Thoughts – the enemy of meditation?

Many times I’ve heard something like, “I can’t meditate,” or, “when I try, I just can’t stop the thoughts from coming up.” I can relate. Before I understood that the purpose of meditation is the act of intending to do it, and before I could be kind to myself in the face of frustration and perceived incompetence, I felt like I couldn’t either.

In her book First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, Sarah Wilson opens with an anecdote about the time she was offered the chance to ask the Dalai Lama a question. After much fretting, panic, and uncertainty, she went with “How do I get my mind to shut up?” His reply was: “There’s no use. Silly! Impossible to achieve! If you can do it, great. If not, big waste of time.”

It’s funny, and characteristic of the straightforward candour we’ve come to expect from His Holiness. What it shows, though, is that meditation isn’t about a goal or an achievement. It’s an action, a practice.

And yet, in so many meditation instructions we hear some version of “let go of thoughts,” so it’s not hard to see how this has been misinterpreted.

What I love about neuroscientist and mindfulness teacher Dan Siegel’s approach (I’ve been fan‑girling over this man for years!) is his “bring it on” attitude. His Wheel of Awareness, a meditative practice, dedicates an entire quadrant to welcoming all the thoughts, images, and memories - our mental processes - into awareness. Yes, when inviting other aspects into awareness, such as the sense of hearing, we might wish to adopt a “let go of thoughts” approach. But knowing that mental processes will get their turn helps me approach it more as a reminder that, for now, I’m inviting hearing to fill my awareness, so I reorient to that.

Another spiritual teacher whose message helped land this concept in me was Matt Khan and his book Whatever Arises, Love That. Again, we don’t have to let anything go or turn away from an unbidden thought; we can love that it popped up. Smile at that thought, I sometimes add a bouncy “Whoopsie,” and return to where I’m intending to place my awareness right now.

Lastly, meditation is about living in the world, our world, with more ease and choice. And our world is busy and full of choices. It gives us the chance to practice the art of starting again, recovering from our choices, and choosing again. It’s a practice of finding ease with “mistakes” and responding to them with self‑compassion. Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, writes: “Beginning again and again is the actual practice, not a problem to be overcome so that one day we can come to the ‘real’ meditation.”

Thoughts, bidden and unbidden, will always accompany us, and that’s just how it is. How we respond to them is the art and the practice of meditation—and a foundation of resilience and good mental health.