Zen Habit of Seeing Your Thoughts Come and Go.
Learn this key skill for mental health and well-being.
Have you ever wondered about the origin of your thoughts? Who creates them? One answer is that nobody knows. But a more obvious answer is that you — to be specific, your subconscious mind — creates your thoughts.
If you sit quietly for a minute and pay attention to the specific thoughts and images that pop up in your head, you can notice them and note them down on a page. Are you creating your thoughts, or are they just popping up in your mind without your control?
Think of thoughts as trains and your mind as a train station. You can observe thoughts as trains that come to the train station and grab your attention. You can order a train to leave the station because you are the stationmaster.
You can imaginatively think about your thinking processes. If you don’t learn to let go of thoughts, your mind will soon become cluttered. You will start experiencing anxiety.
The work of Aaron Temkin Beck, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that anxious thoughts are usually magnified, overgeneralized, or just wrong. But your thinking can influence feelings and control your behaviors. Consider this:
When people don’t let go of anxious thoughts and turn them over in their minds, allowing them to seep into their body’s systems, they start experiencing the beginnings of insomnia, depression, and other mental health issues.
As we can think about our thinking, we may dissociate ourselves from our thinking using mindfulness meditation.
According to Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., mindfulness is the mental practice of living in the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. It boils down to the idea that you are separate from your thoughts. You are an observer of your deliberations, and you can pick and choose between different thoughts.
At the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Stress Reduction clinic developed into Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction where more than 25,000 people have completed the 8-Week program to respond more effectively to stress, pain, and illness:
“Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.”~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
How can you learn to observe your thoughts?
Teaching yourself to dissociate from your thoughts is complex. But with practice, you can realize that you can become an observer of your mental processes.
When a thought comes to your mind, such as “No one likes me!” you can express it by attaching words that describe your act of observation to it:
“I’m having the thought that no one likes me.”
Visualize thoughts as trains exercise
Sit somewhere and close your eyes. Breathe in and breathe out. Focus on your breath:
Tell yourself that your thoughts are trains that come to a train station — your mind — and then they leave the station. You can stand on the platform and observe the trains come and go. Imagine that you are the stationmaster.
Try to label every train with a specific name. If an anxious thought is not leaving the station, you can order it to leave the station.
Some trains stop at the station and some just pass by. When a train remains at the station for some time, you may feel certain emotions related to the thought. If you like the feeling, you can allow the train to stay.
Become aware and “watch” as the trains leave the station. Tell yourself that you remain at the station while all trains leave the station after some time.
This exercise can teach you that you don’t have to react to every thought by judging it somehow. You can simply observe your thoughts. The objective here is not to change your thoughts, but rather to change how you respond to them.
Conclusion
Over time, mindfulness meditation will help you to detach yourself from the thoughts that arise from your subconscious mind — that you don’t feel compelled to hop onto the first train that comes your way.
If you do get onto a train by mistake, you can get off it as soon as you realize that you are not a passenger but a stationmaster.
The more you try to make mindfulness meditation a part of your life, the more control you will have over the thoughts in your mind.
I remember one day walking to secondary school, that I became conscious that I was, for the first time, thinking in WORDS.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that just before that moment my mind was operating in a much lower level.
I think that one can think without words and almost no images too, just in abstract way. In some way I still can do it, but I must force myself to not to be using any words.
This way, thinking goes way faster (20-50x than normal thinking with words?!) and efficient but I suppose it needs mental training.
From that day I have myself got used to using words to think in a common way, but I think I have loosed something, because as I said, I sense that low-level thinking also called unsymbolized thinking is way more efficient.
In fact, we all do, because when you think in something, you first have that 'flash' of concept that precedes the elaboration of the full sentence that you want to express. But if you think to yourself there is no need to do that, and you can keep thinking at that level, stopping the waste of processing that represents the translation for the concept in words.
I think this concept is really important, I have an intuition since long time ago...
Besides this, I think your analogy about train stations and so, lacks an important point: the concepts or thinkings that come and go inside our mind are in fact generated by our brain but always with a purpose; when you think, your brain pops up thinkings related to the current situation, not any random situation. EXCEPT of course, when in meditation, where you can literally hear sentences and low-level thinking come and go if you achieve enough relaxation.