Give your Thoughts a Name Meditation
Learn how to observe your mind and give your thoughts a place without being distracted by them.
| Give your thoughts a name meditation |
| Kind of meditation |
Observation |
| Degree of difficulty |
more advanced students |
| Recommended duration |
3 to 30 minutes |
| Posture |
Sitting |
| Advantages |
- It gives you an insight into your mental activity
- It teaches you to distract the mind from the content of your thoughts
- It teaches you to be aware of cause-result relationships
- It improves your concentration
- It relaxes your body and your mind
- It teaches you to live in the NOW
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| Remark |
This is a step further compared to the count your thoughts meditation for everybody that wants to get an insight into the functioning of his own mind. It is also a further step on the way to controlling your mind instead of letting your mind control you.
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This Examine your thoughts meditation is an insight meditation and goes a little further than the count your thoughts meditation. This meditation is also called "mindfulness meditation". In this meditation we learn to observe our thoughts without being touched, influenced or distracted by the content of these thoughts. If you have little or no experience with meditating we advise you to start with doing some concentration and focus exercises for a while.
The meditation looks a lot like an ordinary concentration meditation. We are fully concentrated, alert and present and every time we are distracted we bring our attention back to the object of meditation. The great difference is that with this meditation we give a name to every thought. As soon as a thought enters our mind we give it a name but we do not pay any attention to the content of the thought. To give an example: if you start to think of your work you say to yourself: work. When you start to think of what you are going to do later on you say plans.
Do not make yourself crazy and choose to concentrate on only the clearest thoughts like work, fear, plans, longing, happiness, judgement, anger, etcetera. This meditation really teaches you to observe your thoughts without allowing yourself to be carried away into either "good" or "bad" trains of thought. As is the case with every form of meditation we try not to judge, we try not to get angry when things do not go so well and we try not to be too goal-oriented. Let us begin!
Exercise: Give your Thoughts a Name Meditation
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- Sit down, close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing.
- Be aware of every breathing in and breathing out.
- Breathe automatically and freely, do not try to control your breathing.
- Pay attention to how the air slowly passes through your nose, fills up your lungs and goes out again.
- If, after taking a few breaths, you feel fine and at ease you focus all your attention on the object. This may be a mantra, a candle or your breathing.
- Breathe deeply and steadily and focus on the object as you always do when you are meditating.
- If you start to think of something else than the object, be aware of this, give your thought a name in the form of a simple word. Then calmly return to the object of meditation.
- In no case pay attention to the content of the thought.
- Breathe deeply and steadily and focus on the object as you always do when you are meditating
- If all of a sudden you notice tingling in your body or relaxation reactions in your muscles, that is fine and you also give them a name. For instance, tingling.
- Continue doing this until the time that you have set apart for this exercise is over.
- Now slowly take your thoughts back to the rest of your body and the sounds in the room. Move a little, stretch your muscles a little and open your eyes.
- Finished!
This exercise is not easy but you cannot do it wrong. We learn to look at and to observe thoughts. If for a longer period of time there are no thoughts entering your mind, that is fine. It goes to show that you are really deeply concentrated. If there are lots of thoughts entering your mind, that is fine as well, as long as you are aware of it. Do not allow yourself to be tempted to pay any attention to the content of your thoughts. Before you know it you are busy with the same thought for a long time and your meditation will not be very successful. Perhaps you will discover a certain pattern in your thoughts like work, work, work, work. Which thoughts can you get rid of easily and which thoughts are hard to let go? If you do this exercise more frequently you can make it even more effective by connecting things. When, to give an example, you think of a person, what do you feel then? Imagine that you get upset and irritated every time you think of Jane. You can call this thought Jane irritation. When you are even more advanced and you notice that certain categories of thoughts occur a lot you can start to count them. Good luck and have fun!
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