On learning to notice thoughts (without serving them tea)

We each have 60,000 thoughts per day. What should we do with them?

Welcome to the second instalment of The Perpetual Beginner. I’d love to know what you think – please share comments below, where you can also subscribe to the newsletter.

In my last post, I set out the basic premise for this blog: exploring being present with experience not just as an approach to day-to-day life but as the starting point for how we can fundamentally make sense of the world. To adopt an experiential perspective, I wrote, is not about retreating into some “inner” domain. Rather, it’s a way to refresh the vividity with which we receive the pulsing, shifting world around us.

Reading that post on his way into work, my friend V--- wrote to me to say how he appreciated the reminder to tune into what he could see and hear around him, rather than being lost in thought or absorbed in a podcast. Walking over London Bridge, he was able to really take in the cool river-breeze, the bustle of commuters making their way into the city and the patterns of the seagulls against the dark grey sky overhead.

There was a catch, though. “I was fully present,” he told me, “until I realised that my mind was reflecting on that”.

It’s an apt example. We each have, on average, around 60,000 thoughts every day. 80% of these are automatic; many, as in V---'s case, seem to turn in on themselves. No wonder, then, that simply being present with all that we see, hear, touch and feel around us can be so hard.

It raises a fundamental question. What is a wise approach to relating to our own minds – specifically, to the steady stream of thoughts, memories and projections that are continually going through our heads?

Much has been written on this subject, of course, and I won’t attempt to summarise the various different perspectives here. There is, however, a simple way of relating to this “inner monologue” that I’d like to share. It involves learning to notice thoughts as they arise, without getting caught up in the storyline. You learn to cultivate a spacious, open awareness towards whatever arises, within and without.

The basic approach is summed up by one of my favourite meditation quotes – from the Japanese Zen teacher, Shunryu Suzuki:

“Leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea”.

In this post, I unpack three insights – three “freedoms” – that follow from this orientation towards one’s own mind. To begin with, though, let me introduce the basic practice…

Learning to notice thoughts as they arise 

The key distinction is between simply having a thought (“I must call Jim”) and becoming aware that such-and-such a thought is present in your mind right now. Psychologists call the latter “meta-cognitive awareness”: being aware, real-time, of what’s going on in your mind.

To appreciate this distinction, try the following exercise. First, close your eyes and take a couple of slow breaths. Then ask yourself: “what’s my next thought going to be?”, resting with this question for a few moments. (You can try this for yourself now).

You perhaps found that, in posing this question, you became aware of the current “contents” of your mind. In particular, you perhaps became aware of the space within which thoughts come and go.

Where it gets tricky is sustaining this kind of awareness for a period of time. Try observing your thoughts for five minutes straight and you’ll likely find that sooner or later you become entirely caught up in their content: musings about the past, fears or fantasies about the future, things you need to do, and so on. This is the natural power that our thinking minds have over us: they offer to take us away, and most of the time we oblige.

Our capacity for meta-cognitive awareness can be built up over time, however, and perhaps the most foundational way to do this is via a simple mindfulness exercise. Mindfulness basically means awareness, while the Pali word for meditation, bhāvanā, means “cultivating”. You could think of mindfulness meditation, then, as a practice of cultivating awareness. And it’s an honour to share a short practice – centred around noticing thoughts coming and going – recorded especially for this post by the renowned meditation teacher, Joel Levey. Together with his wife, Michelle, Joel was one of the first people to introduce mindfulness practices into mainstream Western contexts – for example, in educational, organisational and governmental settings – going all the way back to the late 1970’s with this work.[1]

The practice takes five minutes. So find a quiet spot, close your eyes, and enjoy…

Whether you’re new to mindfulness or an experienced meditator, please do share your reflections from this practice in the comments section below.

Gaining insight: Three “freedoms from thought”

Here, I’d like to share three fruits of this practice: three shifts of perspective which can perhaps be glimpsed from Joel’s meditation and which can be developed and deepened over time (through short exercises like this one or from longer periods of contemplative practice). With this deepening, we get better at sustaining an awareness of our mind’s activities; we also become more able to bring this awareness “online” in situations where we’d normally be totally absorbed in our inner monologue.

I call these three freedoms from thought, riffing off the more familiar expression, freedom of thought. As invaluable as that may be (and today more than ever), I think it remains true that freedom from thought is often underappreciated in our highly cerebral, ideas-driven culture (our obsession, for instance, with “smart” technologies and “optimising” solutions).

The point is not that we ought to somehow rid ourselves of thoughts altogether or demonise them as “bad”, as the source of all of our problems. Rather, it’s that most of us, most of the time, tend to be overly identified with the thoughts in our heads and this, for all kinds of reasons, can be extremely limiting...

Freedom #1: Opening up to a range of perspectives

Perhaps we can start with this tendency to be identified with our thoughts.

Let’s suppose that you’ve moved into a new apartment and you’re trying to configure the central heating unit. You’ve fiddled with the settings and consulted several online forums, but nothing seems to work. “I’m useless at this,” you think. And if you’re like most people, the default way this thought is “received” is that it’s taken to be a true representation of reality. You automatically identify with what the thought is saying.

By contrast, in learning to observe thoughts “like clouds passing through the sky of the mind”, as Joel puts it, you learn to step back, suspending judgment as to whether the thought is true or not. Maybe you are, indeed, useless at this task. Or maybe that thought arose because you’re tired, or prone to self-criticism of late, or for any other number of reasons (including, of course, that the heating unit is genuinely counter-intuitive!).

In other words, you learn to see the thought as a thought that’s arising, rather than as a statement of fact. “I’m useless at this” is then recontextualised as just one possible perspective on the current situation. This ability to see things from multiple angles is invaluable for all kinds of reasons: if you’re plagued by self-critical thoughts, it opens up alternative interpretations towards what is true. Socially, meanwhile, it’s crucial if we’re to have constructive debate with people who hold different beliefs to our own. As Theodore Zeldin once put it: “the more contexts we can choose between, the less the difficulties appear inevitable or insurmountable”.

An interesting case study for this last point is an awareness-training programme that’s been running in the UK parliament for just over a decade. During this time, over 300 politicians have taken regular group mindfulness sessions over the course of several weeks. In such an adversarial (if not wholly toxic) context as Westminster politics, it’s revealing that one of pieces of feedback that comes back most consistently from programme graduates centres precisely on this capacity to see things from multiple perspectives. “I’m much more able to step back and see the other point of view”, notes Baroness Anna Healy. Tim Loughton MP, meanwhile, comments on the “more considered approach to exchanges of differing views” among graduates of the programme.

In other words, being totally identified with one’s own opinions, being reactive to what’s just been said – these are things that we do have some control over, irrespective of the particular views and opinions we happen to hold. This capacity for multi-perspectivity takes practice, but it can be built up over time.

Freedom #2: Resting with the gentle rhythms of the body

The language I’ve used so far – noticing thoughts, mindfulness, meta-cognitive awareness – is perhaps a little misleading. You could be forgiven for interpreting everything here as a distinctly “cognitive” endeavour. Indeed you could, if you wished, read this entire post as advancing an argument – as something to be weighed up in purely intellectual terms.

But this would miss the crucial point that this is an experiential practice, not a conceptual one. True, your thoughts are the “object” of the meditation, but they are held in awareness, which is not a concept.[2] To observe a thought is not some philosophical move by which the thought is subsumed it into another, “meta” thought.[3] Rather, it’s precisely to step back from the steady stream of thinking, the currents of which can be so strong.

Step back – to what? There are many answers to this question and it’s something we can each explore for ourselves – whether that’s through simply pausing to check in with your thoughts and emotions throughout the day, through meditation (for a longer one than Joel’s, see for example this one from Tara Brach) or from extended periods of silence (such as retreats lasting several days).

Through all of these, in my own experience, the heart of the practice introduced here centres around slowing down and resting in the space of awareness itself. Doing so, I notice thoughts coming and going, but it’s as much about the awareness that abides behind and between these thoughts. Sitting quietly, I notice how this background awareness is shaped by my body’s subtle rhythms: the cycle of breathing, the beat of my heart, the whole field of vibrations where my body meets its immediate environment.

Thoughts weave in and out of something altogether more mysterious

In other words, I learn to notice how my thoughts weave in and out of something much larger and altogether more mysterious. The value and the power which thoughts appear to have is thus placed within a wider context. This is, for me, a crucial insight. As the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (a key inspiration for this project), once remarked: “life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life”.

Freedom #3: Allowing whatever is there, in this moment, to be

Central to the practice of observing thoughts in Joel’s meditation – indeed, central to all forms of mindfulness practice – is accepting whatever arises in your present-moment experience. You’re not trying to change anything. You’re not trying to push thoughts away, or invite other thoughts in. You’re just noticing what’s there with an open, allowing attitude.

Again, this is encapsulated in the Suzuki quote: “Leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”

In the case of negative thoughts – like “I’m useless at this” – this “allowing” stance may seem counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t we be better off defending ourselves from such unhelpful thoughts? Most schools of psychology are in agreement, however, that trying to push thoughts away is usually self-defeating: they tend to bounce back, often with even greater force.

Where the approach outlined here differs from some others (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) is in really leaning into this accepting, non-judgmental attitude: you accept that a negative thought is there and you allow it to be there for as long as will be the case. You surrender to what is. Leaving your front and your back door open, you let the thought take its leave when it’s ready to do so.[4]

I sometimes get asked: “this is fine in principle, but I get the same (unwanted) thought that comes back again and again. Allowing it to ‘be there’ doesn’t change this”.

In A Path With Heart, Jack Kornfield offers some helpful advice about dealing with these “persistent visitors”[5]. It essentially involves taking the approach outlined so far even further. Beyond accepting whatever arises, including difficult or painful thoughts, you can adopt a befriending stance towards them: when they show up at your door, you welcome them in like an old friend. Cultivating this stance of befriending takes practice, and it doesn’t magically transform a negative experience is into a positive one. It can, however, open up the possibility for a radically different way of relating to challenging thoughts and emotions that are determined to show up in the present moment.

Coming back to the world

I began by advocating for presence as a way to refresh the aliveness through which we make contact with the world around us. To quote from my previous post, which set out this point in more detail: “in the end, it is always the world itself that we attend to... moments of stillness help us to receive more of the world, and to receive it more fully.”

In general, that is true. But it omits the 60,000 invitations that we each get, each day, to pay attention to something other than what’s in front of us. In that context, I hope that the Zen-inspired practices and philosophy offered here might be helpful, not least because the more we’re able to let thoughts come and go, the more we can open up to all that’s going on around us.

And so, to end on a sensual note (if a slightly cheesy one), here are a few lines from the 13^th Century Chinese poet, Wu-men:

Ten thousand flowers in spring…
The moon in autumn…
A cool breeze in summer…
Snow in winter…
If your mind isn't crowded with ten thousand things, this is the best season of your life. 

Until next time ~~

Image credits: S. Tsuchiya, Dominik Schröder and malith d karunarathne via Unsplash.

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[1] For more, see Joel and Michelle’s collection of wisdom teachings on their website and in their book, Living in Balance.

[2] A possible exception might be the schema of philosophers like Daniel Dennett, but his treatment of subjective experience makes no sense to me.

[3] Philosophically-minded friends sometimes ask me whether there are not certain thoughts which mark themselves out as special – and which undermine the whole exercise. For instance, what about thoughts about the meditation practice itself? Thoughts like “Am I doing this right?” or “OK, I’m noticing my thoughts… but hold on, what about *this* thought?”.

But there is no real issue here: these thoughts are dealt with in exactly the same way as any others. They may pose as “meta” in nature – and they are – but at the end of the day they’re still thoughts: we can notice their arising (and perhaps notice the charge or “feeling-tone” that they carry); we can notice that they hang around for a while; but if we stick to just observing what’s there, then at some point these thoughts, like any others, fade away. And when they do, we reorient towards whatever might show up next.

[4] The standard guidance is to lean into challenging experiences with this open and receptive attitude, but if the experience is very comfortable then it is fine – indeed, advisable – to let go of the practice.

[5] See chapters 7 and 8. The expression Kornfield uses is in fact insistent visitors but I have (since first reading the book) always (mis)remembered the general point in terms of “persistent visitors”, and now feel wedded to that expression 😊