Meditation is not about stopping thoughts or emptying your mind, but rather about noticing when your attention has wandered, simply letting go of the thought in question, and beginning again.
It is a way of changing our relationship to our thoughts so that we are less consumed by them and experience spaciousness. Creating a new and spacious relationship with our thoughts brings both peace and freedom.
Sharon Salzberg
There is something paradoxical about meditation: the more you think about it, the further you drift from its essence.
Most people who sit on a meditation cushion for the first time arrive with an expectation. Sometimes that expectation is “relaxation,” sometimes something like “coming back to yourself,” and sometimes “silence”—inner silence. All of that sounds perfectly fitting and adequate, and yet there tends to be an underlying assumption that the brain has a kind of volume knob that you can turn down to zero once you master the right technique.
But the brain “thinks” otherwise. Thoughts simply arise—whether you want them to or not. You might conclude that you’re doing it wrong, but you could also “see” them as evidence that you are alive. The real question is not how to stop your thoughts, but what you “do” in the moment you notice them. That moment is brief, almost invisible; before you “know” it, it has passed. You were briefly caught up in a thought, and now you’re back. That is the entire “work.” Not an empty head, but that fraction of a second in which you return—without fuss, or at least without judgment about the fuss.
Sharon Salzberg calls this a different relationship with thoughts. The word “relationship” deserves attention. It implies that there are two parties who don’t always agree. That can be true of you and your thoughts as well. You don’t have to like your thoughts. You don’t have to believe them either. They are there, they come and they go, they move—and you can be the one who watches, who “registers” them as “things” that exist and with which you need do nothing.
There is, then, a difference between being inside a thought and seeing a thought. The first is what many people consider normal, and in that state they are likely to merge with their thoughts entirely. There is no longer a thought and someone in whom that thought exists—instead, you become the thought; you are the worry about tomorrow, you are the replay of yesterday’s conversation. Seeing a thought asks nothing more than a small measure of distance. The distance that brings clarity. In ACT therapy, the term “defusion” has been coined for this—a felicitous find: becoming disentangled from thoughts.
The space that Salzberg speaks of, which she describes as both peace and freedom, is not something you need to “create.” It is more that you uncover it—because it was already there. Beneath the layers of interpretations, judgments, reactivity, and stories that the thinking mind continuously produces, there is something that simply … is. Without drama or fuss, simply present.
For some people, this is a startling discovery in meditation: that stillness is not reached by overcoming thought but by no longer being completely swept away by it. As I sometimes say, it’s not about being free from thoughts but about becoming free with your thoughts.
You don’t need to be a good meditator. In fact, that’s not really possible. All you need to do is begin—and when you’ve drifted away, which will often happen, simply begin again. That’s it. Beginning again and again. That is where you find peace and freedom.
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