The relationship we want to have with our thoughts while meditating is like the one we have with sounds. This is my favorite guidance from Hyon Gak Sunim, the Zen Master that has inspired and super-charged our Zen practice at Synthesis Center.
We had a short meditation session after yoga today, and shared some questions and thoughts with tea and cookies afterwards. One of our beautiful practitioners asked about ‘getting rid of thoughts’ in meditation and that bloomed into an interesting conversation, the gist of which I am sharing in this short post.
So… create the same relationship to thinking as you do to sounds…
Our beautiful haven of a studio is located on a street corner where cars come, slow down to observe the stop sign, and then accelerate. This happens countless times during the day, and countless times during a sitting (meditation session). As you allow our ears to perceive this, you become aware of sounds coming, going, coming, going, gradually getting louder and then gradually fading.
Can you grab that sound and make it stay? Can you engage it in such a way that it will remain? No, the sound fades, as the next car/motorcycle appears. You can’t ‘hold’ the sound.
This is also the way we can view our thoughts as we meditate. A thought somehow appears on the screen of awareness. Now, you can certainly grab the thought, engage it, feed it, and it will make babies, move on to other thoughts… and now you are in a thinking stream. However, if you treat the thoughts as you do sounds, then you watch them appear (no matter how seductive – and thoughts are ALWAYS seductive!) and then let them pass. It is not ‘getting rid of thinking’, it is actually changing your relationship to thinking. For the time you are on the cushion, you can practice experiencing thinking as sounds, coming, going, coming, going.
Eventually, there comes a point when you realize that there is space between thoughts, that there is so much more life available besides your thinking. It is within this space that you are finally present. Present to moment, to your environment, present to your body and to your raw experience.
As you become more present to your raw experience, the more alive you feel Afterall, life is what is happening, not what happened or what you anticipate will happen.
Then, instead of being in the flow of your mind, you are in the flow of life. Situations come and go, come and go, and a version of ‘you’ is watching. That version, the witness, is then free of the thinking, that version is free to choose.
The witness is free to choose which thoughts to feed, which situations to engage with, which life to manifest.
