It’s a great relief and privilege for me when I can guide someone to create a quiet place in their otherwise very active mind. It’s never immediate, often not easy, and hardly as consistent as I’d like it to be, but isn’t that the whole point of becoming mindful, to understand and appreciate the challenge? Isn’t that why we attempt the whole thing in the first place? Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, that’s a fact. And I’m here to share that the hardest thing you’ll never do is quiet your mind, at least, not if that’s your intention for pursuing mindfulness.
So, if you’ve come to my blog expecting to discover the secret to how you might quiet your mind, fret not, we’ll get there, but I warn you, it isn’t the way you think!
You’ve been told that if you can establish a regular mindfulness routine, you’ll begin to see results in a very short time. And the longer you stick with it, the more mindful you become! That’s it, that’s the formula. So, go sit under a Bodhi tree and get yourself enlightened. What are you waiting for?
If it were only that easy. If you’re like many folks I’ve worked with, you’ve started and stopped with mindful meditation many times in your life. The pattern usually goes something like this. You start, you see some immediate results, and you get excited. Next, you double down, but you inevitably hit a plateau or intervening life event and you get thrown off track. Before long, your daily practice falls by the wayside even as you promise yourself you’ll start again once the storm has passed.
Only it never does. And you never do.
Mind Full of Mindful
In the early days of my mindful practice, I suffered many of these same setbacks. Start, get excited, plateau, stop. Mix and repeat. This went on for several years until my practice finally took hold and has become no less an essential part of my life than eating, sleeping, and brushing my teeth. In fact, becoming mindful has completely changed my life. It’s been absolutely transformative.
The most common misconception that often prevents a practitioner from progressing in their mindful training is this idea that the whole point of the thing is to completely empty your mind, to essentially go blank, as it were.
I’m often told by those who wish to become more mindful that they simply aren’t able to go blank. They just have too much stuff racing through their heads. Maybe you feel this way, too. If so, you’re not alone.
But, what if I were to tell you that the requirement to empty your mind is a bunch of crap. There, I said it. In fact, in meditation practice, the intentional act of emptying your mind will have the opposite effect entirely. Go ahead and try to think about nothing. Pink elephant.
Sorry, I had to throw that in there. It’s a technique I use with my meditation groups to demonstrate how easy it is to insert thoughts and images into the mind. If you saw a pink elephant, you’re in good company, 100% of people do.
So if the point of mindful meditation isn’t to empty the mind, at least not forcefully, why is this the preeminent theme everyone is always talking about? I believe they have it backwards.
A Mindful Parade Of Sailboats
The first techniques I teach in mindfulness workshops are related to breathing and anchoring. You would be absolutely impressed by how quickly and thoroughly five reps of box breathing or alternate nostril breathing will shift your mood, calm your anxiety, and increase your focus.
When we close our eyes and take a moment to inhale several deeply nourishing breaths, the mind will naturally begin to quiet itself. Only, it won’t seem that way at first.
Once you’ve begun the quieting process, the first thing you’re apt to notice is the endless procession of thoughts racing through your head. And you’re going to think to yourself, “What are all of these thoughts?” and, by jove, you’ve got it!
Got what? Metacognition, that’s what. You see, rather than reacting to your thoughts automatically (yes, prior to becoming mindful, that’s what we’re all doing, like it or not), you have created a little bit of space. You’ve created a window that looks in upon the thought parade that is your mind. Now your sole job is to dispassionately observe what’s happening.
And here’s the trick. You’re NOT to push these thoughts away. Nor are you to judge them or ascribe meaning to them. You are simply to observe them. Some meditation teachers will instruct you to see your thoughts as clouds drifting by in the sky. A great meditation teacher once said that we need to leave both the front and backdoors of our minds open and allow thoughts to pass through freely. Just don’t invite them to stay for tea!
I suggest my students picture themselves standing in a peaceful verdant forest by the side of a babbling brook. I then ask them to pluck their thoughts out of the sky and set them on little sailboats and let them be swept away by the currents. There are many similar techniques. All accomplish the same thing. Pick one that resonates with you.
It’s Hard, But Do Nothing
Quite paradoxically, the most powerful thing you can do to quiet your mind is: NOTHING. That’s right. Your goal is to do absolutely nothing other than watch the thoughts blow by as clouds or set them on little sailboats to float downstream. That’s it.
Only, it really isn’t that easy to do, because you’re on autopilot, so the thoughts keep on coming. They are relentless. This is why so many give up their mindful practice before they’ve made it too far. They feel like failures, but they have it all wrong. You see, the mind is never quiet. The human brain is designed to think. That’s what it does.
In becoming more mindful, your goal is create space so you can more objectively view your thought parade, better understand how it is affecting you physically, spiritually, and emotionally. You are now free to make better decisions having disengaged your autopilot.
There are specific mindful meditation techniques like RAIN and SOBER that can effectively guide you through the process. These are very helpful and can be employed by both beginners and more advanced meditators. They also have the additional benefit of being portable, in other words, with a little practice, you can use them in real life situations in real-time. This is a very handy skill to nurture, and doing so will serve you well.
Eventually The Quiet Comes
As I’ve stated many times, becoming mindful does not mean emptying your mind and becoming a blank slate. Yet, if you are able to maintain your practice for a long enough period of time, probably months or more, but could happen in just a few weeks, the quiet will seek you out and it will eventually find you.
This is critically important to understand if you are to successfully quiet your mind: Quietude must find you. If you seek it, quietude will hide behind a endless and impenetrable curtain of discursive thoughts. These thoughts will likely take the form of questions related to “where is it?” and “why can’t I find it already? I got shit to do!” The paradox is in knowing that the seeking, in and of itself, makes the quiet unobtainable. Counterintuitive, no?
When you breathe intentionally, you quiet the body. When you quiet your body, you become a spectator of your own mind. It’s through the process of thinking about our thoughts (metacognition) that we can actively let them go (on little sailboats or clouds or whatever). Then one by one, as you slowly work through the clutter, you can be mindful of which thoughts are working for you and which aren’t. You can work with the former and dismiss the latter in whatever way best suits you.
Over time, your entire thought parade will slow down. Then, one day, when you least expect it, you’re completely blank! Yes, it will happen. But here’s the rub, once you realize it’s happened, the parade resumes.
This is normal and quite expected. It happens to me all the time, and I don’t expect it’ll ever stop because the brain is a thinking organ. Thinking is what it must do. Of course, the content and quality of said thinking will be increasingly influenced by your mindful practice in ways that will surprise and amaze you.
When the quiet comes, embrace it. When it leaves, accept it. If you can do this, quietude will come more often and stay ever longer, but never forever. Because just as in needs out, and up needs down, quiet requires noise, and noise, quiet. They are two sides of the same coin!
Yet, hopefully, in those moments of quiet you will gain the insights you need to shape that noise, that parade, to your liking and empower it to take your life to new heights.
