Meditation Isn't About Stopping Your Thoughts

If only my mind were free of distracting thoughts — how wonderful that would be! I could give my full, undivided attention to my work, and in my idle hours I would not have my mood coloured by old grievances drifting up out of nowhere. How to reach that thought-free state is, I am sure, a question on many people's minds – before long, someone in a session will ask me how to banish stray thoughts during meditation. And for the beginner, the number of stray thoughts often becomes the very yardstick of whether their meditation is a success. And so, they conclude, to meditate well you must work very hard to drive those thoughts away.

What a misunderstanding this is! Most people who hold this view soon discover that the stray thoughts are inexhaustible, and they go on to decide that they are simply not cut out for meditation, abandoning the practice altogether — which is a real pity. To talk about a "mind free of distracting thoughts," we have to begin with a few basic qualities of consciousness itself.

First, we cannot exercise complete, free control over our state of mind. You can test this for yourself: if you force yourself not to picture a large elephant, the very thing you end up thinking of is almost certainly a large elephant; sometimes a melody plays over and over in your head, making it impossible to fall asleep. The usual response is to keep telling yourself to forget that tune. Yet the harder you try to forget, the more firmly you remember it; and yet, when it is the dead of night and you are half-asleep and too weary to push the melody out of your mind, that is when you finally drift off; and parting from a loved one — and then dwelling on the things they left behind — is much the same.

All of these phenomena tell us that we cannot freely control what kind of thoughts rise up in the mind. What is more, trying to suppress a particular thought often backfires. And so the state of a mind free of distracting thoughts can never be reached by the method of suppressing those thoughts.

But does this mean we have no freedom at all to govern our own state of mind? Not necessarily. If the task is to keep thinking of a large elephant, most people can at least hold their attention for a few seconds. We are soon distracted, true, but at least we can keep our minds briefly single-pointed. This is the partial freedom of the mind.

Meditation rests upon this partial freedom, and it takes the expanding of that freedom as its aim. In the practice of meditation, we exercise the mind's capacity for control, trying to give ourselves over fully to the breath. Of course, everyone who has meditated knows that the moment stray thoughts arise, they go on to occupy the mind. And the true training of meditation is not to suppress those thoughts, but to observe them as they rise, and then to use that innate freedom to draw ourselves back to the breath once more. The capacity to exercise this freedom strengthens gradually with practice. Again and again, the stray thoughts lose their power to steer our train of thought, and in their place comes a clear observation of those thoughts, and the freedom to fix our undivided attention upon the breath. The stray thoughts still arise as before, but they can no longer ensnare the mind.

But what about the mind free of distracting thoughts we were promised? Let us first reflect on what a stray thought really is. Not every passing thought deserves to be called a stray thought. Say, for instance, you are puzzling over how to solve a maths problem, and the answer suddenly appears in your mind — this is not a stray thought, but a flash of insight; on a leisurely afternoon, you recall a moment that brings a knowing smile, and this is not a stray thought either, but a fond memory. Usually, only thoughts that leave us troubled are regarded as stray thoughts. Even painful moments, so long as we can let them come and let them go without being moved by them, do not count as stray thoughts. Simply observing a thought arrive, then returning to the breath — this attitude of remaining unmoved is precisely what meditation is.

Meditation is, of course, a long process, and reaching a mind completely free of distracting thoughts cannot be done in a single step. Yet, as a meditation practitioner, to notice your own mind gradually turning from turbid to clear is a joy all its own. This is a process every one of us can experience.