You close your eyes and listen to the meditation guiding you to focus on your breath. Your awareness is on your inhale, but it’s also aware of your thoughts narrating your session: “Okay, keep your mind on your breath,” or perhaps it’s run away altogether and has started to plan your shopping list for dinner.
Be assured that these are common experiences when meditating. All types of meditation rely on the natural wandering of our minds to allow us to practise—after all, meditation is a refocusing practice, and without thoughts, we’d have no reason to practise!
Noticing Is More Important
Learning to notice that you are having thoughts is more important than the thoughts themselves. This is because we need to learn to notice when our minds are wandering to be able to return to our focus. Noticing, acknowledging, and letting go of these thoughts to return to our focus is what meditation is. Even experienced meditators will have thoughts, but with practice, they are able to return to their focus faster.
Tips to Quieten Thoughts
Guided Meditations
If you are new to meditation, guided meditations may be easier to follow than self-guided meditations, as you can more easily engage your mind by tuning into the voice of your guide. This, in turn, tends to quieten your own thoughts but doesn’t stop them altogether—and this is absolutely fine. You may have heard that the goal of meditation is to clear your mind of thoughts; this is not completely truthful—have a read of my other blog post, which talks about how setting a goal of clearing one’s mind only sets us up for disappointment!
Acceptance
Meditation is also about being at peace with whatever arises in our experience. And that includes having distracting thoughts or a narrator in our heads. If we’re thinking about dinner and not our meditation focus, we can learn to accept that this is what has arisen in our consciousness and then gently let it go. Acceptance that thoughts are an integral part of meditation helps us to let them go without frustration or judgement.
Make Friends with Your Narrator
Many people have a very active ‘inner voice’ which talks to them as they meditate or provides a narration. This can be helpful when you first learn to meditate if your thoughts remain on your focus. For example, you’re following a guided meditation and the instruction is to “bring your awareness to your foot,” and your inner voice pipes up: “Okay sure, let me think about my foot and see what I can sense.” This can be helpful to keep you focused.
Let Go of Your Inner Critic
However, sometimes your inner voice can become an inner critic, which is not helpful. It may say things like “you’re not doing it right” or “this is a waste of time, I should be doing...,” which is a sign that your inner narrator has become a distraction. In this instance, noticing these thoughts have become distractions means you can accept their arrival and gently let them go.
If you’re in the lucky minority of people that don’t have an inner voice, it may be easier to focus your attention without an inner narrative. But for the rest of us, we can turn our thoughts to whatever we have chosen to be our focus for that particular practice.
Labelling
This brings me to labelling. A handy technique that helps to quieten distracting thoughts, labelling uses your inner narrator to keep your thoughts on your focus. Say you are practising an open-awareness meditation and find that listening to the sounds around you triggers lots of thoughts. You can turn your inner monologue towards labelling your experience. So you may hear a bird chirp and label this in your mind as ‘listening’ or even more specifically ‘bird bird bird’ over and over. This technique is helpful when your mind is particularly active and keeps wandering off, as it replaces the off-topic thoughts with a thought about the focus of the meditation—the bird sounds. You can label what you see too, if you’re practising an open-eye meditation. This even works when you’re in a noisy, busy place with lots of sounds and visual input. Label what you see and what you hear over and over to keep your mind on the job as long as you can.
Visualisation
Of course, your mind may still wander off, but you can even label those distracted thoughts with ‘thinking, thinking’ and then gently bring your mind back to your original focus. You can even add a visualisation that might help you with your labelling. I think of a label-maker in my head like the old-school Dymo machines that produced labels to stick to objects. For those not familiar with these devices, you can think of a white label sticker with the word you are using to label written on it, or simply a Sharpie writing out the word in your mind's eye.
For beginners, using guided meditations can work in the same way—they give you words to think about, so your own are naturally quietened in the process of simply listening. But if you don’t have the luxury of having a guide, you can try the labelling technique to keep your mind focused as best you can.
The Short Answer
It’s worth repeating - noticing your mind is having a thought is more important than the thoughts that arise so you can train your mind to return to your focus, over and over. This is meditation.
Remember, the journey of meditation is unique for each of us. Whether you're distracted, focused, or somewhere in between, every session is an opportunity to strengthen your practice. The key is to keep practising and stay curious and open to accept whatever arises.
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