Thoughts and inner dialogue arrive constantly. This practice is about seeing them as passing events rather than reports on reality.
Listen to the Meditation
About This Practice
You cannot stop thoughts appearing. Anyone who tells you meditation is about emptying the mind has set you a task no one has ever completed.
What you can change is your relationship to them. A thought arrives. You watch it arrive, watch it sit there, and watch it go. You do not follow it, argue with it, or take it as an instruction.
That matters because thinking is where our automatic behaviour gets its orders. A thought shows up, we believe it without examination, an emotion follows, and we act. Watching the thought instead of obeying it interrupts that chain at the earliest point.
It also gives us access to something useful. Our currently active beliefs are what produce our emotions, and those emotions play out in the body. Notice the thought and you have found the belief that is driving how you feel right now.
Once you can see it, you can test it. Is this accurate? Is it exaggerated? What evidence would I actually give for it? A more balanced thought produces a more balanced emotional state, which produces more balanced behaviour. That is Reframing, and this practice is where the raw material for it comes from.
Micro Practice: Three Breaths
When your thinking has run away with you, take three breaths.
- Breathe and settle on the breath itself.
- Breathe and observe your thoughts as thoughts, not as facts.
- Breathe and come back to the present.