Your Thoughts Aren’t Bad

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Despite dating back thousands of years, and despite Jesus engaging in it as an integral part of His spirituality, meditation as a spiritual practice has been all but lost in the western Church. In many quarters within Christianity, meditation is looked upon with wariness and deemed to be a dangerous practice, but that is too our detriment.

Part of what it means to be human is that unlike other creatures, we get stuck in our minds. Our brains are in constant overdrive. The mind wants to keep us safe, solve a problem, or simply be in control of any given situation. Most of us are thinking ourselves into oblivion, racing from one thought to another, one emotion to the next, never pausing to simply be (a tendency to which Buddha referred as the “monkey mind”). And in those rare moments when our minds are still, we’re confronted with the unbearable reality that life is filled with suffering, so we try to escape or at least find ways to dull the pain. Maybe we turn to a drink, a pill, a needle, sex, or shopping but we will go to almost any length to avoid suffering. And this is the root of all our addictions, all our anxieties, all of our cravings. We just can’t deal with life, so we find anything that will entertain or distract us from the present moment.

Thankfully, mindful meditation—i.e. the practice of being present to this very moment—provides the space to sit with all our feelings without being defined by them or needing to assign a moral value to them. Mindfulness creates space for a third way of seeing by compassionately embracing a neutral, nonjudgmental posture toward all the emotions, feelings, and ideas that constantly flood our brains. Instead of impulsively grasping or identifying with these thoughts or emotions, we simply let them go, neither clinging to nor rejecting anything.

This is important because our brains naturally default to dualistic, or binary, thinking. We judge people, places, and beliefs as either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, gay or straight. And once we’ve divided reality into binary camps, the brain makes us choose between these false dichotomies. Since pleasure is determined to be good while pain is adjudicated to be bad, any form of suffering thus must be avoided—hence the impulse to escape or numb ourselves from the present moment.

Yet if we take the time to cultivate the discipline of meditation, before we know it, the way we gaze with loving kindness at every thought that comes and goes during meditation is the way we will see all the hopes and fears, pains and pleasures in daily life. “How we regard what arises in meditation is training for how we regard whatever arises in the rest of our lives,” explains Tibetan Buddhist and author Pema Chodron.

Whether meditation is a new concept for you or you’ve been practicing mindfulness for years, this guided meditation by Father Brendan E. Williams can help you cultivate not only mindful awareness of the present, but also an open, tender-hearted compassion toward yourself.

What We’re Reading, Listening to, Watching

Melanie

• Reading: Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice by Belden C. Lane

• Watching: For All Mankind (Apple TV+)

Gary Alan

• Reading: When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

• Listening to: “Stabat Mater” by Jerycho