Examine your Thoughts Meditation
Learn to observe your own mind, give your thoughts a place, and examine them.
| Examine your Thoughts Meditation |
| Kind of meditation |
Observation |
| Degree of difficulty |
more advanced students |
| Recommended duration |
3 to 30 minutes |
| Posture |
Sitting or Walking |
| 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 connections between thoughts, emotions and tensions
- It improves your concentration
- It relaxes your body and your mind
- It teaches you to live in the NOW
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| Remark |
Be the ultimate observer of your thoughts. This is step further compared to the give your thoughts a name meditation for everybody that wants to have an insight into his own mind
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The Examine Your Thoughts Meditation is an insight meditation and goes a little further than the Give Your Thoughts a Name Meditation. We have started with counting our thoughts, then we gave them names and now we are just going to observe them quietly. This meditation is a mindfulness meditation for more advanced students. In this meditation we learn to observe our thoughts without being touched, influenced, distracted by the content of our thoughts. We are completely aware, alert and present and every time when we are distracted we bring our thoughts back to the object of our meditation.
When we do this meditation for the first time we start by giving each thought a name just like we did in the Give Your Thoughts a Name meditation. As soon as a thought enters our mind we give it a name, but we pay no attention to the content of the thought. For instance: when you start thinking of your work you say to yourself work. Do not make yourself crazy and choose to concentrate on only the clearest thoughts like work, fear, plans, longing, happiness, judgement, anger, etcetera. When, after some time, we have gathered between six and eight thoughts we start playing with them. We call forth the thoughts one by one and observe what the thought feels like, how our body reacts, whether the thought is pleasant or unpleasant, what kind of associations it brings with it. In this way we get an insight into the various emotional associations of our thoughts.
This meditation teaches you to relax and to deal with your worries so that you can let go of them more easily. You can also do this exercise when you want to meditate on a specific problem. Choose the thought you want to concentrate on and examine the feeling, the reactions and the emotional connotations. See how the way you look at it changes your reactions to your thoughts. 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: Examine your Thoughts 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 twinklings in your body or relaxation reactions in your muscles , that is fine and you also give them a name. For instance twinklings
- Continue doing this until you have gathered between six and eight thoughts. If you have a few less, that is fine.
- One by one call forth the thoughts and observe how each thought feels, how your body responds to it, whether the thought is pleasant or unpleasant and what kind of associations the thought brings with it.
- Pay attention to the differences in the feelings and the emotions that the various thoughts bring with them.
- Do this with all your thoughts in a random order and if you like you can examine certain thoughts a number of times.
- Continue doing this until you have enough of it or until your time is up.
- 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!
Do not be tempted to pay any attention to the content of your thoughts. Before you know it you spend a lot of time on the same thought and your meditation will not be very successful. When certain thoughts or emotions upset you and it is hard for you to examine them, then decide to start with thoughts that do not call forth such strong feelings. This exercise not only teaches you to let go of your thoughts and just observe them, but it also shows you the effects of your thoughts on you as a person. Which thoughts do you find hard to let go and which can you let go easily? How do your body and your mind react to unpleasant thoughts like worries, frustrations and uncertainties? Is there a connection between thoughts and physical stress? Is there a category of thoughts that you find really unpleasant? Are you able to observe you thoughts and your aches without getting too involved ?
This exercise teaches you how to remove the root out of every problem. You learn to accept and as a result to observe more clearly. Everything in your life becomes lighter, you can make better decisions and you learn to see the relativity of every problem. As you learn to do this exercise more and more easily, you also increase your ability to practise this technique in your daily life. Before you know it you will live fully in the NOW! Good luck.
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