You Can’t Know the Mind That Way

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, I'm going to talk about a mind trap that we sometimes get caught up in when we're practicing mindfulness and trying to understand the mind. So although our mind and what we think has a profound influence on our lives, most of us generally know very little about how the mind operates and why it does what it does. So, of course mindfulness, practice is this wonderful tool that we have that gives us a way of observing the mind and understanding it better. Therefore being able to work with it better so we can live more meaningful and happy lives.

But one of the reasons that many of us do not gain deeper insights and self-awareness in our mindfulness practice is because we keep trying to understand the thinking mind with the same thinking mind that's causing us a lot of our problems and suffering. It's a little bit like a dog chasing its tail. And it's a little bit like what Albert Einstein once famously said, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that we used that created them. So the only way that we can truly begin to gain deeper insights and awaken greater levels of self-awareness is to shift out of the thinking mind and into awareness itself. We need to step out of the mind to observe and understand the mind.

So sometimes we get caught up in this kind of cycle of trying to problem solve our meditation, or we're judging our meditation. We're trying to figure out our meditation. We're struggling with the mind using the mind. So we want to avoid that. And keep trusting that we can let go of the mind and rest in awareness.

Just keeping the practice really simple and easy like that. It takes a bit of trust. So if we can letting go of being caught in the thinking mind and learn to rest more and more in awareness, then understanding and insight naturally emerge. Not only that, but actually the mind tends to become more calm and steady when we rest in awareness. All we need to do is just give the mind a little bit of space for all of that to happen.

So today as you practice, just remembering that you don't need to use the thinking mind toi understand the thinking mind. Instead, just trust that you can let it go and rest in awareness. So as always, thank you for your practice and you presence here in this community. And just inviting you now to settle in for today's meditation.