If You’re Thinking a Lot During Meditation, You’re Doing It Right
The most common myth about meditation
It is normal and natural that you have a lot of thoughts when you sit down to meditate, just like it is normal and natural that you think a lot throughout the day.
Many people still believe that meditation requires the cessation of thinking in order to be effective. This is not true.
The goal of meditation isn’t to wrestle your mind into a state of quietude, but to detach from it enough that it can process and release some of the stuck thinking and feeling patterns, and to cultivate a more resilient state of consciousness.
In fact, there are several reasons why a busy mind may be the sign of a very deep meditative experience.
Emotional Release
We release suppressed emotional states when we meditate. As these buried emotions come up, we may experience them as moods or streams of thinking. This is a natural process that occurs when we don’t resist it.
So don’t worry if you’re feeling things or having a lot of thoughts when you sit to meditate. It is likely that this is just your body and mind processing old states that remained stuck in your psyche.
A coalition of researchers from Norway and Australia have studied how our brain works during meditation. Sven Davanger, a neuroscientist at the University of Oslo, and co-author of the study, said the following.
“The study indicates that non-directive meditation allows for more room to process memories and emotions than during concentrated meditation.”
In non-directive meditation, the participant gently focusses on a mantra, a sound, or his/her breath, but otherwise lets the mind wonder as it will. There is no effort to suppress thoughts, as is the case in concentrated meditation.
So it is safe to let the mind wonder while you meditate. It is likely the effect of your brain processing stored up emotions and letting them go.
The non-directive meditation experience looks like this:
- The meditator gently places his/her focus on the breath, a mantra, a sound, the sensation of the body, or any other anchor for maintaining attention.
- The meditator’s mind begins to wonder in thought.
- The meditator realizes that his/her mind is wondering and reinitiates step 1.
Thinking is not our enemy in meditation. It will always occur. Experiences of prolonged silence are possible, but quite rare. They are not to be sought after.
Instead, let your psyche process and release whatever it needs to. Don’t dwell on or resist your thoughts. Don’t feel guilty if you spent most of your meditation session thinking. It happens.
You’ll just add more mental chatter to it by thinking about your thoughts.
Mental Resilience
If you can weather the storm of chaotic thinking during meditation, it will make your mind more resilient throughout the day, when your senses are bombarded with information.
Meditation lets us step out of our thoughts and observe them from a distance. It is in this process that our thought patterns begin to lose their grip on us. We stop chasing after the pleasant ones and resisting the uncomfortable ones.
In other words, we stop being so reactive.
If you’re experiencing a lot of unsettling thoughts during your meditation, can you sit through it? Can you release any resistance you have to these thoughts and just let them go by?
Or, if these thoughts are pleasant, can you watch them go by without indulging them?
Thoughts try to lure us into dwelling on the past, planning the future or fantasizing wish-fulfilling scenarios. The more you allow yourself to observe your thoughts without reacting to them, the less attached to them you become.
Have you ever sat by a window and watched a storm happening outside. Maybe it was a downpour of rain, or perhaps it was heavy snowfall. Maybe the trees were swaying in a strong wind.
And the whole time you were watching the storm outside, you were perfectly safe and comfortable inside, where it was warm and pleasant, and the effects of the weather couldn’t touch you.
This is the same relationship we can have with our thoughts when we remain in the seat of consciousness, deep inside of ourselves. We can watch them go by without being effected by them in any significant way.
Self Realization
The other day, I came upon a beautiful quote by Eckhart Tolle, one of my favourite spiritual teachers.
“The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not ‘the thinker.’ The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.”
While Eckhart is not specifically speaking about formal meditation, he is giving us a glimpse into the awakening process that the practice of meditation hopes to facilitate.
As we allow ourselves to watch our thoughts, we start to see that they are not us. We are not our thought patterns. We are something deeper, beneath our thinking. We are the witness that observes our thoughts and feelings.
As a result, we no longer have to fear our mental and emotional states. We start to understand that they are a phenomenon occurring in the field of our awareness, but they are not us.
When we know that we are not our thoughts or feelings, but the experiencer of them, we realize that we don’t have to resist them. It is completely safe to let them be. And we naturally let them go. Any feeling or train of thought we don’t resist, will dissipate on its own.
And the more we surrender our thoughts to this natural process, the deeper inward it takes us. It may seem paradoxical, but a busy mind can be the catalyst to deep self realization, if we don’t resist the experience.
I don’t remember exactly when my journey with meditation began, but it became a regular practice when I learned Transcendental Meditation (TM) over a decade ago.
One of the things they taught us at our local TM centre was that we shouldn’t judge the quality of our meditation by what happens during the session. Instead, we judge the success of our meditation practice by the effect it has on our daily lives.
Do we notice ourselves feeling more relaxed throughout the day? Has our focus improved? Do we find that we have more energy? Is there a noticeable improvement to our moods? Are we less reactive to negative stimuli?
Over the years, I’ve tried many different meditation techniques. They all work. And none of them ever completely quiet the mind. So don’t be discouraged by your mental chatter during meditation. No matter what your experience is, you’re doing it right.
If you want to learn a simple meditation technique that anyone can do, check out the article below.
