Mindfulness of Thought

A quick visit to the café of your mind

Go, if you can, to a modestly busy café or restaurant. Find a nice table and sit down. Order some tea, if you like, or whatever suits your fancy. While you’re waiting, let’s try a mindfulness practice.

An excellent choice, given the surroundings, might be to notice sounds.

Likely there are many interesting things in this environment you could listen to, but for this exercise let’s try to focus on voices—noticing them, but not getting drawn into them.

You may be momentarily intrigued by any given voice or even conversation, but overall you’ll probably find the sounds blurring into a sort of background murmur—one you can easily observe without attachment.

This is exactly the posture we’d like to develop when listening to our own thoughts.

We’ve been noticing thoughts already, of course.

The difference now is that instead of noticing thoughts as a distraction, and then returning our attention to something else (for example, sounds or breath or motion), we want to learn to attend to our thoughts directly, as the focal point.

Think of this as the next logical next step in the mindfulness tree:

sounds —> breath —> thoughts

As you may have guessed, you can do this within the span of one practice—it makes for quite a nice progression, actually.

Begin your meditation as usual, in the manner you prefer; start by noticing the sounds around you, then gradually shift to noticing your breath, and finally shift again to noticing thoughts.

This is hard!

It is one thing to listen to blended voices in a restaurant; quite another to try to tune in directly to the constant and often insistent thoughts chattering within the mind’s café.

At any level of experience, you will likely find yourself repeatedly hooked by your thoughts and drawn into their world of evaluations and assessments. By now, however, you probably know what to do.

When you notice you’ve been “hooked,” acknowledge it and any thoughts or feelings that come with it, and then go back, as best you can, to nonjudgmentally observing your stream of consciousness.

You may find it helpful, when your thoughts seem particularly entangling, to take a break and go back to observing something a little less charged, like sounds, or breath, or motion.

Be patient with yourself. Trying to mindfully observe thoughts is challenging for everyone. If you find yourself getting too frustrated, don’t forget about ACT’s diffusion exercises—they’re always available to help.