Tara: In these last sessions, you’ve been widening the field of mindfulness, including breath, body, and feelings or emotions. Now, in these next few sessions, we'll be exploring bringing mindful attention to thinking. A major insight for most of us as we begin mindfulness practice is just how incessant our thoughts are. They're a continual stream of nonstop judgments and comments, plans, worries.

Noticing this has been called “seeing the waterfall.” Our thoughts are all a part of our ongoing home movie where the protagonist is moi, this person sitting right here. It’s estimated that we have about 60,000 thoughts per day, and 95% are the same ones that we had yesterday, so we live in this familiar little cocoon, obsessing about some challenge at work, regretting something we did or didn't do, strategizing how we'll navigate the day. The process is well expressed in a cartoon where a man is about to drive into a desert, and he sees a sign. It says, “You and your own tedious thoughts, next 200 miles.”

Our thoughts create our experience of life, and if our habit is to generate a lot of worry, we’ll live with anxiety. I’d like you to check out something right now by just reflecting on two words, and the first word is “trouble.” So, mentally repeat that word “trouble” and just sense how it lives in your body and your mind. Okay, erase that one, and now, “kindness.” Repeat the word “kindness” and sense that word in your body and mind.

And, just to notice the difference, what comes up for you simply by reflecting on two different words? Thoughts create our mood. They’re our filter for life. So, you might consider what are the key repeating themes, the tone or mood of your thoughts today or yesterday. Evolution has rigged us to be vigilant about potential threats. That’s called the negativity bias of the brain, so we naturally tend towards a predominance of worry and negative judgments. This can perpetuate an ongoing atmosphere of tension and fear, including some of the difficult emotional states we explored these last few sessions.
Neuroscientist Jill Boite Taylor explains how this happens. She says, “It takes 1.5 minutes for an emotion to rise and pass through our neural circuitry if we don’t fuel it with further thoughts. However, if we play and replay triggering stories, they can lock us into a difficult emotion for days, even decades.” Mindfulness allows us to awaken from what can be described as the prison of thoughts. It helps us to actually recognize and be aware of thoughts as they're happening so we don’t get lost inside them, and that enables us to then discern is this particular thought helping us, is it serving us, or is it actually keeping us in anxiety and tension?

And, if we find that a thought’s not serving us, mindfulness then gives us the opportunity to let them go. So, meditation not only gives us more choice in thinking, research shows that it actually improves cognition. Even in four days of training, findings include enhanced ability to sustain attention, improve working memory, and executive function.

The first step in bringing mindfulness to thinking is recognizing that thoughts are happening. Now, that might sound simple, but it’s actually quite challenging, and that’s because most of our lives, we go around inside our thoughts as if we’re at the movies, lost in the story and taking it to be reality, but as we begin witnessing our thoughts, we find they're primarily some combination of pictures, they’re still shots, they’re movies, along with an audio soundtrack. Again, like a movie, they create a story in our mind based on representations of our living world. Thoughts are a virtual reality. They’re not the same thing as this living reality.

So, in today’s mindfulness practice, we'll do a brief exercise to sensitize us to thinking, and then we’ll expand to include mindfulness of thoughts. Please find a comfortable posture for the practice, allowing your body to settle and your mind to be at ease. You might take two or three full breaths, inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly, to sense the breath more fully in your body. Now, as the breath resumes its natural cycle, bring a relaxed and focused attention to your primary anchor of the breath or of body sensations.

For the next minute, imagine you're watching for thoughts just as a cat might wait, intent and alert at the entrance to a mousehole for a mouse to appear, and when a thought appears, count it, whether it’s a mental image, or some auditory commentary, or a movie clip with picture and words. So, continue in this way, waiting at the mousehole, counting the thoughts that appear.
Now, take a deep breath, and then slowly exhale. Perhaps you noticed just a few thoughts - four or five, maybe - or perhaps it was a lot of thoughts - 15, 20. Maybe you noticed that there weren't many thoughts and realized, “Oh, that’s a thought.” You’re noticing, and that's the essence of mindfulness. We’ll continue now, adding the recognition of thoughts into our basic mindfulness practice. Again, establish your home base - the breath, the body. Fully relax with the sensations of the inflow/outflow of the breath or body sensations, just noticing what the experience is like.

Let your intention be to simply stay with your primary anchor, with your home base, until thoughts pull you away when they arise, and as you’ve been doing, once you notice a thought’s occurring, just acknowledge it and then let go, gently landing again at your anchor, relaxed and present.

You might notice where your attention is at this moment, and whether you've been off in thought. Simply recognize this with mindfulness, and without any judgment, relax back, arriving again right here, right with this breath, this moment.
We’ll close with a verse from the poet Wu-Men. “Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.”
© Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield
Reprinted by permission.