When I first started practicing meditation, I kept waiting for something super profound to happen. Like a life-transforming experience with the divine or some magical insight. It took me years to calm that expectation down. After a few years of practice, I was with a friend who said something that would normally trigger me and send me into that overthinking mode you dissect here. But at that particular moment there was this slight pause--a gap between my thought and my next action. And I had a realization that that gap was meditation doing its thing.
I love your steps listed here because they don't require years of practice. I especially liked the idea of our hands (and the rest of our body) having a sort of intelligence. And how the everyday phrases we use--grasp a concept, get a handle on things, etc... signal that at some point we made this connection between body and mind. I also liked how you pushed this all beyond simply self-healing to using the reclaimed power to "power effective action."
Thanks for these reflections. Yeah, I think it always feels wonderful when we see that the work we put into meditation has just completely changed our baseline way of operating in the world. Sometimes the most mundane-seeming changes can actually have the most dramatic impacts on the quality of our day to day lives and the quality of how we show up for other people in the world
I really like this image of the gap. I would describe it in a similar way. I am very curious in your perspective how this gap has evolved? I wonder if you have ever felt like this gap had become too large and sometimes unsurmountable.
I am not sure I have found it unsurmountable. At times, I have found it large in the sense that conversations (both internal and external) seem to really slow down at times where, at least externally, it can become uncomfortable. Generally, the evolution (while far from perfect) has been about ceasing to notice it at all. It just is. Before, I would be amazed and get lost in my amazement. Now, I rarely notice unless someone points it out, or I realize that I haven't yet responded to a question. But maybe I am missing your description of unsurmountable? Where have you experienced that?
Great Article! Can't wait for part 2. I think having an outlet for our attention besides our thought is wonderful gift. So many people don't even notice the haze of thoughts buzzing in their heads incessantly.
It feels like fate that you've written about this topic now. I have what they call adhd and my mind is always buzzing with activity. I've heard people say 'don't engage with your thoughts just observe them and let them pass by'. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that really means and how to practice it in a note or post.
My own understanding of it is like being a little sleepy or less conscious so you don't have the energy to concentrate on the thoughts. So they're just running past in the background like a tv in the other room. But not engaging with thoughts seems to be a thing in meditation. And isn't meditation about being more awake/alert/conscious?
So, my view is that learning to observe your thoughts and let them pass by is one particular skill that is useful to learn but it’s not the be all and end all. To me it is more like a foundation for deeper work than than an end in itself.
What learning to be able to observe your thoughts without attaching to them does is:
a) demerge your identity with the thoughts. If you are observing them, then it removes the illusion that they are who you are
b) increases your general control over where you place your attention. If you can choose to keep coming back to eg your breath, then you can gradually learn to put your attention wherever you want (including keeping it *on* your thoughts in a conscious way as in some of the exercises in this article.
The two things you don’t want to be doing imo though are:
a) just trying to blank out the thoughts from consciousness
b) create the sense of some separate “observer self” who is doing the observing (actually doing this can be a very useful intermediary exercise for some people as it does help get some freedom from their grasp. And I should mention that some pretty serious spiritual systems include this as an end point. But my view - which coheres with my interpretation of most Buddhist systems - is that you don’t want to have a sense of a separate observed self, but rather allow awareness to simply arise as a feature of the observed thing itself. You say say the thought becomes aware of itself, or starts to become illuminated by its own capacity for awareness - rather than being observed by an outside self.
Once you have mastered to at least some basic degree being able to keep your attention on a simple chosen object eg breath, that’s when you can start allowing more difficult objects like thought itself or even just general open awareness of the whole cognitive-sensory-affective-perceptual field to become your object of attention.
That’s when you can start holding thoughts and the underlying sensations behind thoughts in deep awareness in the manner described in this article so that you can start to see how they are constructed and how they might be deconstructed.
So to summarise - learning eg breath meditation where you observe thoughts and just come back to the breath can be a useful foundational skill. But the skills learned from it can be fruitfully applied to turning thoughts (and other mental phenomena) into the mediation object themselves in order to gain insight and liberation
Very interesting points about what one shouldn't be doing. Turns out I've been kindof doing both. Seems like it's best to train the 'return to breath/object muscle' first which then increases the capacity and flexibility to detach from the thoughts and notice around it.
Really appreciate your detailed reply and explanation. Thankyou!
This was a great read. I really enjoyed the phenomenological description of thinking. This is something I have considered often. When you observe your thoughts and you can see them forming and start feeling for them.
I have this image of a slow boiling soup, where you can catch some swirls of thoughts coming up to the surface, and see them without getting verbalized. If you catch them there you can see them dissolve without forming. And you see many of these at the same time. Makes me think about the “will to power” from Nietzsche.
Seeing thoughts like this makes me wonder what does it even mean to think, if it is allowing them to surface or if it is something else.
And now thinking about thoughts and feeling a together.. it is a bit strange because feelings can be sometimes like this. Not immediate hijacking, but a slow process that… feels like nothing?
Following this image, I also have the experience of the other way around, grabbing a thought that for some reason goes down the soup, and if you grab it can go down with it and found some real mess.
"When I got to know it through awareness we became very good friends."
That word "know" is doing a lot of work. He doesn't say "analyze" or "understand." Just... know.
Your piece lands on something similar from a different direction. The hands-as-bridge insight isn't just practical. The Cambridge research you cite about language evolving from the grammar of grasping suggests something deeper: the thinking mind and the body's felt-sense aren't separate channels. They're the same channel running at different speeds.
Buddhist contemplative practice has a name for what you call "being mode." Practitioners call it "rigpa" in Tibetan, or basic awareness. Not the awareness of something, but awareness itself, prior to the division into thinker and thought. The interesting thing is that most entry points into it are, like your hand and foot exercises, somatic. The body seems to be the most reliable door.
The question that comes up for me: is the body useful because it's a distraction from thought, or because it's actually where awareness lives most naturally?
Great exercises! Going for a walk (exercise 2) is a great way to start practicing that; less serious than going of and sitting in meditation but more intentional than hoping to remember to try it during the day.
"Don't worry that the brain isn't a muscle" is the kind of disclaimer I needed to hear a lot more of when I was starting this stuff, I needed to have it spelled out in materialist terms what was meant by "breathe into the whole body, breathe out tension"
Yeah, I think the shift in perspective from a materialist-rationalist frame to a phenomenological view can be a challenging one for the thinking mind, so helping it see that the two are just different lenses rather than contradictory fact-statements can be a really important part of the process.
When I first started practicing meditation, I kept waiting for something super profound to happen. Like a life-transforming experience with the divine or some magical insight. It took me years to calm that expectation down. After a few years of practice, I was with a friend who said something that would normally trigger me and send me into that overthinking mode you dissect here. But at that particular moment there was this slight pause--a gap between my thought and my next action. And I had a realization that that gap was meditation doing its thing.
I love your steps listed here because they don't require years of practice. I especially liked the idea of our hands (and the rest of our body) having a sort of intelligence. And how the everyday phrases we use--grasp a concept, get a handle on things, etc... signal that at some point we made this connection between body and mind. I also liked how you pushed this all beyond simply self-healing to using the reclaimed power to "power effective action."
Thanks for these reflections. Yeah, I think it always feels wonderful when we see that the work we put into meditation has just completely changed our baseline way of operating in the world. Sometimes the most mundane-seeming changes can actually have the most dramatic impacts on the quality of our day to day lives and the quality of how we show up for other people in the world
I really like this image of the gap. I would describe it in a similar way. I am very curious in your perspective how this gap has evolved? I wonder if you have ever felt like this gap had become too large and sometimes unsurmountable.
I am not sure I have found it unsurmountable. At times, I have found it large in the sense that conversations (both internal and external) seem to really slow down at times where, at least externally, it can become uncomfortable. Generally, the evolution (while far from perfect) has been about ceasing to notice it at all. It just is. Before, I would be amazed and get lost in my amazement. Now, I rarely notice unless someone points it out, or I realize that I haven't yet responded to a question. But maybe I am missing your description of unsurmountable? Where have you experienced that?
Great Article! Can't wait for part 2. I think having an outlet for our attention besides our thought is wonderful gift. So many people don't even notice the haze of thoughts buzzing in their heads incessantly.
Thanks Samuel! Well said. I’m looking forward to sharing part 2 soon.
It feels like fate that you've written about this topic now. I have what they call adhd and my mind is always buzzing with activity. I've heard people say 'don't engage with your thoughts just observe them and let them pass by'. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that really means and how to practice it in a note or post.
My own understanding of it is like being a little sleepy or less conscious so you don't have the energy to concentrate on the thoughts. So they're just running past in the background like a tv in the other room. But not engaging with thoughts seems to be a thing in meditation. And isn't meditation about being more awake/alert/conscious?
I’m glad the article found you at a good time!
So, my view is that learning to observe your thoughts and let them pass by is one particular skill that is useful to learn but it’s not the be all and end all. To me it is more like a foundation for deeper work than than an end in itself.
What learning to be able to observe your thoughts without attaching to them does is:
a) demerge your identity with the thoughts. If you are observing them, then it removes the illusion that they are who you are
b) increases your general control over where you place your attention. If you can choose to keep coming back to eg your breath, then you can gradually learn to put your attention wherever you want (including keeping it *on* your thoughts in a conscious way as in some of the exercises in this article.
The two things you don’t want to be doing imo though are:
a) just trying to blank out the thoughts from consciousness
b) create the sense of some separate “observer self” who is doing the observing (actually doing this can be a very useful intermediary exercise for some people as it does help get some freedom from their grasp. And I should mention that some pretty serious spiritual systems include this as an end point. But my view - which coheres with my interpretation of most Buddhist systems - is that you don’t want to have a sense of a separate observed self, but rather allow awareness to simply arise as a feature of the observed thing itself. You say say the thought becomes aware of itself, or starts to become illuminated by its own capacity for awareness - rather than being observed by an outside self.
Once you have mastered to at least some basic degree being able to keep your attention on a simple chosen object eg breath, that’s when you can start allowing more difficult objects like thought itself or even just general open awareness of the whole cognitive-sensory-affective-perceptual field to become your object of attention.
That’s when you can start holding thoughts and the underlying sensations behind thoughts in deep awareness in the manner described in this article so that you can start to see how they are constructed and how they might be deconstructed.
So to summarise - learning eg breath meditation where you observe thoughts and just come back to the breath can be a useful foundational skill. But the skills learned from it can be fruitfully applied to turning thoughts (and other mental phenomena) into the mediation object themselves in order to gain insight and liberation
Very interesting points about what one shouldn't be doing. Turns out I've been kindof doing both. Seems like it's best to train the 'return to breath/object muscle' first which then increases the capacity and flexibility to detach from the thoughts and notice around it.
Really appreciate your detailed reply and explanation. Thankyou!
Yeah, I def think training that muscle first makes sense for most people otherwise it’s just super easy to get lost in thought.
This was a great read. I really enjoyed the phenomenological description of thinking. This is something I have considered often. When you observe your thoughts and you can see them forming and start feeling for them.
I have this image of a slow boiling soup, where you can catch some swirls of thoughts coming up to the surface, and see them without getting verbalized. If you catch them there you can see them dissolve without forming. And you see many of these at the same time. Makes me think about the “will to power” from Nietzsche.
Seeing thoughts like this makes me wonder what does it even mean to think, if it is allowing them to surface or if it is something else.
And now thinking about thoughts and feeling a together.. it is a bit strange because feelings can be sometimes like this. Not immediate hijacking, but a slow process that… feels like nothing?
I really like that soup image you used. It’s very evocative of how I experience thought forming too.
Another attempt to capture it that I liked from one of my moots @vividvoid was:
“a whispering sea of ghosts foaming in the background, waiting for an identification to seize a half-concept and elaborate it into a story.”
Ghosts foaming!
There is some definite liquid aspect!
I like how the concepts turn into stories.
Following this image, I also have the experience of the other way around, grabbing a thought that for some reason goes down the soup, and if you grab it can go down with it and found some real mess.
Mingyur Rinpoche's quote stopped me.
"When I got to know it through awareness we became very good friends."
That word "know" is doing a lot of work. He doesn't say "analyze" or "understand." Just... know.
Your piece lands on something similar from a different direction. The hands-as-bridge insight isn't just practical. The Cambridge research you cite about language evolving from the grammar of grasping suggests something deeper: the thinking mind and the body's felt-sense aren't separate channels. They're the same channel running at different speeds.
Buddhist contemplative practice has a name for what you call "being mode." Practitioners call it "rigpa" in Tibetan, or basic awareness. Not the awareness of something, but awareness itself, prior to the division into thinker and thought. The interesting thing is that most entry points into it are, like your hand and foot exercises, somatic. The body seems to be the most reliable door.
The question that comes up for me: is the body useful because it's a distraction from thought, or because it's actually where awareness lives most naturally?
Great exercises! Going for a walk (exercise 2) is a great way to start practicing that; less serious than going of and sitting in meditation but more intentional than hoping to remember to try it during the day.
"Don't worry that the brain isn't a muscle" is the kind of disclaimer I needed to hear a lot more of when I was starting this stuff, I needed to have it spelled out in materialist terms what was meant by "breathe into the whole body, breathe out tension"
Yeah, I think the shift in perspective from a materialist-rationalist frame to a phenomenological view can be a challenging one for the thinking mind, so helping it see that the two are just different lenses rather than contradictory fact-statements can be a really important part of the process.
Overthinking is not simply a thinking problem.
It is often a nervous system strategy.
The mind keeps circling because the body predicts that if it stops, something important will be missed:
a danger,
a rejection,
a mistake,
a betrayal,
a future loss that could have been prevented by thinking harder.
So attention practices may interrupt the loop.
But interruption is not resolution.
The real question is: what does the nervous system predict will happen if the thinking stops?
Resolve that prediction, and the mind no longer has the same job to do.