When Do You Allow Thinking During Meditation?

There are a lot of beliefs about meditation, including that one needs to be a monk or away from society, that one needs to chant a mantra or special phrase, or that one needs to hold one’s hands in a particular shape, touching the thumb and middle finger.

While these are aspects of particular meditation techniques, they aren’t necessary to meditate and to learn to work with the mind. Meditation, in its basic and most simply profound level, is a state of non-distraction. Distraction can be caused my many things, thoughts, emotions, different sense input, for example sounds or sights.

One of the most widely held misconceptions or ideas about meditation is that we are somehow supposed to rid our mind of thoughts. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When we begin to meditate, we encounter a flurry of thoughts and believe that these mental phenomenon are the cause of our problems with meditation. In fact, thoughts are the natural phenomena of the mind, just as waves arise in the ocean or clouds appear in the sky. And, just like the waves in the ocean, thoughts left as they are will simply settle back into the ocean of mind. Or, as clouds appear in the sky, remain for a while and then disappear, in the same way, thoughts left to simply float within the mind and left as they are, will dissipate and disappear.

The question of when do we allow thinking to occur in meditation is almost not the point. The bigger point is to learn how to remain undistracted by thoughts when they arise, since we know after some practice, that they will in fact arise.

So, how do we remain undistracted?

First, you can read other posts that have been presented on this site:

Watching the Clouds Within Our Minds

17 Ways to Practice Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Resting (in Meditation) in Whatever Arises

What we do when we meditate is to allow everything that arises to simply remain, as it is, without grasping on to the thoughts and creating more thoughts about our thoughts. What that means is that when a thought arises, we don’t follow after it. Instead, we use an object of our meditation as an anchor for our attention.

The easiest anchor for our attention is our breath. You can find a post, references to other posts, and downloadable exercises for this practice here: Anchoring the Awareness of Emotions in the Breath. Whatever you do, make sure that give yourself plenty of time to work with, in this case, the breath as a means to return to present awareness. There’s nothing that you have to do to the breath; it’s simply a tool to bring your awareness out of distraction.

Give the exercise a try and then let me know how it works for you. Please feel free to contact me or leave me a comment if you have any questions.