Is Clearing Your Mind about Emptying it?
When I made my first attempt at practicing meditation, I thought to myself: Well, what do I do first? And the first thing I came up with was to clear my mind. I wanted to take away all conscious thoughts, both good and bad. I wanted to have basically a blank slate with nothing popping in. No distractions and no imagination. But what I found when I tried doing that was that the harder I tried, the harder it became to remove any thought. And as you can imagine, the thought I couldn’t seem to escape, the one that kept ironically appearing to me was, how do I clear my mind?
So, as I sat quietly just hoping for a moment of uninterrupted peace, suddenly I started remembering all the things that I had forgotten to do that day. I thought about how I had forgotten to pay one of my bills; to call my friend back and finish the conversation we had started earlier in the week; and then I started worrying about some things that hadn’t even happened yet. By the time I went through all of that, I was too tired and frustrated to continue on. This went on for few a months with very little progress. Later on in life, the more I kept studying things like meditation practices and the different styles and manners in which to achieve it, one thing stood out to me. I learned that I was basically misunderstanding what clearing our minds actually means.
We tend to associate a clear mind with absence of all thoughts. We imagine some peaceful state where all of our deepest worries suddenly disappear; all of life’s distractions and outside noise fade in the background into a manageable silence; and then everything becomes calm and very quiet. But in truth, I found that our minds are busy animals always trying to process new information, trying to make new connections, trying to recall past experiences, and staying in perpetual anticipation of what’s coming next. But slowly I began to understand that thinking isn’t the problem. It occurred to me that maybe the problem was with the relationship I held with my thoughts and possibly that’s what was adding to the noise.
Through the Kind Rebirths approach, when we start to notice, observe, and witness (NOW), we can initiate a practice that recognizes our thoughts without feeling the need or desire to follow every one of them. This is why mindful awareness is particularly valuable. We notice what occupies our attention; we observe how those thoughts and feelings influence our emotions; and then we witness the patterns that emerge from them while reserving the impulse to react. Consider how one simple or single thought can occupy and control you for an entire day. Imagine that someone says or does something that you don’t care for and hours later you’re still carrying that same event in your head replaying it over and over again. You casually imagine how the outcome might have been different if you responded in a different way or what if you said nothing at all. Despite having the original moment pass some time ago, hours or days even, but how you’ve interpreted it continues to occupy your thoughts. Sound familiar?
Clearing hour mind does not mean that you have to forget what may have happened. You don’t have to convince yourself that it didn’t or doesn’t matter. What’s most important here is the acknowledgment that you’re continuing to participate in a conversation or an event that is no longer happening. And perhaps the kind of Kind Rebirth moment we keep overlooking. There is a good probability that we spend too much time trying to remove thoughts from our minds instead of realizing just how much authority and control we are giving them.
Being aware does not grant you complete freedom from the noises and distractions in life, but it can teach us which thoughts deserve our precious attention versus those we just become used to entertaining. A clearer mind doesn’t always equate to a quieter mind. Perhaps a more appropriate definition would be one that states that it includes knowing the difference between having a thought and letting the thought have you.
Stay mindful…
Rebirth
