Finding Space to Breathe. Mindfulness of Thoughts

First, I’ll share the radical notion that we are not our thoughts. As saliva-making is to the mouth, blood-pumping is to the heart, so our minds generate thoughts. Pause for 20 seconds, absolutely clear your mind and do not think a single thought.

If you tried that, you likely found it is literally impossible not to think. The brain is just doing its thing. The challenge is "Cognitive fusion" when we over-identify with our thoughts and fall in the trap of believing our thoughts are facts. As is sometimes said - Thoughts are not facts - even the ones that tell you they are. As teacher, Larry Yang suggests.. Accept them more. Believe them less.

Putting in Spacers

Sometimes the experience of a thought or emotion is conflated with the response. We react as soon as a thought or emotion arises. Mindfulness allows us build our skillfulness to simply see and notice the thought or emotion without reacting to it. In that space, we can CHOOSE if and how we might want to respond or what we might want to believe or not believe about the thought. In that space, we can differentiate between the thinking or emotional state and create a space to bring in an intention of what we might want to do next to move from a place of reactivity to a place of discernment and response.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.. - Author unknown although often attributed to Viktor Frankl.

I incorporate this idea of space into breath meditation sometimes by paying attention to the spaces between the inhale and exhale. We could mistake that pause as “nothing” but it is just as much a part of the flow and full of mystery and grace. The same is true in music and dance. Music and dance are defined as much by the notes and movements themselves as the pauses between notes and stillness between movements.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendos

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

- Wallace Stevens

In moments (or longer stretches) when life feels constricted and tight, attuning to where there are spaces can be supportive and give a little more room to breathe.

Techniques: Working with Mindfulness of Thoughts

Dinner Party

Have some fun with it. Take a few moments to imagine your mind is like a dinner party with thoughts as guests jostling around to find a seat. Sit back and behold your guests. Who shows up? What are they wearing? Who brought friends? Who are you glad to see? Who do you dread seeing?

Train Cars

Imagine your thoughts are a passing train. Begin to notice and name each car based on its contents (e.g. Worry Car, Figuring Out Car, Excited Anticipation Car, Checklist Car, etc.) Practice noticing the train cars going by without hopping on one. Inevitably, you WILL hop on one and get carried down the tracks. When you realize this has happened, simply take a last look around the car and then step back off the train.

Give your thoughts to someone else

Imagine your thought streams are coming from a person in front of you. What do you notice when you see these thoughts emanating from another person? This practice can help de-personalize the thoughts.

Waterfall

Imagine your thoughts are coming down on you like a waterfall. Next, imagine taking a half-step back behind the waterfall so you can watch.

And Some Notes...

80,000 thoughts a day

A range of research suggests we have an average of 80,000 thoughts per day and 98% the same as yesterday. This well-worn patterned cycling through of our same thoughts becomes the inclination of the mind through which we use to filter our experience. In mindfulness, we can begin to see thought patterns and choose which ones we want to release or to add in. The findings of Hebbs' rule in the 1940s (neurons that fire together, wire together) and neuroplasticity reveal that we are able to change the structure of our own mind by choosing where and how we place our attention.

The analogy of a garden is useful here. Imagine the mind is an incredibly fertile patch of earth. All the black gold compost, sunshine and water it needs to grow whatever is planted. We can choose what to plant and what we spend our time tending to and cultivating. If we start to change what some of those 80,000 thoughts are, we can actually shift our direct experience of our own life and what we grow.

The Mind is always working.

Mindfulness is not trying to empty the mind, control or get rid of thoughts. This misconception trips up a lot of us. The practice is to notice and make space for what is there, and to begin to relate to it without judgment. Remembering this can help ease frustration when the mind seems particularly busy. Instead of trying to get bouncers to throw out thoughts, imagine making more and more room for what’s there.

Storytelling mind

We can begin with a thought and weave it into a story that we then believe. Entire moments, days and years can be spent believing the story we've made up. Here’s an example. Recently, a family member texted me while I was camping. I returned home 2 days later and a string of texts streamed in. The stream began with a simple “Hi!” to the final text saying she did not know why I was no longer talking to her and felt gravely sorry for the wrongdoing on her part that caused it. When I called to let her know I’d been camping out of cell range and that nothing was wrong that I knew of, she sobbed with relief. 48-hours of her life were spent spiraling in a wholly imagined story.

Our mind does this all the time. A good place to catch the storytelling mind in the act is when you are awaiting someone’s text reply, particularly if the exchange is tense. You see the 3 dots and then Poof! The 3 dots disappear. No reply. Notice if your mind starts churning out hypotheses. With mindfulness, we can catch ourselves more and more upstream when a story is forming to check out its validity.

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.” – Michel de Montaigne.

Stanford Marshmallow Test and this thought/feeling will last forever!

Every single emotion and thought we've ever had has come and gone. Some take longer than others but all come and go. Nevertheless, we can become enmeshed believing a thought or emotion is going to last forever. In the Stanford Marshmallow experiments, you see kids in dire struggles with the decision to eat 1 marshmallow or wait and get 2. The problem is they don't know how long they'll have to wait and are roiled with anguish about the tortured delayed gratification. Even though the elapsed time is only 10 minutes, their experience of it is that the torment of staring down a marshmallow they desperately want to eat seems like it will last forever. It’s the belief in “FOREVER” that breaks them. (NOTE: I’m not sure you can run experiments like this on kids today but it's fascinating to watch!)