Stop Trying to 'Silence the Mind'.

Many of us have become convinced through high-end, esoteric spiritual ideas that the goal of meditation is to ‘silence the mind’ or to be able to ‘focus on nothing at all,’ but that’s not the case.

There’s an ironic paradox in that kind of thinking. The same kind of paradox that concerns ‘desire.’

The Buddha was asked about how to end desire and pointed out that the urge to end all of your desire is, in itself, a desire. It’s a want. So, how can you ‘want’ to end your ‘wants’? It’s not possible to end desire through desire. The goal is to let go of the need to end desire as well, to be able to be exactly where you are at, without resistance.

Most of our inner healing is founded on overcoming paradoxes like this.

So, the real goal of meditation—at least for those of us who are not living in a monastery on a hilltop trying to achieve a complete disconnection from human life—is to learn how to be present, not to learn to be completely thoughtless or egoless.

And if you want to learn to be present (even to the extent that you want to reduce your thoughts), your goal isn’t to try to push away the thoughts or to ‘focus on nothing.’ Your goal is just to focus on something that is not your thoughts.

That’s why we practice focusing on our breathing.

We are trying to practice putting our attention and our focus onto the sensations and experience of breathing because that experience does not need thoughts in order to be experienced.

The more that you try so hard to silence your thoughts, the more that your thoughts will take over. Instead, just practice putting your attention onto the non-thought-based elements of your inner experience.

This is why I tell people that you can’t just ‘stop thinking.’ Your attention, energy, and focus need to go somewhere. So, in order to ‘stop thinking,’ you must ‘start feeling.’ It takes practice to turn our attention to sensations and emotions that are not based in conscious thought.

The more that you practice putting your attention onto those other elements of your inner experience, the more that your thoughts will calm down naturally on their own.

And sometimes, you have to let your mind run around for a while first. Like taking an energetic dog to the dog park to run around for a while. The more that you try to keep him cooped up, the more energy he has to release. But if you just let him run around for a while, he’ll get tired naturally and eventually calm down.

Instead of trying to silence the thoughts, just practice listening to them, observing them, and not investing yourself in them.

Listen to them with idle curiosity and redirect your focus to the sensations and emotions that cannot be expressed through thought.