Learn how to overcome distraction in meditation practice and develop clarity in your relationships, work, and activities with this new guide from a beloved meditation teacher. The mind can be a potent tool, used to guide extraordinary achievements, inspire good works, and incline your spiritual path toward peace and awakening. But the mind can also produce thoughts that lead to suffering. For many people, thoughts run rampant and seem to oppress or control their lives. Even the Buddha tells us that before his enlightenment, he sometimes found his mind preoccupied by thoughts connected with sensual desire, ill will, and harm. But he figured out how to respond to thoughts skillfully and developed a step-by-step approach to calm the restless mind. Now, Insight Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine offers an accessible approach to training the mind that is guided by the Buddha's pragmatic instructions on removing distracting thoughts. Drawing on two scriptures in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Shaila shows you how to overcome habitual modes of thinking, develop deeper concentration, and discover the insights into emptiness that are vital for a liberating spiritual path. Following the Buddha's pragmatic approach, Shaila guides you through five steps for overcoming distraction and focusing the mind: 1. Replace unwholesome thoughts with wholesome thoughts.For example, if you find yourself thinking thoughts of ill will toward a person, try thinking instead of their good qualities as an antidote. 2. Examine the dangers of distracting thoughts.Weigh the costs of allowing thoughts of ill will, lust, greed, and so forth to obsess your mind. The costs of dwelling on distracting thoughts nearly always outweigh any supposed benefits. 3. Avoid it, ignore it, forget it.Develop the skill to turn your attention away from habitual distractions. Remove the fuel and let the fires of distraction die out. 4. Investigate the causes of distraction.By understanding the conditions that perpetuate habitual thoughts, you can learn to free yourself from those patterns. 5. Apply determination and resolve.Supported by wisdom, you can make a firm decision to stop dwelling on patterns of thought that are not supporting your deepest values and goals in life. Each chapter includes exercises and reflections to help you cultivate the five steps to deeper concentration. You'll learn about your mind and develop your ability to direct your attention more skillfully in meditation and daily activities. And ultimately, you'll discover for yourself how these five steps boil down to one key realization: In the moment you recognize that a thought is just a thought, you will find yourself on the path to a life of remarkable freedom.
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“Thoughts are understood as they arise, understood as they remain present, understood as they pass away.”
— CONNECTED DISCOURSES OF THE BUDDHA6
EACH OF US has developed our own personal array of mental habits that affect the choices we make and the way we experience, interpret, and respond in life. Whenever we sit down to meditate, these habits continue to operate, and we can observe them. What is the mind doing? What do we want our minds to be doing?
Some people chat with themselves, as a child would with an invisible friend. Others might narrate past events, spinning the story toward their personal advantage. One might hear fragments of a tune floating through his or her mind or ponder design options for a potential kitchen remodel. A recently retired person might lie awake at night rehearsing project proposals and imagining how former colleagues would respond. Someone who purchases a weekly lottery ticket might conjure up detailed plans for spending the ten-million-dollar jackpot. Because mental chatter is such a common habit, meditation students often long for thought-free bliss and wonder, “Will my mind ever settle? Will I ever know the peace and joy of a quiet mind?”
The wandering mind seems ubiquitous. Using fMRI scans, researchers discovered brain activity in subjects who were not engaged in mental tasks but were resting quietly.
The group of brain regions that shows lower-level activity when we engage in an activity that requires attention and a higher-level activity when we are awake but resting is now known as the “default mode network.” The default mode network has been found to be particularly active when the mind is wandering, craving, or engaging in self-referential thinking. Conversely, the default mode network has been found to be consistently deactivated during activities that require focused attention, mindful awareness, and engagement in present tasks.
Researchers continue to explore what happens in the brain when we get caught up in our experiences and find ourselves lost in thought.7
Several studies found that the default mode network of adept meditators is remarkably quieter than that of novice meditators or the general population. It may be true that minds tend to wander, and that thinking is a natural activity of the mind. However, mindfulness and meditation practices can significantly quiet the mind.8
In the training sequence presented in this book, we begin by working with overt, repetitive thoughts that tend to be charged with emotion or to develop into full-fledged stories. These techniques are intended to be applied as needed to dispel distractions that obstruct the development of concentration and clear seeing. As mindfulness becomes more refined, you may sometimes become aware of a subtle stream of deluded impressions that seem to arise without a clear cause and then disappear before crystallizing into coherent ideas. This subtle level of mental activity will also gradually subside as tranquility develops.
In daily life, an agitated mind can be burdensome. It feels even worse if the scenarios you rehearse, the worries you entertain, the opinions you promote, and the memories you cherish are tinged with self-judgment, are biased, or are outright false. Mental chatter not only wastes time and energy but tends to follow circular patterns of thought that galvanize your distorted perspective.
Memories can easily be distorted to fit into your current narrative. For example, if you are influenced to think negatively about a person, you tend to have primarily negative memories and predict similar, unhappy experiences in the future. Relationships are reinforced through selective memories. Minor past events might be exaggerated to unconsciously prove that the judgments are accurate, that I am right. After all, you probably rarely lose an argument that takes place only in your head.
According to Buddhist teachings, perception is inherently limited, conditioned by physical and mental processes. Variations in visual, olfactory, and auditory acuity among people shape their individual perceptions. In the same way, emotions, biases, desires, preferences, defilements, beliefs, fears, memories, and previous experiences affect perception. In addition, what one assumes about oneself as the perceiving subject inevitably distorts the perception of the object.
THOUGHTS ARE MENTAL EVENTS
A meditative exploration of mind depends upon clearly distinguishing between the content of your thoughts and the process of thinking.
If you give too much emphasis to the content of a thought, you might not realize that thoughts are the objects of discrete mental events. A narrative might appear to have a sense of coherence and continuity, but by looking closely you will see that the cognitive events that form the story arise and pass away quite rapidly. A memory or fantasy might seem so real that you experience pleasure, pain, emotion, and sensation as the story unfolds in your mind. Take care not to believe the content and become immersed in the narratives, or delusion will run the show.
To investigate your thoughts in meditation you need only establish a cursory awareness of the narrative content — just enough to determine if pursuing this train of thought is moving you toward trouble or ease, happiness or suffering, bondage or release. Look closely at a thought but refrain from brooding on its content or becoming enchanted by its narrative. What is actually happening right now? Your answer might be simple, perhaps just, “thinking is happening.”
Whatever patterns your mind tends to adopt, notice that the thought content is not the objective reality. The story line is not happening in the outside objective world; rather, a process of thinking is occurring.
When you recognize the event called thinking, you have become mindful of the activity that you are currently engaged in. This honest and clear engagement with present experience paves the way for skillfully developing your mind. After recognizing that thinking is occurring, you can consider whether this use of your mind is nourishing your deepest goals or obstructing them.
Beginning meditators usually first learn basic skills that protect the mind from being sucked into the realm of thoughts. For example, one might direct attention away from thinking and focus attention on present sensations of the body while sitting and breathing. Additional meditative skills work directly with thoughts and the mental states that accompany them.
When you can turn your attention toward a thought without being seduced by the story line, you will be able to explore your tendencies, patterns, and the intentions that propel speech and action.
MANY KINDS OF THOUGHTS
As you notice the thoughts that float through your mind, you may find distinct patterns that you easily recognize to be harmful. Other patterns that run through your mind each day may not seem overtly cruel, greedy, or hateful. It might not be obvious whether they cause problems, yet you may sense that they do not support your spiritual life. The discussion in this and subsequent chapters will explore a wide range of patterns that may obstruct your concentration, including patterns that do not appear to be particularly evil.
For example, patterns of rehearsing, worrying, planning, judging, analyzing, remembering, replaying, anticipating, expecting, designing, strategizing, ruminating, and pondering are not as acutely destructive as hateful thoughts of plotting revenge. At times we need to plan, rehearse, remember, analyze, and design. The fully awakened arahant disciples of the Buddha engaged in some of these activities when they remembered, pondered, rehearsed, recited, and analyzed the teachings that they had learned. Although these ways of thinking are not inherently unwholesome, for some of us they can become compulsive habits that distort perception, divert energy away from concentration and insight, reinforce a deluded self-position, and prevent us from being fully present with life as it is unfolding right now.
Please consider the thoughts that have crossed your mind today. What kinds of thoughts caught your attention and occupied your mental energy? Was there one primary obsession or a flurry of trivial thoughts? Did the character you call myself have a leading role or did it narrate the story to an imagined audience? What was the outcome of your mental activity? Anticipating future events, ruminating over past mistakes, obsessively solving everyone else’s problems, and entertaining yourself with your own life stories might appear to be innocuous mental activities, but these habits place an enormous burden on the mind. Day in and day out, they reinforce distorted and deluded perceptions of yourself. In meditation they hinder deep concentration and insight.
Recognizing Restlessness in Daily Activities
Observe the various kinds of thoughts in your mind while performing your daily activities. Notice clues to the state of your mind and keep a watch out for signs of restlessness while engaged in social encounters and ordinary activities. For example, notice if you become restless and distracted in daily activities. Observe:
The quality of your sleep and how long it takes before you fall asleep
Cravings for food, drink, or shopping, or an urge to check your communication devices for messages or emails
Nervous tics or restless movements
Excessive gregariousness or silent withdrawal
Degrees of frowning, smiling, and facial tension
Willingness or unwillingness to make eye contact
You might notice your mood, your behavior, the attitudes or responses of other people toward you, your analytical reflections, and the thoughts that arise after an event. Do you feel more selfish or more compassionate in the wake of restless thoughts? Learn to notice the signals that help you determine if your engagement is wholesome or unwholesome and if it is likely to be beneficial or harmful in that particular situation.
Observe Thoughts
When you are involved in thinking, pause and notice thoughts as just thoughts. They are momentary, discrete mental events; they are not necessarily telling a true story.
Notice what kind of thoughts arise most frequently in your mind. How would you categorize your most common thought patterns? For example, do they involve mental activities such as planning, controlling, worrying, judging, expecting, comparing, analyzing, ruminating, or craving? Are your habits feeding boredom or curiosity, arrogance or humility, envy or appreciation, irritation or patience? Is your mind stuck in low-grade, chronic distraction and trivial meandering?
Watch your mind and notice the underlying themes that play out in the scenarios you think about. Observe the habitual thoughts that float through your meditation. Observe the thoughts that occur as you shower and brush your teeth. Observe the thoughts in the background of consciousness while you commute to and from work or go to and from the grocery store. Observe the thoughts that come to bed with you and the first thoughts that appear as you are waking up. Throughout the day, observe your thoughts to notice the mental patterns that influence your perceptions.
Gradually unpack the myriad ways ha...
Table of contents
Cover Page
Advance Praise for Beyond Distraction
Title Page
Contents
Introduction: Lost in Thought
1. Knowing Your Own Mind: Many Kinds of Thoughts
2. Thoughts That Help and Thoughts That Hurt: What Intentions Do You Nurture?
3. Antidotes and Alternatives: Strategy #1 — Replace Unwholesome Thoughts with Wholesome Thoughts
4. Weighing the Costs: Strategy #2 — Examine the Dangers of Distracting Thoughts
5. Withdrawing the Fuel: Strategy #3 — Avoid It, Ignore It, Forget It
6. Unraveling the Causes: Strategy #4 — Investigate the Causes of Distraction
7. Saying No and Meaning It!: Strategy #5 — Apply Determination and Resolve
8. Applying the Five Strategies: A Complete Training Sequence
9. Mastering Your Mind: Moving toward Liberation
Appendix 1: Dvedhāvitakka Sutta: Two Kinds of Thought
Appendix 2: Vitakkasaṇṭhāna Sutta: The Removal of Distracting Thoughts
