And pause!

As part of my quest to have a better and deeper understanding about the meditation practice and apply it to my daily life, I mostly try to reach out as much sources as possible. This is because I believe every time I come across a new material that catches my attention, whether it be a book, article, video, or podcast, I either learn something new or gain a new perspective. In that sense, there is always this potential in every material to confirm/refine/refresh/redefine or entirely change my prevailing views. It may be same old thing, but sometimes it gives me a new perspective and helps me internalize the central theme.

Recently, I bumped into this article at Tricycle Magazine titled “Creating a Confident Mind” written by Phakchok Rinpoche and Eric Solomon. The article seems to be an excerpt from their book called “Radically Happy: A User’s Guide to the Mind”.

It’s kind of a lengthy article, and in it, the authors describe this meditation exercise that seemed to me quite contrary to the idea of considering thoughts and emotions as distracting elements during meditation. Rather, they suggest using thoughts and emotions to bring us back into the present moment. This way, we can have have a friendly bond with our thoughts. This meditation exercise – in relation to the notion of “Anger” in particular - is performed by watching the flow of thoughts, rather than the thoughts themselves, just like “watching the river”.

Also, the good news is, as they suggest, we don’t need to do this only during formal meditation sessions. We can do this practice almost anywhere, especially when we feel overwhelmed by too many thoughts. We can just take a mini-break to look at a thought instead of clinging to it.

So, I would like to share this exercise with you here and now so that you can practice it as well if you wish.

“Exercise: Watching the River - Using Thoughts and Emotions as an Object

In the beginning, thoughts and emotions may come so fast and furious that it seems like there’s no space between them. That’s because we have a subtle habit of clinging to each thought or emotion as it passes through our mind.

In this case, practice “watching the river” by watching the flow of thoughts, rather than the thoughts themselves. When you look at a river, your eyes don’t get distracted by each portion of water as it passes; it just flows by. The river is the flow. If there were no flow, we wouldn’t call it a river.

In the same way, just rest your attention on the flow of the river of thoughts and emotions, instead of following each individual thought as it passes. That way you will gradually become accustomed to watching a thought rather than clinging to it, habitually thinking about the thought as it arises. By contrast, as we get used to watching the flow, the spaces between the thoughts will naturally reveal themselves.

So in this way, thoughts themselves become remedies for subtle involuntary thinking; they are an antidote to the unconscious habit of thinking about thoughts, which is just a kind of clinging.

Don’t cling to or try to follow each thought. Just observe.

Whatever arises in the mind, just watch it come and go, lightly, and without grasping. And get ready to pounce on the space between thoughts as soon as it arises. If you practice in that way, you’ll succumb to thoughts such as “Oh, there is the space! I must rest in it,” which means you are filling the space with another thought. The best way is to rest in the space. Remain spaciously, whether there is any space between thoughts or not. Practice without any goal of finding a space. If a space comes, remain present in the moment. If a thought comes, remain present, observing it. Either way, you are relaxing the clinging.

As we practice these exercises and get used to resting in the space between thoughts, there will be no need for a meditation support (for example, focusing on the breath), because we are fully present and aware. That space is usually quite short, but over time we become more and more stable in it.

Like a lion not bothering to look at all the stones but rather turning to look in the direction of the stone thrower, instead of looking at the thoughts we can look at the maker of thoughts—awareness. When you turn the mind to look at the knower of a thought, you are becoming like a lion looking at the stone thrower. At that instant of looking toward knowing, you can just

let go and rest;

let go of being present; or

let go of knowing.

At that moment of letting go, you are in mind’s nature— awareness itself. The nature of mind—awareness—is always available whether there is a thought to be known or not.

What does it mean to let go? It means to just let the mind be, however it is. One way to think about letting go is to use the analogy of someone who comes home after a long hard day of work. After a long day at work, completely exhausted, they drop into their favorite chair and let everything go. So just drop everything and rest like someone at the end of a long day of work. At that instant of letting go, you are aware, completely undistracted.

You need to have dignity to let go of clinging: the confidence that letting go is the way to practice, the confidence in knowing that what appears in the mind can be just like writing on water. When you write on water, it’s there for an instant and then naturally disappears. When you cling to thoughts and emotions, it seems like there are all kinds of disturbances. But when you have dignity—the confidence to let go—there is no disturbance; thoughts and emotions naturally dissolve without any effort.

When anger arises, instead of chasing it, look at the knowing of the anger, let go, and rest. You can learn to practice that way in any situation, while completely engaged in life. Engaged, but not forgetting that it is just writing on water, remembering to look toward the knowing and letting go. You look at the anger and see the baseless aspect of the anger, then let go into the space of not finding any basis for the anger.

Anger is sometimes the thought “I am angry” and sometimes it is just an agitated, restless sensation in our body. Either way, we look toward the knowing of the thought or the knowing of the sensation, then let go. Our habit is to chase the anger, to get right into it, justifying the anger or rejecting the anger. So we need to be aware of how it works, how the habit kicks into action.

When you are aware, you can catch the habit before it fully kicks in. Instead of habitually being like a dog chasing stones, you habitually become like a lion, using awareness as your object, rather than thoughts or emotions. When a thought or emotion comes, you naturally turn toward the knowing of it and let go.

…

At this point, I also encourage you to read the whole article to grasp the overall context. As well, I firmly believe that the analogy of being a lion versus being a dog that is described in the article is particularly a good one to better understand how to handle our rising emotions such as anger, agitation or frustration toward any situation or person. 

- G.

Video: Organizma Brand Commmunications

Music: Blue Violets by Ketsa