This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: The Influence of Thinking; Wise Thinking (1 of 5) The Influence of thoughts. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: The Influence of Thinking; Dharmette: Wise Thinking (1 of 5) The Influence of Thoughts - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 18, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: The Influence of Thinking

So hello everyone. I am very happy to be back here with you all to sit here at IMC¹, and to welcome you into the IMC orbit, the IMC community, for this Monday morning. It's pretty special that I have this opportunity to be with you in this way, and it's pretty special that there's such a wonderful, rich sense of community that's forming just from the chats. For those of you not reading or writing in the chats, I just know that those chats exhibit a very warm, supportive, warm-hearted community that gathers for these meditations.

Probably for some of you, maybe for many of you, one of the challenges of meditation is having a wise relationship with thinking. Some of you maybe think a lot in meditation, and it becomes more time for thinking than it is time for meditation. Some of you might struggle with your thinking, and maybe even think that your thinking is an enemy, and something you have to fight against.

For this meditation, I would like you to be allowed to think. I'll offer some guidance through the sitting around thinking.

Certainly, you can be centered in your breathing while you're aware that you're thinking. You don't have to let go of your thoughts, but rather be curious about them. See them clearly for what they are. In a sense, stand away from them and look back at them: "Oh, this is thinking. Yes, this is what my thinking is about." Get to know your thinking. It might be a little bit like getting to know someone who's speaking a foreign language you don't understand. What are some of the things you can pick up about this person who's thinking? All along, breathing in, breathing out. Almost like breathing is the beat to the music, and the music is your thinking.

To begin, assume an appropriate posture for you that supports your ability to be both relaxed and alert. Alert and relaxed. No matter what posture you normally take, is there some way of straightening out the spine? Adjusting so that your shoulder blades are going a little bit down your back, so that your chest comes out a little bit in a way that might even look like a posture of confidence.

Gently lower your gaze and feel the effect that lowering your gaze has. Then, seeing what effect closing the eyes has, close the eyes. See what effect it has on you to slowly take some deeper breaths. Comfortably deep, with comfortably long exhales. Continue taking some deeper breaths.

And now, on the exhale, relax your body. Relax particular parts, or the whole body, and see what the effect is on you in that part of your body that relaxes. On your whole body, on your heart, on your mind. Then notice what shifts and what happens to you.

Let your breathing return to normal. Be with your normal breathing and see what's happening now as a consequence of normal breathing. And then, with normal breathing, continue the process of relaxing your body. Almost imagine that relaxing as a door that opens, or a slide you slide down. As the door is fully open, or as you come to the bottom of the slide, how are you? What's shifted and changed? Be open and receptive to what effect the relaxing has had.

So as you exhale, relaxing the belly. As you exhale, relaxing the chest. Relaxing the shoulders. Relaxing the muscles of your face. And again, seeing what effect it has on you.

On the exhale, relax the thinking mind. Calming the thinking mind. Support for calming the thinking mind is to be reassuring for it. Be a reassuring attendant to how the thinking mind might be anxious or upset. And then settle, centering yourself on the body breathing. Maybe the movements of the belly or the chest. Even following one full cycle of breathing in and breathing out. Resting with it, being receptive to it. What effect does it have on you? Feeling the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

With breathing as the rhythm, as the beat, also be aware of your mind thinking. You're allowed to think, but know you're thinking. As if thinking is happening between your breathing, around it. Just as you can hear the drumbeat together with the other music, know the beat of the breathing together with the music of thinking.

As you're aware of thinking, what effect does the thinking have on you? Does it project a mood or a tone? Does it contribute tension or relaxation? Are your thoughts harmless whispers, or are they intense demands for attention? And whatever way you're thinking, it's fine. Breathe with it. Breathe through them. Keep the beat going, a steady beat.

If you find yourself thinking, it's fine. Breathe with it. Allow your thinking to be there, as if breathing is a gentle wind blowing through the thoughts. Notice what influence, impact, or mood thinking casts upon you. How might that change if you see clearly your thinking, and the influence it has?

And then, in the last couple of minutes here before starting to end, how have these minutes of meditation affected your thinking? Has the nature of your thinking changed? Has the mood behind your thinking changed? Has the strength of thinking changed? Has the space, the stillness, or the silence around thoughts become bigger?

As we come to the end of the sitting, think now about the people in your life. The people that you care for. The people for whom you have friendly regard: friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, people you know about from books or talks that you've listened to. In whatever friendly regard you have for them, think about them. Think about what elicits friendliness, what you appreciate, and feel the influence of those thoughts on you.

Then, letting your kind regard open now as wide and expansive as possible, wishing that any benefit from this meditation can be for the welfare and happiness of others. May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free.

May all beings be safe, and may we contribute to that possibility. Thank you.

Dharmette: Wise Thinking (1 of 5) The Influence of Thoughts

So, hello and welcome on this Monday. We begin a new series and a new topic for the week. Maybe because I just came from meditating for a week, or teaching for a week on a retreat, somehow what surfaced for me to want to talk about is thinking. A very important part of a wise life is becoming wise about our thinking.

Often enough, I think for many people, thinking happens on automatic pilot. We just take our thinking for granted, assuming that this is how it should be. Thinking just churns out whatever thoughts it does, and we just go along for the ride. The thoughts that we have can have a huge influence on us. If we are just on automatic pilot, allowing those thoughts to be there and have that influence on us, it can be quite detrimental. Some psychologists believe that one of the leading causes for depression is rumination.

If we are thinking thoughts which are not pleasant, having one of those thoughts might just be a small drop of unpleasantness or have a small unpleasant effect on us. But if we have the same kind of thought over and over and over again throughout the day, it begins wearing us down. It begins filling us with the unpleasantness that comes along with them.

If those thoughts are self-criticism of any kind—if we're constantly having thoughts about our shame, our guilt, our inadequacy, or whatever it might be—the frequency of those thoughts is often never questioned. Maybe to some degree, all of those might be true, so that they warrant a few thoughts, reflection, and consideration. But there's no need to have thoughts like that repeatedly over and over and over again. If anybody talked as repeatedly to us as we might be talking to ourselves, we would wonder about their mental health, or they would seem like they're quite foolish. But we don't question the foolishness of ourselves having the same thought. Thinking can be automatic; we take it for granted that this is how things should be.

So, to start becoming mindful of thinking is hugely important. Some people have no clue how to do this. Some of this might be because we have a variety of different cognitive abilities—ways in which the mind cognizes and understands our life. Some of those can be almost preverbal or non-verbal ways of understanding and processing. However, there are also verbal ways. There is the inner voice, the inner speech that we have. Some people don't have an inner speech; they have inner images that they produce. But whether it's images or inner speech, it tends to follow the rules of our language. It tends to follow the story, the narrative that inner speech can make. So we need to become aware of how this works for us.

One interesting discovery is noticing whether you think mostly in images or mostly in words when you're actively thinking. Then, as you think, what influence does that thinking have on you? Is it uplifting? Is it energizing in a nice way? Is it agitating? Does it make you sad? Does it make you feel shame, embarrassment, or deflated? What is the influence that the thoughts have? Thoughts do not need to influence us. They do not need to come along with a mood that sets us up for how we have to feel. But it's hard to tease those apart.

I've sat quietly and thought about when my kids were young. A thought would come up about some danger they were in, that something might happen. Sometimes this image or idea would come up suddenly, and I could feel the influence it had was fear throughout my body. But there wasn't any imminent danger. Those thoughts, those images that I had, cast this incredible spell on my body. It doesn't have to be that way.

It's possible to have clear enough attention and recognition that, in a certain way, is stronger than the influence of the thoughts. It's like going to a horror movie. We feel afraid; there's fear. But if you look around the theater and see there are people eating popcorn, falling asleep, or doing what they do in theaters, then you're not absorbed in the images on the screen, and maybe the images don't affect you as much. Or if you start looking at the cinematographic techniques used in the movie, then you're not so caught in the story. You're not lost in it, and it doesn't have such a big effect. So we can step back and look at what influence thinking has.

The kind of inner voice, the images, and the way of thinking might be discursive². The way I use the word discursive might not be quite what the dictionary says. On one hand, it refers to just rambling thoughts, kind of going this way and that way, running around and thinking this and that thought, and just kind of being random. But I also think of it as carrying on a discourse, carrying on a conversation in our mind. It could be a conversation where we're judging ourselves and thinking about all that's bad. It could be a conversation about planning, imagining the future. It could be a conversation about what happened in the past, repeating it over and over again. It could literally be a conversation that you're imagining with another person, and you're even filling in their part of the conversation. So it's a relatively active and energetic way of having a conversation in the mind, jumping around from one topic to another, but still kind of carrying on a conversation.

So the inner voice is speaking, or the inner projector is projecting images of all this kind of stuff. If these are taken for granted, assuming this is the way it has to be, then we're really limiting our capacity, limiting the full richness of what our inner mental life can be about. Instead, recognize: "Oh, I'm having a conversation. I'm having a movie of what's going to come, and this is the influence it has. Wow, look at that influence."

What difference does it make to you when you recognize you're having a conversation? Recognize your inner voice is going along, and it has an effect on your mood, your energy, and even how you understand yourself. Is that influence necessary? Do we need to believe every thought? Do we need to be affected by every thought? Do we need to go to horror movies all the time? Not that all thoughts are scary, but they can be angry, or they can be critical. What influence do they have? What difference does it make when you know and recognize that influence?

This can be subtle, or it could be very, very strong. Even the subtle thoughts, if done for a long period of time, for hours, repeatedly coming back to it, can have a huge impact on our life and how we understand and affect ourselves. We don't have to believe every thought we have. We don't have to be under its influence emotionally or mood-wise. What we think does not have to agitate us or depress us.

We can just breathe with it, breathe through it. Breathing is a bit of a protection. It's not a way to stop thinking; it's a bit of protection so that we have a more balanced perspective of thinking, our involvement with our thoughts, and how they influence us. So we learn the art of breathing through the thinking mind, to breathe alongside it. That way, the mental energy doesn't all go into the thoughts. There's something else, another perspective, another balancing force while we're thinking.

I think this is one reason why some people like to go for a walk when they're really troubled. It's kind of like you go for a walk with yourself; it's almost like having a friend. Something else is going on rather than just being caught in your mind. It gives it a fresh perspective. It breaks up the hegemony³ of thinking that it has on us. It's the same thing with breathing. Breathing can be kind of like going for a walk with oneself, accompanying it, breathing through it. It can be a little gentle shield, or a gentle wind that blows away the influence that the thoughts might otherwise have on us.

Does that help us to see our thinking in a wiser way? Does that help us to reconsider, to question: Are these thoughts true? Are they useful? Is there a better way to think? Are there better thoughts to have, and what might those be? And if there are better thoughts to have, consciously, deliberately begin having those thoughts. You're allowed to have a sense of deliberateness with what you think, as opposed to just being the victim of whatever the mind wants to spew out. You can actually choose, maybe not for a long time, but you can break the chain and think about things which are reasonable and true, things which are uplifting and supportive, things that are wise. Take your mind for a walk so that the thinking mind, the discursive mind, doesn't have the upper hand.

In the next few days, I'll talk about different kinds of thinking, different ways of thinking. Because if we never really understood all the different aspects of thinking, then we might be very limited in how we think, and therefore more likely to be the victim of how we think. As we learn new ways of thinking, that can set us free in many ways. So thank you for this, and I look forward to continuing tomorrow.