Just Sitting, Just Thinking

Cultivating awareness of your thoughts

I recently wrote a post that invited you to explore your awareness by settling it into your body. In this post, I’ll share another tool that centers your awareness in your own thought stream—a type of metacognition or becoming aware of your own thinking. For me, this practice has been utterly transformative.

You may have encountered many of the things I’m sharing from other teachers or lineages. None of this work is my own discovery—people have been building this technology of the mind for thousands of years! I am taking great pains to lay out a clear exposition of each technique with no “fluff” or extra attachments. Even if you know some of these ideas well, I would invite you to encounter them anew.

For some of you, you will also find that this particular set of practices works together to give you control of your mind, and perhaps some of the energies (in a broad sense) around your self and your experience. You might be surprised to find what you can do with that. Reality is more malleable than we assume. We’re laying the foundation for some of that work early on, with my emphasis on intent in the previous meditation post.

First, Sit

Today’s practice is simple: sit down and pay attention to yourself thinking. Even when we add a few hundred more words around it, it’s still that simple—just sit down and follow your thoughts.

From a practical perspective, it’s a good idea to do this at the same time and in the same place every day. Focused ritual builds a power of its own, relying on the rhythm and regularity of experience. (The key is focus and intent; this is why brushing your teeth is not the same as meditating.)

It’s also probably a good idea to do this one sitting up. Nothing wrong with lying down or reclining, except that it’s a little bit easier to drift off to sleep and you might lose focus more easily. I would suggest sitting on the edge of a chair with your feet flat on the floor. You might have to adjust the height a bit so it’s comfortable. Find a comfortable place for your hands—in your lap, on your legs, or perhaps on a cushion on your lap.

If you’re comfortable sitting cross-legged on the floor, that’s another great option. There are reasons you probably think of this as the stereotypical “meditation posture”. I will write more about posture and some subtleties later, but, for now, just find somewhere and sit.

The Practice

And then, close your eyes and be aware of your thoughts. That’s it.

Maybe another word is better for you? Follow your thoughts? Watch? Listen? Pay attention to them? The key here is that you want to create an “observer” so that you stand outside your stream of thoughts and just watch them.

It will feel strange if you’ve never done it. You really maintain almost two minds: your natural, normal stream of thoughts, and then this awareness that observes that stream: “ok, I’m thinking about lunch now. Oh, now I’m thinking about what I have on my calendar next week. I got that glass out of the cabinet this morning and the door was a little dirty. I wonder if Mary is still angry with me…”

Cultivating that dual awareness is the essence of this practice. You’re still having your normal stream of thoughts, but you are also an observer, a witness that is aware you are having those thoughts.

What will invariably happen is this: you’ll lose track of your perspective and simply be having thoughts and be in your thoughts. It just collapses into your “normal way of thinking.” I think of it as getting caught up in the flow of thoughts or ensnared in them. Some days, this will happen a lot. When it does, just gently reset yourself to watching your thoughts and continue.

Don’t be frustrated or upset. This kind of “failure” is perfectly normal and each of these failures is a gift. Each reset is a point of learning. The more times you slip, the more improvement you’ll make. It’s easier for a beginning meditator to make progress because there are more mistakes to “fix”!

Doing More With This

This is it. This is the whole practice. Some of you might recognize this as a slice of mindfulness meditation, and it is, just stripped of everything else. This is the pure practice of becoming aware of the machinery in your mind. One technique, nothing else.

When you get bored you’ll be tempted to add things to it—cool visualizations (thoughts in little bubbles that pop or float away), focusing on your breathing, or trying to stop thoughts. Don’t do any of that! Just sit and watch your thoughts. When you stop doing that and get caught in the thought stream, start over again. It’s that simple.

I’d suggest setting a timer. Start at five minutes. Even if you think you “can’t meditate”, you can manage five minutes. No? Then try three. And then gradually add a minute every few days until you’re doing this for 15 minutes a day. Congratulations. You now have a meditation practice. See how easy that was? (Spoiler alert: it’s not easy. You have to actually do it and do it consistently.)

Don’t expect linear progress. You might easily do 12 minutes one day and then struggle to do 3 the next. Be gentle but firm with yourself. Some days you might need to fight yourself a bit and just focus, but if it’s really not happening for some reason—maybe there’s some outside stress or something—come back tomorrow.

I would also strongly suggest keeping a journal. How much you want to write in it is up to you, but at least record what you did and for how long each day.

Now Do It!

As I said, it’s a deceptively simple practice. I had to write a bit more about it, or you would have missed it—such a small, simple thing can’t possibly be important, can it? We’ll do two things with this in the future. For one, there are a few small extensions to the practice you can explore. (But they aren’t essential—I can’t stress strongly enough that what I’ve written here is the entire practice.) And this exercise provides a departure point for developing stronger discipline of your mind and thought processes—truly, a rare thing and a vanishing asset in today’s society.

One last thought: Try very hard to do the practice at the same time every day and build a rhythm to it. That matters. But this is also a practice you can explore in little snippets throughout the day. When you’re standing in line or waiting on something, do this practice. Think normally but be aware of your thinking normally.