“Oh you meditate — I could not do that because I cannot stop my thoughts, my mind is constantly thinking.”
The truth is that if you were stop your thoughts completely, you would be dead. And that is not the intention of meditation. We can not escape the mind and remove our thoughts. Meditation is not about stopping your mind from thinking, but about taking a moment to step away from our reaction pattern of thoughts, feelings, and actions and become aware of our mind patterns from a balcony view. Meditation can give ourselves a breather to be able to use our mind more powerfully and direct our thought patters and mind for greater happiness and balance.
The mind constantly receives, processes, and responds to inputs from our life. To understand our behaviors, thoughts, or feelings we need to understand what inputs our mind has been fed with. Checking in and being in tune with our body is important so that we can tell when our heart raises, when our thoughts become negative, or when we feel pressured and stressed. Sometime physical feelings are easier to acknowledge. The stiff shoulders, the tight jaw, and the heavy chest all tells you something about the current inputs and your reactions to them. They are a great signal to start understanding what is going on in our mind.
What happened today that makes my chest tight? What in my relationship this week has made me feel more emotional? What has changed over the last month that has made me smile a lot more?
Meditation gives us a great opportunity to stop new inputs and check in with the body how it is feeling. When we observe our thoughts, we are able to understand how these inputs are affecting us. In meditation I find it helpful to acknowledge a thought and label it and before moving back to focusing on my breath. For example, if I during a meditation keep coming back to my to-do list at work, or analyzing an argument I had with my partner, I will acknowledge that stress at work, and my partner are what is occupying my mind currently. This makes it easer for me to go back and focus on the mediation, and I can act on the labeled thoughts after the meditation. Most of the time, we are not fully aware of what is occupying our mind and his process can help us become more in tune with ourselves.
So, instead of seeing meditation as a process to stop the mind and our thoughts we should see meditation as a way to pause new inputs for just a short while and allow ourselves to check in on how the current inputs in your life are making us think, feel, and behave. By having this awareness, we can take actions that serves us better and will help us to be more present and further appreciate the beauty in our lives.
