The River of Thoughts

    V 1.1    Cafe Melb May 2023

There is a wonderful analogy for mediation that many people find useful.

Imaging your mind is a river and your thoughts are fish, constantly moving along.

When you try to clear your mind, you jump into the river and attempt to remove them. But all you achieve is muddying the water, as the flow of thoughts is unceasing.

You soon come to the realization that you can't stop them, it appears you have no control over them at all. This is quite frustrating as so many others appear to succeed and you are therefore failing.

The suggestion is that rather than trying to stop the thoughts that you sit on the bank of the river and just observe them. Try not to attach to them. Just acknowledging them as they slide past.

Using this method we all can achieve some success but invariably, we will grasp onto to a thought and be carried away helplessly down the stream, unaware that it has even happened.

Then a considerable time later we will return to the present. The usual response to this is that we have, once again, failed. The frustration piles up on each attempt. The conclusion is that we are no good at this meditation stuff and should give it up.

But there is another way to look at this extremely common outcome.

Being captured by thought is just part of being human and is inevitable. But returning to the present should be a joy. A small celebration of arriving back in this moment.

Suspending judgement of our performance is counter intuitive. Judgement is a reflex we use to improve performance but in this situation it backfires.

Another suggestion is that in each moment we have the opportunity to begin again. It’s such a simple idea that easy to overlook just how powerful it is.

So now stripped of the concepts of failure, judgement and blame, the frustration falls away and we can return to the bank of the river each time refreshed and enthusiastic that regardless of whether we succeed or not, we have the opportunity to glimpse how our mind works.

In the beginning we only have small success, staving of attaching to thoughts for seconds and being carried away from this state we perceive is the goal of mediation. To be in the now.

But what if getting lost and returning is the practice. What if witnessing the process of seeing thoughts swim past and not grasping onto them, then getting lost and returning is the actual practice. How would it be possible to fail at this?

Over time the seconds build, the ability to witness thoughts at a distance becomes minutely stronger. The amount of time lost starts to get smaller. After much time, yes a lot of time, we can feel the very beginning of capture. The long term outcome of this is all of the rewards that meditation promises, focus, attention, calmness etc....

But these are are only a by product. Seeing truly the nature of our own mind is humbling and freeing. There is a great quote “The more you meditate he more you become you”. David Lynch