Thoughts and Alignment

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I want to talk about thoughts and alignment. So many people who get into meditation, mindfulness, or even therapy or anything to do with personal development are often frustrated by thoughts. There's a feeling of my mind's all over the place. I can't calm it down.

It's creating all of this extra stress for me. And what we ended up doing is pathologizing the thinking mind, pathologizing our brain for being all over the place. You often hear things like I can't focus, or my mind constantly thinks about this and this and this, or I can't settle it down. Like I need something like meditation to calm my mind. I needed to train my mind.

That's the one I hear a lot of. I need to really train my mind or tame my mind. There's merit to it. I'm a meditation teacher. Certainly meditation does help calm the mind, train our focus and there's huge utility to that.

However, I do want to also say that a mind that is bouncing from one thing to another, or is agitated isn't just an indication or isn't always an indication that you just can't focus. It might instead be an indication that something is out of alignment with your life. I mean, think about maybe a difficult conversation you had once and it just, it lingered in you the rest of the day. Maybe you said something you wish you didn't say and the person, you know, there was just a, there's just a look on their face. And you were like, oh, I probably shouldn't have said that, but you didn't apologize or anything afterwards.

And you just went to bed that night and your mind was all over the place thinking about it. Right? Is that because you can't focus or because something felt out of alignment? You felt like, Hmm, that probably wasn't the right thing to do and I haven't yet rectified it yet or had a fuller conversation about it. It's still lingering in the system. And that's a minor example. There are so many things that we do across a lifetime.

All these little decisions where we can temporarily abandon ourselves, an inner knowing, and it causes us to get out of alignment. And as humans, we tend to have a very high tolerance for that, which is why we can go months, years, or decades sort of bearing it. Where something doesn't feel quite right, but just like, okay, well I keep going. And then it starts to catch up to us. And the mind's all over the place.

We feel a little agitated. And I have a teacher who says, many times we paint ourselves into a corner and then we do meditation to feel comfortable there. You know? So this is an example of like we're making decisions that are actually out of alignment with the deeper truth within us, but we feel the agitation and the stress that that has created, and then we go, Ooh, I need to meditate to calm down. Maybe. Or maybe we need to actually start taking some responsibility for the decisions that we're making and whether they're taking us into alignment or out of alignment with our life.

So my main invitation to you today is instead of looking at thoughts as simply a symptom of a broken brain or an inability to focus, what if you use that as a compass? What if your mind being all over the place was actually an internal agitation of something being out of alignment? What would that be inviting you to look at, to listen, to, and to get back into alignment, to really deep inquiry? But it's a doorway into actually leading your life in a way that is genuinely fulfilling and genuinely yours. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.