The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on June 29th, 2021
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I was 19 years old when I started getting interested in spirituality & meditation. The second book I read in my quest was “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, and one of the first chapters focused on, “you are not your thoughts.”
It really made no sense to me at all.
Some years later, I was doing a four-month residency at the Upaya Zen Center, and in my final interview with the teacher, she said to me, “you’re a bright young man, but…. try not to think so much.”
That advice went in one ear and right out the other.
The next year, I did a three-week meditation retreat in Malaysia, and after telling the teacher I was mostly just thinking all the time, she asked, “do you notice the stressfulness of thinking so much?” I replied, “uhhh, actually I really enjoy my thoughts!” She looked at me a little confused, and said, “keep looking at that.”
Not too much longer, I was on my two-year retreat in Myanmar with my teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who is unique among meditation teachers in that he encourages the use of skillful thinking to aid one’s meditation practice. After months of listening to him encourage meditators to bring some thinking into their practice, one day he said to me, “for you, no more thinking. Your mind is already curious enough.”
I was able to take it in this time, but felt a lot of resistance!
A few months later, I started to realize that I was journaling quite a bit and maybe it wasn’t so helpful. Even though it was 100% about meditation/buddhism, it was lots of “trying to figure it out,” and, finally, I could see the stressfulness of all this thinking.
It was around this time that it finally sank in just how much of my identity revolved around “David the thinker.” I fancied myself as a writer, an armchair philosopher, a thinker, and a person with a future that could use some planning & strategizing.
I distinctly remember a moment in Myanmar where my thoughts seemingly disappeared, even though I wasn’t even doing a “meditation technique” at the time. It wasn’t for very long, maybe 30-60 seconds, but I became filled with fear & borderline panic. Being without thoughts was the equivalent of total identity death. I had left my family, my life in the United States, my hobbies, my financial stability, and much more, but I had never let go of “the thinker.”
As the story goes, I let go of about 95% of my journaling, only using it as a last resort tool. I likewise let go of my need to figure out meditation, to know what would come next, to be something or be somebody. I took to heart the instructions to “trust awareness” and to “see thoughts as just thoughts.”
Wow. Wow. Wow. What followed was a deeper layer of peace and serenity than I had ever known to that point. Did I say wow yet?
Now back in lay life, I still think a lot, but they no longer define me. There’s also a fair amount of no-thinking, and a very large amount of letting early-stage thoughts float through with grabbing onto them.
That chapter I read at age 19 on “you are not your thoughts” now makes perfect sense. Putting that into practice and realizing it for myself has been perhaps one of the most radical things I’ve ever done.
Have you ever noticed that you are not your thoughts, even if only for a minute?
Note: Here’s an article I wrote a while back about three practical strategies to work with thoughts in meditation, but on a high level, there’s something deeply powerful about simply letting go of the need for thoughts to fuel our identity.
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