I feel like this ought to be on a punny T-shirt. In fact I decided I would write using the title before I knew what I might write because it made me smile. So hear goes...why is this true?
I think often people believe meditation is about controlling or even stopping our thoughts. This is simply impossible. We have over 30,000 thoughts a day, most of which we are not conscious of. They are generated for reasons barely understood by our mind and we become conscious of some and not others, again, for reasons we barely understand. Our mind is a huge vortex of noise taking place in our heads.
Given this, how can we possibly stop it? Our mind is constantly processing, working, churning. Meditation is not about stopping this. People feel they are failing at meditation when they are distracted from their breath by thoughts as if focusing on our breath could possibly stop all that activity. That is not what meditation is about. That vortex of noise and activity is going to happen no matter what we do.
In the sense of mindfulness not being about stopping our thoughts then its not what people think it is - the the statement is accurate!
Also its not about what we think - the kind of thoughts we think or emotions we experience. Mindfulness practice is not, directly anyway, about what we are thinking - its about our relationship to all that thinking.
Often we feel very clearly that we are our thoughts - I am the thinker of thoughts. However, given the volume of all these contradictory thoughts we can't possibly be - stop to think about how often are you actively thinking thoughts and how often they just pop up unbidden? Mindfulness practice is a process of separating the conscious "you" from the mind creating all that stuff. When we do this - even for a few moments - we gain some sense of being able to look at thoughts rather than seeing the world through them.
Mediation is about separating yourself as best you can from all these thoughts. The more often you notice the distraction of all that noise from the vortex as you try to follow your breath the more you realise you are not your thoughts - all that is going on nearby but you are not it. If that noise was "you" how could it distract you? Only something distinct from "you" can distract you from what you are focusing your attention on surely?
What you realise in even a brief meditation practice is there is your breath, there is the vortex and there is you - they are separate. In fact, being distracted and finding meditation difficult is an essential part of realising this.
And the more your separate from it, the more you realise that turning the volume down on that vortex occasionally can give you a different perspective on things. So there - in the sense of mindfulness being about you separating from your thoughts it also not what you think!
Now lets get those T-shirts ordered.
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