The Goal of Mindfulness Isn’t to Stop Your Thoughts

Mindfulness Transforms Your Thoughts

When I was a child, I talked all the time—and it usually got me into trouble. At home, at school, it seemed like someone was always telling me to sit down and be quiet. Once, one of my grade school teachers stood me in front of my class with masking tape over my mouth, telling my peers that’s what happens when you don’t shut up. (This was back in the days when corporal punishment and community shaming were standard practice in school.)

If I wasn’t being disciplined, I was being excluded.

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, so we didn’t celebrate birthdays or holidays or say the Pledge of Allegiance. Attending public school, this meant I sat out in the hall a lot—unable to participate in class activities that didn’t align with the faith I was brought up in. I didn’t have a Christmas morning experience. Halloween and Easter were things other people did. Every morning when the class said the Pledge of Allegiance, I was sent out into the hall. I spent every class holiday party sitting outside the classroom. While my classmates dyed Easter eggs, I sat out in the hall. While they glued cotton ball beards on construction paper Santas and sang carols, I sat out in the hall.

One year, I was sent to a child psychologist because I broke all the eggs my classmates brought to school to dye for Easter. The psychologist asked me why I would do such an awful thing. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it—let alone explain it to someone else. I was suffering under layers of hatred: Of myself, of others. I’d formed the belief that I was no good, that nobody wanted me, and nobody needed to see me or hear me. I often lay in bed at night thinking: I can’t do anything right. Nobody wants me. That belief was programmed—and, at times, beaten—into me.

My entire childhood was a lesson in shutting up and shutting down.

I believe we can all relate to this experience, in one way or another. We are each born with a vibrancy, a desire to be magnificent, great, dynamic, charming—to sing our songs loudly in the middle of the room. But instead of being encouraged to thrive, most of us receive the message that to be liked we must be small and quiet. The world tells us to shut up and sit.

But those words—once wounds—became my wisdom.

They can become yours too.

As a consciousness coach and consultant, I spend a lot of time thinking about thinking. (There is even a term for it: Metacognition.) As humans, we think thousands of thoughts every day. Studies have shown that humans can have anywhere from 10,000 to over 50,000 thoughts a day. That’s as much as one thought every 0.02 seconds! The stimuli the human brain absorbs each second number in the millions, yet our brains can only consciously process a fraction of them in any given moment.

Still, I don’t think many people understand the power of their thoughts. Beginning to think about what you are thinking—the stories you tell yourself, the voice of your inner critic, the beliefs you reinforce with your mental chatter—is the key to negotiating your suffering and arriving at a space of awareness.

But most of us don’t do it. Many do not even know how.

In some ways, we have come to believe that our thoughts are universally true, that who we are is defined by what we think—that the voice of the inner critic is us. But that voice, no matter how familiar it may become, is NOT YOU.

Not even close.

It might surprise you to learn that the goal of mindfulness is not to stop your thinking but to become aware of it. Through mindfulness, you learn to become actively aware of what you are thinking so, at the deepest level, you can listen to your inner wisdom. By discovering how your thoughts are generated, where they come from, and their power to create any reality you choose, you can begin to understand how they inform your feelings and behaviors—and, subsequently, your life!

Through mindfulness, we don’t just become conscious of our thoughts, but learn how to exercise our ability to choose them as well. We can ask ourselves if we really want to feed a thought or choose something different.

And how do we do all that, exactly?

We shut up and sit.

Get started, here.