Do you ever find yourself feeling completely distracted
by tons of different thoughts running around in your mind and you don't really
know how to get them to stop? This is something that happens to me a lot,
and I have a favourite mindfulness practice that helps me to slow down
the thoughts in my mind and have a better relationship to them.
It's kind of funny, but our thoughts are with us all the time, and so we kind of have
like a long-term relationship with the kinds of things that we think about.
So today, I want us to try together a practice called mindfulness of thoughts.
In this practice, we're going to try meditating on what it is we're thinking about.
For this practice, you can do it standing, sitting or lying down, whatever will be
most comfortable for you, but a position that you don't have to
move around in too much while we go through the activity.
Take a moment to pick your position, something that feels both stable and at ease.
When you find your position, you can close your eyes, or, if you prefer,
you can pick a point in front of you to focus on. Sometimes closing your eyes
will help you to stay focused, so if you are comfortable, I encourage you to do this, and
if at any time, you need to open your eyes or pause the practice, that's no problem.
We're going to begin by focusing all of our attention on the sensation of breathing in and breathing out.
Notice what it feels like when the air enters your body,
and notice what it feels like to breathe that air back out.
At any time during this practice, if you feel your mind getting distracted
or you feel a little bit uneasy, you can always return your focus to the sensation
of breathing in and out. Your breath is like a good friend supporting you.
Now, I'd like to invite you to become aware of any thoughts that are coming into your mind.
You might have thoughts where you're remembering a story from the past
or maybe you're thinking about something that's coming up in the future.
This is very normal. I had a thought come in just a moment ago like this.
What I want to invite you to do is take a moment to label the thoughts when they come up.
See if instead of getting caught in a thought and following the story all the way to the end,
you can simply label it, like "worried" or "planning" or "remembering".
I'm going to give you a few moments now of silence, and I want to invite you,
as thoughts come in, to see if you can be the labeler, the observer of the thoughts.
Notice each one when it comes in, and as soon as you notice it, give it a label,
and then see if you can return to the feeling of breathing in and out.
Each time, label, return to breath. Okay, try this for a few minutes on your own.
Now that we spent a few moments labelling our thoughts, see how it feels.
Did you get lost in a thought or were you able to come back to your breath
after you labeled them? It's okay if you found this challenging. It's very natural
to get distracted by our thoughts, but what we're doing here is trying to build
up our mindfulness skills so that our thoughts take us away less
and we can become more observers of what's going on in our mind.
Okay, now, I want us to try one other way of noticing our thoughts
that can help us to not get caught in them. What we're going to do this time
is we're going to imagine that our mind is like the giant sky.
Imagine our mind is the blue sky and our thoughts are like clouds in the sky.
They form gently and they drift by, but we don't get caught in them.
We don't follow them. We are the person lying on the grass, looking up at the big blue sky.
We notice the clouds, and then we let them gently drift away.
I'm going to give you a few moments on your own to try this.
See what it's like, especially if there's a thought that keeps trying to pull you,
to allow that thought to be a gentle cloud in the sky, and then imagine it
slowly drifting away as you continue to lie on the grass, just as the observer of the cloud.
Okay, try this for a few moments, and any time you feel yourself getting too distracted,
remember you can come back to the sensation of breathing in and out.
Take a few moments now to observe your mind like the sky,
with the thoughts gently drifting away as clouds.
Okay, let's come back now to the sensation of breathing in and out.
After expanding our mind to notice our thoughts, we may feel more calm, if we
were able to let them drift away, but maybe we got really caught in a thought
and went all the way down the story and forgot that we were even doing a mindfulness practice.
That is okay, but what I want you to do now is just take a few moments to bring
your mind back down out of the clouds and really anchor it in that sensation of
breathing in and out. Take a few moments now to see if you can
let go of any thoughts and simply breathe in and out for a few moments.
On your next out breath, I'm going to invite you to open your eyes.
Thank you for trying this mind observing experiment, and remember, we don't have to
fix or change our thoughts, but sometimes just observing them from a distance
like we would the clouds in the sky or labelling them like we would a file
can help us to have a little bit more perspective on our thoughts instead of getting caught up in them.
This is something I do almost every day, and it really helps me to be able
to calm my mind and look at my thoughts with more clarity and perspective.
Thanks for joining me today.