Eight-Week Course
Week 4
Mindfulness of Thinking
and Thoughts
First, an important idea ...
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Everything in you and everything about you is working for your good
— or it is trying to.
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So, everything in you and everything about you is working:
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to keep you safe,
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to help you 'get on',
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to help you feel at ease and comfortable
— or it is trying to.
Because of this, in some sense, everything in you and everything about you is worthy of respect and appreciation. I say, 'in some sense', because although everything in you and everything about you, every aspect of your make-up — including your body in all its complexity, the mind with its thinking and imagining, your feelings and your emotions too — everything will be trying to do its best for you, but will not always get things right. It doesn't have the wisdom or skill always to make the best choices or offer the best advice. It doesn't always know how to achieve its intended, hoped-for goal.
But something surprising follows on from this:
You are, in some sense, 'allowed' to feel however you do.
You are 'allowed' to be however you are.
Of course, you might not like how you are or like how you feel.
You not want to be like this. Fair enough ... God may not like it either ...
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But the starting point for change is our simple honesty.
If we're honest before God, that honest opens the way for God to work with us.
And it opens the way for him to work in us.
He might say something like: 'That's okay, it's not good,
but I can work with this. We can work with this.'
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Of course to say we're 'allowed' to be how we are is never a basis for us doing just whatever we like. It is never a basis or an excuse for cruelty or unkindness.
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And see below for more on these ideas (or click here).
Beyond all this, remember, God is good, and on our side, and want the best for us:
Jesus says, 'I came that you may have life, and have it in all its fulness' (See John 10:10)
Page updated
5-3-24
The busy mind
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Most of today us have very busy minds, head full of ideas, thoughts, memories and imaginings, racing this way and that in endless succession.
Keeping up with our thoughts and our thinking can be exhausting.
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Beyond that, lost in our thoughts we can miss out on the life that is happening around us and even miss out on the life that is happening within us — for we are more than just our thoughts; we have feelings and emotions too, and even intuitions and insights deeper and different from our thoughts.
How often in daily life do we find ourselves saying. 'Oh, sorry. I missed that. I was thinking about something else.'
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Of course, sometimes daydreaming and even letting our mind simply wander is harmless and can even be fun, so often in day to day life we seem to have little control over our heads and our thinking even when we wish that we did.
'I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane.' So complained Bob Dylan. And even if our own thoughts are not quite driving us insane, they are not always exactly a help.
Very importantly, thoughts and thinking are not in themselves a problem. Far from it. We depend on thinking. It is part of who we are and what we are. It is an essential part of ordinary, everyday life. We need to think. Thinking helps us to manage life, anticipate the future, organize the present, recall good and useful things from the past. It helps to keep us safe, and through thinking we can move towards an understand of the world and make progress. Thinking can be a wonderful thing. (Of course, in terms of biology and neuroscience, the brain and with it, our capacity to think are extraordinary complex. It is often said that nothing in all creation is more complex and sophisticated than the human brain.)
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But if our thinking can be good for a certain sort of problem solving, most obviously problems requiring logical reasoning and analysis. It has no competence with some of the things we are inclined to entrust to it, for instance, it's not so good with things to do with the more subtle and sophisticated aspects of human behaviour and human relationships. The 'problem' is that we're inclined to let it try to manage these things. Wrong tool.
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And while, as a rule, our thoughts and our busy minds might not be — quoting Bob Dylan — 'drivin' us insane', There are many situations in which our busy minds and ungovernable thoughts can be downright unhelpful. Often our most distressing emotional states — anxiety, anger, jealousy, panic, depression - are the result not jus of what is happening but of how our thinking entangles us and enmeshes and entraps us in that state.
so we are not looking to stop our thinking or make our minds blank, and neither are we looking to supress our emotions ... But we are learning that our thoughts and emotions need not control us.
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​We can find a certain openness a certain distance, a certain space ... Fully alive, our thoughts and emotions arise, are present and then pass. We have a certain freedom. We do not 'have to' buy into our thoughts and feelings.
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We do not have to believe all our thoughts.
We are created as a unified whole: body—mind—spirit.
Each element in our make-up is a gift of God, and essentially good.
Each can be used for the good of others.
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Thinking can be a very good helper but makes a very poor boss.
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Our minds are trying to do their best for us ... See the feature on the Peter Principal in the column to the right.
Remember what was said last week in relation to our well-established (but unhelpful) patterns and habits of thought, those thoughts we have had a thousand times before and which often seem to hold us captive: 'if we learn to relate to these oppressive patterns, not by challenging them or getting caught up in an argument with them, but by seeing how they affect our bodies and our breathing, then we can learn to relate to them more wisely, finding a new, unforeseen and very welcome freedom.'
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Please note if you find the following few paragraphs a bit too theological or 'technical', don't bother with them. Maybe read them through and then, as I've suggested elsewhere, pop them in the 'slow cooker.' It may be that in time you come to find them helpful. Click here for advice on this kind of thing.
What it is to be Human: Insights from Jewish and Early Christian Tradition
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Each one of us is created as a unified whole: body and spirit, with a mind and emotions and a capacity for relationship with God, with other people and with all creation. We are created for relationship.
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In early Christian thought, following on from the best of Jewish thought, the heart is for each of us the centre of our being. The heart is not just the bodily organ that pumps our blood, it is that 'centre' from which we can relate to God and to other people. In fact, each of the terms heart and spirit, means pretty much the same thing. Each of us has (or even is) heart-spirit, and that's what makes us a personal being, like God. And that means that, as in the life of the Trinity, relationship lies at the heart of who we are. We are created for relationship: relationships with others, relationships beyond ourselves, and of course, relationship with God.
So, in summary, we are created as a unified physical-spiritual being, and at our very centre is a capacity for relationship. That's is what it means to be a spiritual being or in Christian terms, to have a heart. Moreover, it is in and through relationship to God and others (and only in and through relationship to God and others) that we can find our fulfilment.
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A quick aside — I hope it's helpful — when Bible Project looks at the Old Testament meaning of the word which in our English Bibles is commonly translated soul their conclusion might take us by surprise: 'We don't have soul, we are a soul.' In early Christian thought and writings, it's much the same with heart and spirit. They're not things that we have but something that we are. I found this four-minute Bible Project animation very helpful. The link is here. They explain why the word 'soul' is often not really very helpful. In part, that's why I tend to prefer terms like heart and spirit.
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But what does all this mean for us and for our mindfulness practice? The ideas run something like this:
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Fallen, Unfallen and Fully Healed
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For someone in fulness of right relationship with God — that is, someone either unfallen or fully healed:
1. Their heart/spirit listens to God — which is what God always intended and still looks for.
2. The mind/brain interprets and plans.
3. The emotions motivate their action.
4. Their body does the work.
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In our fallen, muddled state things are more or less the other way round:
1. The body (or more generally, our 'fallenness') desires something — this is what I want.
2. The emotions drive us to pursue whatever that might be.
3. The brain works out how best to get whatever it is that we crave.
4. And the spirit/heart gets dragged along behind.
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Mindfulness practices and things like Christian quite prayer can help us learn to discern what's driving us, what's controlling us — usually something to do with pleasures and pains, or hopes and fears — and see that we don't need to be so entangled with these anymore.
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Kindness and gentleness, rather than force or aggression, will help us first to recognize these 'entanglements' and will then help us to let them go.
We'll also discover that it was always God himself who was always both inviting us to this path and enabling us to follow it. The call was always coming to us from the Father through the Son, and it was the Holy Spirit himself who was enabling our response. And the call, is of course, to be like the Son, who himself images the Father, and who stands in fullness of right relationship to everyone and to the whole creation.
If all this seems a bit complicated ... Don't worry.
Click here for advice on this kind of thing.
Some more on the this week's key learning ...
It might come as a surprise to hear that everything in us and everything about us is working for our good — or it is trying to. Everything in you and about you is trying to keep you safe, help you 'get on' or help you feel at ease and comfortable in the world — or it is trying to.
Because of this, in some sense, everything in us and everything about us is worthy of respect and appreciation. I say, ‘in some sense’, because although everything in us and everything about us, every aspect of our make-up — including our body in all its complexity, our mind with its thinking and imagining, our feelings and our emotions too — everything is trying to do its best for us, but will not always get things right. It has neither the wisdom nor the skill always to make the best choices or offer the best advice. It doesn’t always know how to achieve its intended goal.
At one level, the intentions of everything in us are good … but they are often also disordered and unwise.
Think back to the image of the little children trying to help in the kitchen or the garden. They may be well intentioned and enthusiastic, very keen to help. But they lack wisdom and skill, might not produce much of a cake and may make quite a mess. The hope is that through kindly appreciation of their efforts and through a kindly, grateful, gentle response to their good intention and their willing efforts, the children will learn to do better.
And perhaps this is especially so with our thinking and our habits of thought: they are essentially well-intentioned, but often misguided.
As for our thinking and all that stuff in our heads … rather than children in a kitchen, imagine for a moment a newly appointed junior-manager, in a business. This budding high-flier has skills and potential. That’s why they got the job … But as so often with the would-be mover-and-shakers in the TV show The Apprentice, things can go wrong. Brimming with enthusiasm, no lack of confidence, they can successfully manage some challenges, but then, through arrogance and their unwillingness to listen or to learn (i.e., the downside of enthusiasm and confidence), they cause chaos in others. Our thinking can be a bit like that … It gets carried away by its ill-founded self-belief. What begins with ‘Yes, I’m good at some things’, moves on to become 'I can manage anything, everything.'
Click the titles and links below to jump to the other pages from this course.
Thinking is good, of course it is!
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Thinking is an amazing gift, a wonderful skill. None of us could not flourish, nor even survive in this world without it. we are ... *** through each day, we We plan, remember, recall, understand, interpret, and explain all of them aspects of thinking and the working of the mind, as so are imagination and many aspects of creativity.
Beyond that, this world that we live in would not exist (could not exist) had not our ancestors and those countless people who came before us — and indeed by our contemporaries too — done a lot of thinking.
Civilization, agriculture, technology — these didn't arise by magic; they all are the result of thinking, of human insight and understanding. Thinking is behind the 'big things' like electricity and computers and aeroplanes, but it's also behind all the little things too. Someone invented (thought up) such 'trivial' things as the buttons and zips and the pins we use to fasten our clothes. (It took us a long time to come up with Velcro, and even zips didn't exist until about a century ago.) And imagine how much inventive thinking lies behind things like knitting and the weaving of cloth. Remember that bricks were once a 'new technology.'
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Everything we see around us — save perhaps for the sun and moon and stars, and what's left of the natural world — is in some way the result of human thinking. Thinking is amazing ... and it's a gift to be grateful for.
But … thinking is not without its downside. In part it has this downside precisely because thinking has been so very successful in so many areas and aspects of life. Precisely because it is so good at some things, we tend to trust it in areas where it is not really very much help at all, areas where has little competence — or none at all.
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I'm reminded of the so-called Peter Principle ...
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The Peter Principle
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The Peter Principle is a concept from business management. Back in the 1960s, sociologist Laurence Peter observed that people working in businesses and large organisations are often promoted beyond their level of competence.
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These are people who are good as some things, and who on the basis of that, are promoted, but then come to be entrusted with roles quite beyond them, tasks that do not suit them and for which they are simply not fitted. For example, a talented and successful teacher might be made School Head but has no administrative or management skills and so is a failure, even a disaster in the new role.
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Our thinking is a bit like that. It’s very good at some things, but we entrust it with tasks and challenges in areas where it has no competence at all, indeed, where it is dangerously incompetent!
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The Peter Principal comes from the book The Peter Principle, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull (1969).
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(The Peter Principal, incidentally, was originally presented as a joke, as satire, but came to be seen as saying something important. We might say that it has a competence or relevance beyond what was first thought.)
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'Don’t fuss. It is all my work.'
These words are said to have been heard by St Angela of Foligno (1238-1309) at a time when she felt overwhelmed by the challenges of her work among the poor.
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'Don't fuss, love God, don't fuss.'
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For over 50 years, the Revd Stuart Bamforth (1935-2015) worked as a parish priest in industrial West Yorkshire. After his death, his daughter, Ruth, gathered and edited some of his essays, reflections and sermons. They were published under the title, 'Don't fuss, Love God, Don't fuss.'
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Angela of Figino, by the way, only began to devote herself to prayer and to care for the poor later in life. Until her 40s she had, as she puts it, 'lived an empty-headed life, preoccupied with wealth and social status.'
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. . .
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'Don't Fuss, Love God, Don't fuss' (by Ruth Bamford) was published 2021.
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St Angela of Foligno's writings are available in various collections. Although they are not altogether unlike the writings of Julian of Norwich, many people today will probably find that they are not so accessible nor so immediately engaging.
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Busy mind? Don't worry.
Disappointed or frustrated
with yourself?
There's no need to be.
A well-known mindfulness teacher, celebrated world-wide and with decades of experience, has said:
'Sometimes I sit down for my practice and no sooner do I begin than my mind starts up, "Gibber .. gibber ... gibber ... .... gibber ... gibber ..." And it keeps going, nattering away incessantly, right through to the very end.'
'But I've learnt, no need to worry ... I'm gradually learning to let go of the idea that I know how things should be, and even to let go of the idea that I know how I should be.' And that's good learning.
'I'm also learning to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable ... And I'm learning not to be disappointed that so often I find myself feeling disappointed with myself.
'Thoughts are just thoughts — and not all of them are true. Feelings are just feelings — and not all of them are worth listening to.'
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An endless train of thoughts running round and round n your head? Click here for some ideas about this.
Distractions a problem? No problem! You're in good company
Dominican priest Isaac Morales, writes, 'Although distractions can frustrate us to no end, it may help to realize that they’re actually a common problem.' He explains that St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-1274) said he found it 'nearly impossible' to pray the Lord’s Prayer even once without his mind wandering off. In an interview, Pope Francis said he loves to spend time in silence 'even when I get distracted and think of other things, or even fall asleep praying.'
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John Cassian (5th century) visited many early Christian monks and hermits and they too said, 'Distraction, wandering thoughts? ...Oh yes, were all familiar with that kind of thing!'
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The great contemplative, St Teresa of Avilla (1515-1582) said that during prayer her mind went round like a 'clacking mill-wheel'. Her answer, 'Give the mind something to do. It likes to be busy and having something to do makes it feel important.' She suggested quiet, gentle repetition of something like a phrase from the scriptures.
That's much as we use mental noting of some simple phase accompanying the breath: 'From you hand I receive ...' on the in-breath and 'Into your hands I commend ...' on the outbreath. Perhaps use a phrase with that has 'resonance' for you'. but use it gently. Don't 'interrogate it.
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At the start of this discussion, I suggested that if you find distractions and a busy mind a problem 'You're in good company'. In fact, you're in very good company, the very best.
Everyone who has ever tried quiet prayer or mindfulness finds the same thing: their mind has a life of its own, and it's both a busy life and a vary fickle, unpredictable life too.
After a while, though, the mind will perhaps settle and be still (at least some of the time). But you'll also find, just as encouragingly, that the distractions and the business are not really such a problem. They're simply something else you're working with, like perhaps, the bit of your diet (maybe the greens?) that you're not very keen on but know are good for you.
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Mental noting
Many people find this simple practice helpful in managing a busy mind.
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It's a very simple practice:
When we notice that some activity, whether in body, mind or emotions, has caught our attention we simply note that this has happened and then, as it were, label whatever it is with a mental post-it note. Maybe repeat the 'note' a few times, three or four, then ease back ... If the thought re-arises, note it and label it again, but the guidance is not to keep tagging it for an extended period.
So, for example:
We might attach a note, 'Thinking ... thinking ... thinking'
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or 'planning … planning … planning'
or drifting … drifting … drifting'
or 'hearing, hearing, hearing'
or (in the body) 'coolness … coolness … coolness'
or 'tension ... tension ..tension'
In the feelings 'sadness' ... sadness ... sadness'
or 'joy ... joy ... joy'
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Don't try to catch or label everything.
Keep the labels simple. Be kindly. Be gentle.
it's a post-it note, gently dab it in place —
There's no need for hammer and nails or a fist ... .
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Labelling the thoughts, not buying into them or fighting them,
can take some of the energy out of the thoughts and the thinking,
and some of the pain and distress or other 'disorder' too.
Keep things simple.
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It has been said that mindfulness is always essentially simple.
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So, if it's not simple, it's not mindfulness.
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Don't try too hard.
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And don't worry. It takes time to learn to be simple.
Don't try to label every thought that comes into your head.
(That way lies madness!)
Keep it simple. Keep it light.
Week Four Home Practice
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Remember: Go gently. Do what you can, as you can, when you can.
No need to be idealistic about what you should do,
but perhaps be optimistic about what you might do.
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If you can — and be optimistic here — on six out of seven days try to do the following:
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1) A body scan or a body-and-breath practice aim for ten or 15 minutes. Click here for a new 15 minute session from Liz. Guided sessions of various length are available on the Resources Page. Maybe once of twice in the week try one of the longer versions. I certainly recommend trying one of the excellent guided sessions from Palouse.
2) A Loving-kindness or Gratitude Practice. For guided loving-kindness sessions click here. (With the 14 minute version if you want to skip the introduction and go straight to the guided practice, start at 3 minutes 40 seconds.)​ For guidance on the Gratitude practice click here.
3) Also, a 'routine task.' The idea is to select some simple thing which we do each day — people will often choose for this brushing their teeth, taking a bath or a shower, washing-up or loading the dish-washer — and then try to do it in a mindful, engaged way. That means trying to be aware of any and all sensations that might arise as you do this, sensations in the body: sights, tastes, sounds, or whatever. Also, perhaps, open up to things like your mood and to any emotions or feelings that might arise. Maybe open up to the character of your thinking, noticing perhaps the tendency for you mind to wander off (something it may do again and again). Again, we're not try to achieve any particular state or have any particular experience. We're not even trying to do things perfectly or better. We're practising kindly curiosity — that is, we are being curious about the experience. We are not undertaking an kind of intellectual investigation or analysis.
And don't forget there's always a chance or two (or three or more) of a three-breath pause. Stop, pause, take three deeper, slower, longer, unhurried breaths. Then simply, for a moment or two, check-in with body, mind, and feelings. Then simply move on into whatever in your day comes next. Keep it simple. Try to give those three-breath the time to do their work. It's easy to slip into an attitude where we are, so to speak, 'getting the three breaths done.' (And then we just carry on as we were before we began the practice.) Can we give them the space they need to help and change us? For guided practices and guidance on the three-breath pause click here.
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Tips. Some people will set a timer, perhaps on their phone or watch, to remind them every so often to take a three-breath pause. Others will use post-it notes on (say) the kettle or fridge as a reminder. If you do set reminders of some sort, one thing to notice will be hour reluctance sometimes to take that pause. That resistance is both a common enough and a natural enough experience. Just notice it, and don't fuss. Becoming more aware of our tendency to delay or avoid practice can be an important step in self-knowledge.
The train of thoughts ...
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Sometimes it is suggested that we can 'watch' our thoughts coming and going, rather as we might sit beside a railway line and watch trains passing by. Our thoughts (just like the trains) appear, are present, and then pass by.
But with our thoughts what often happens is that we, so to speak, 'hop aboard' the thought, get carried away and journey with it. Indeed, having hopped aboard a thought, we will often journey with it for a long time.
The guidance is simple: once we realise that a thought has taken us captive, we simply to 'hop back' out that thought, wave it goodbye, and settle in again to sitting and watching.
It may well be that, even in a short practice session, time and again we've latched on to a thought. Don't worry. Getting caught up in our thoughts in this way, getting entangled with our thoughts is something we are all prone to doing. It's not a big problem. But in time we will begin to see that it can be more interesting and more rewarding not to attach ourselves to our passing thoughts, but simply to watch the thoughts come and go — and even to dwell in the peace and quiet that we'll find between the passing thoughts ...