sinkhole of mindfulness.
Having some curiosity about where you lose mindfulness through the day helps. Trying to remember to prompt mindfulness just adds work to our day, and we basically give up. [Laughter] But if you explore it from the perspective of noticing the moments that mindfulness returns, and also noticing where mindfulness tends to get lost, it becomes interesting.
Maybe you've gotten to the place where you can be fairly mindful while you're driving into work, and then you lose it as soon as you get out of your car. You begin to notice the places where you lose the mindfulness. Then there can be some curiosity—not trying to muscle through to be mindful in those moments, but just curious: "What happens here? I've arrived. I'm mindful. Let's see if I can notice the moment that the mindfulness begins to get caught by something. What is it that catches the mind?"
This is where we can begin to see the weakening of mindfulness—mindfulness starting to get "wobbly." As we recognize what it's like to be mindful, we can begin to have some sense of the mindfulness starting to get a little weak. There's a "more or less mindful place," a phrase Joseph Goldstein2 uses a lot. It's a place where thoughts tend to come in and grab us and pull us away.
Another place that can be really interesting to be curious about is beginning to notice when the attention shifts. We notice this in sitting meditation, and sometimes we judge ourselves for it, or we judge the things that disturbed us. We're paying attention to our breath, and a motorcycle goes by, and automatically we are hearing the motorcycle. The attention has shifted.
We often don't notice that the attention has shifted. We are actually aware for a moment about the motorcycle before we jump on a thought about it and start judging the person riding it. Before that happens, there's the moment of the attention shifting and the noticing of the sound.
That noticing the shift of attention can be a really interesting exploration. In sitting meditation, we might notice a shift to a body sensation that feels uncomfortable, or a shift to a thought that has arisen. We can begin to be curious about this shift. Not noticing that the attention has shifted is probably the primary reason why the mind wanders. We don't notice the attention has shifted to a thought, or we notice briefly and then don't notice that we've leaped on it.
If we can be curious about the shift of attention, that's a really interesting place to begin to notice where the mind may tend to get caught. And if we can notice the shift of attention, the mind may not wander because we've noticed it. There's another object that we can know. There's no experience in our bodies and minds that we cannot be mindful of.
The shift of attention can happen in different ways. It can happen from one specific object to another (from breath to sound), but it can also happen from a specific object like the breath to a more expansive object, like calm. As the mind settles, sometimes we lose mindfulness when the attention shifts from attending directly to the sensations of the breath to attending to the state of the mind—the quality of ease or settledness. We can lose awareness because the mind is not clearly recognizing that the attention has shifted to a different kind of object entirely—a more broad or diffuse experience.
When the mind experiences something it's not familiar with, the mind tends to wander. A practice that I've explored is just noticing, "Something's happening that I'm unfamiliar with. I don't have a name for it. I can't even describe it. Maybe I can know that it's not clear." That kind of recognition can help us to hang out with it long enough to begin to learn something about it, to begin to recognize its quality or flavor.
Mostly, I hope to encourage curiosity. This exploration around the wandering mind is really an exploration of what the mind does. Some of the explorations I've described are not so much something you do—like noticing the moment mindfulness returns—it's more of a recognition. We can set the intention to recognize that moment, but it won't be something that you can consciously say, "Okay, right now I'm going to notice mindfulness returning," because if we're doing that, mindfulness is already back.
It's something that begins to be revealed to us. It's a recognition of what's happening. Even having it described like this can support the possibility of seeing something that you might not have thought was important or useful.
So mostly I hope to encourage curiosity. Watch your minds. Thank you for your attention.