Jack: As your mindfulness practice opens to include awareness of thoughts, you might find yourself considering thinking as an adversary, the unwanted disruption to a good meditation, but this is a misunderstanding. Thinking is natural. Our mind secretes thoughts just like our body secretes enzymes. Thoughts are essential for us to communicate, to design buildings, write poetry, treat disease, and contemplate what we most value.

In mindfulness training, we’re not trying to stop thinking. Rather, we are trying to cultivate a wise relationship with thoughts. This becomes especially important when we're dealing with thoughts and beliefs that are negative or undermining. There’s a saying: “Thoughts make a good servant, but a poor master.” The beliefs that run through our mind about ourselves and others are often painfully limiting stories. As Mark Twain put it, “My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.”

Without mindfulness, we can end up seeing our lives through a set of beliefs and stories that, for years, keep us from being confident, create conflict or distance from others, keep us caught in self-doubt or feelings of failure. The practice of mindfully recognizing and waking up out of thoughts can break this chain reaction. One of the biggest breakthroughs people experience when they start a mindfulness practice is “I don't have to believe my thoughts. I'm not my thoughts.”

When we’re caught inside the world of our thoughts, we're caught in a limiting reality that cuts us off from our full intelligence and creativity. In your practice of awakening from thoughts, it can help to realize that thoughts are present, but not true. Thoughts appear as images and sounds and stories in your mind, and they reflect themselves in sensations of tension, or fear, or pleasure, or ease in your body, but the thoughts themselves are not the reality. They are representations of reality. When thinking about a worrisome staff meeting, the party next weekend, or a friend, we are in an imagined world that’s not actually happening here and now.

Today, we'll continue to include thinking in our mindfulness practice and bring in the tool of naming the process of thinking, either simply as “thinking, thinking,” or perhaps the type of thought: “Worrying, worrying,” “planning, planning,” “imagining,” “judging.” Naming a thought when it arises helps to unhook or disidentify from the thoughts. It allows a spaciousness around thinking so that you can see “Oh, this is just a thought.”

You might think of it this way. When you’re in a plane flying through clouds, it seems the whole world is a cloud, yet once you're out of the clouds, you can still see them, but now you’re aware of the sky and the space around the clouds. In the same way, naming a thought can open up your perspective. A thought is then just a thought, not the whole world, and when you see they are present, but not the whole truth, thoughts become good servants, but not the master.

So, we’ll explore mindfulness of thinking. With practice, you'll realize that those patterns of thoughts and beliefs that are fear-based and limiting release their grip as you recognize and name them, and then you can reestablish a mindful presence and a wise relationship to all thoughts as they come and go.

Please find a comfortable posture for practice and allow your body to settle and your mind to be at ease. Take a few full breaths, and then let the breath resume its natural cycle. Bring a relaxed and focused attention to your primary anchor of the breath or body sensations.
When a thought arises, let your intention be to recognize and note it with a light mental whisper. It could simply be “thinking, thinking,” or sometimes it helps to be more specific, and you can name the type of thought: “Worrying,” “planning,” “remembering,” “fantasizing.” After naming the thought, it will often dissolve. When it does, relax your attention, notice sounds, notice the moment. Taking your time, gently return to your anchor - to the breath or body sensations - feeling fully a presence here and now. Continue in this way, resting in your home base and noting thoughts, and then returning.

When you realize you're thinking, this is a moment of awakening, one you can experience with appreciation and curiosity, not judgment. As you note thoughts and come out of them, you might sense a kind of relaxing, an opening of your senses, hearing the sounds that are here, feeling the aliveness of your body, reconnecting with sensations or breath. As you awaken from a thought, notice the difference between the virtual reality of thoughts and the vividness, immediacy, and aliveness of what's happening now. Stay with the practice of your anchor of breath or body, all received with a kind attention.

As you notice thoughts, naming, sensing them as clouds moving through awareness, you see that they are ideas, but not the reality of experience. When your mind is quiet, you can sense the space between thoughts and let the light of awareness shine through it all. As you continue, stay with your core practice of mindfulness of breath and body, and when feelings and thoughts become strong, notice them; receive them with the same mindful, gracious attention.

© Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield
Reprinted by permission.