One of the biggest problems with thoughts is that we tend to believe everything they say: “If I am thinking it, it must be true.”I have learned that the best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind. Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off. When we listen there is a different mode employed in the heart. Instead of trying to cut it off, we receive thought without making anything out of it. When we look at thought in this way we aren’t being pulled into it. We can just look at it. We don’t reject it or suppress it, but we don’t buy into it either. We don’t make more out of it than is there. That attitude of listening, of opening to and receiving thought, has a liberating quality in-and-of itself.
Ajahn Amaro, Thinking
Meditation is not just a simple technique for stabilizing the mind; it is also the discovery of how to engage fully, even while sitting still. In the modern culture of speed we seem to not do anything fully. We are half watching television and half using the computer; we are driving while talking on the phone; we have a hard time having even one conversation; when we sit down to eat we are reading a newspaper and watching television and even when we are watching television we are flipping through the channels. This quality of life gives us a superficial feeling: we never experience anything fully. We engage in these activities in order to live a full life, but being speedy and distracted, we have never discovered what full means
