In This Episode…

“An awakened life is a life in which we’re no longer centered in the cognitive mind, we’re no longer centered in the thought stream. Ultimately, the spiritual path means trusting enough to let go of the mind and allow a deeper consciousness, a deeper wisdom, a deeper kind of guidance system to start to operate within us that isn’t something you can control, and isn’t something you can understand with your mind.” —Craig Hamilton

This episode is the second in our series exploring the most common obstacles to deep meditation–and how we can move beyond them. In Obstacles to Awakening Part Two: The Mind, Craig focuses on what may be the biggest challenge for meditators—our busy, restless minds.

The mind is our constant companion. It helps us interpret and make sense of the world. But when we sit down to meditate, the mind often feels like it has a will of its own. Memories, worries, creative ideas, and unfinished tasks seem to parade through our awareness, grabbing our attention, and becoming a source of frustration for many of us.

It’s easy to see the mind as the greatest obstacle to our practice. But what if there’s another way to approach it?

In this episode, we’ll explore why the mind might not be as insurmountable as it seems. Craig shares three distinct perspectives that can help you come to peace with the mind, moving beyond its noise and distractions to discover a deeper, more grounded presence in your meditation practice.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Learning how to relate to the mind in meditation is probably the most universally challenging part of the practice. It’s the thing people struggle with the most. We try to understand and get a handle on how to meditate with our mind, because our mind seems to have a life of its own.

We sit down to experience the peace and freedom of meditation, and then thoughts bubble up and seem to automatically grab our attention. Thoughts about the past, thoughts about the future, creative ideas, things we forgot—all of this seems to parade through our consciousness during meditation, when we’re just simply trying to meditate.

Our Mind Is Not the Enemy

As I’m sure all of you are aware, the goal isn’t trying to silence the mind. The mind is not the enemy of your meditation. Ultimately, in the context of the mind’s role, meditation means trusting enough to let go of the mind during our practice. Our thoughts are such a familiar set of reference points. They’re how we make meaning out of the world. They’re how we understand what’s going on.

This constant machinery goes on and on, describing what’s happening, interpreting what’s happening, evaluating what’s happening. To just set that down for a period of time, and say, “For this period of time, I’m not going to try to know anything. I’m not going to try to figure out what’s going on, I’m not going to try to figure out what it means, and I’m not going to try to figure out whether it’s good or bad. I’m just going to let my experience happen, and not know anything about it. Let this moment happen, and not know anything.”

I use the word trust because in the end it’s a kind of trust that if I let go of this familiar way of navigating, and relinquish my familiar reference points, the meditation will be okay, I won’t be wasting my time here, and I won’t disappear. So in the end, it’s about the question, “Do we trust enough to let go of the mind?” But there are a lot of different ways that we can work with that, and just practice letting go of the mind.

No Longer Rooted in the Thought Stream

The one other piece I want to mention by way of context is to tie this back to spiritual awakening itself. One way of understanding what it is to live an awakened life is that it’s a life where we’re no longer centered in the cognitive mind, in the thought stream.

The question that I asked about meditation – “Do we trust enough to let go of the mind in meditation?”- becomes the same question in life, “do I trust enough to let go of the mind as I’m living? Do I trust enough to allow a deeper consciousness, a deeper knowing, a deeper wisdom, a deeper kind of guidance system to start to operate within me, which isn’t something I can control or understand with my mind. It’s definitely not the mind.

Awakened consciousness, and the knowing and higher functioning that it brings, is not coming from your thoughts. It doesn’t exclude thoughts. Thoughts still come and go, thoughts are still very helpful, and we still need to think about things. But we might find we think about things much more clearly when we’re not centered in the mind, when we’re not, as the traditions say, identified with the mind. We no longer believe ourselves to be the mind. When thoughts come up, we don’t think “That’s me.” They’re just thoughts arising in the spaciousness of infinite awareness that is our true nature.

Learning to Let Go in Meditation and in Life

So learning to let go of the mind in meditation is much easier than learning to let go of the mind in life. This is why meditation in this context is so powerful – because we can sit and do practices to really step beyond the mind, experience who we are beyond the mind, and experience our being as existing beyond the mind for an extended period of time.

Letting go of the mind in life is more challenging. There’s more risk to it. So it’s good that we practice it deeply in meditations. Then, hopefully it starts to ripple into life. Hopefully, through having the experience of being beyond the mind for an extended period of time, it starts to show up naturally where you realize, “You know, I don’t need to also figure everything out all the time in life. I can let life flow. I can respond spontaneously. I can not know beforehand. I can let go of trying to premeditate things.” Life gradually starts to open to this much less mind-centric way of being.

Leaving Your Creative, Compelling, Busy Mind Alone

I spoke earlier about how certain thoughts can feel incredibly compelling, as though they demand our attention. These might be creative ideas, attempts to solve a problem, memories of something forgotten, or reflecting on a past event to gain insight. Each of these thoughts carries its own kind of gravity.

They seem to call out, “Hey, pay attention to me! I’m important.” This dynamic isn’t limited to thoughts alone—it’s true of the content of consciousness as a whole. Whether it’s perceptions, sensations, feelings, or thoughts, countless objects arise in our awareness, each seeming to insist that it deserves our focus.

In meditation, the simplicity of the practice is this: don’t give any attention to any of it. Just let it come and go. Keep your attention on that which is not the mind—or simply refrain from giving your attention to the mind—and see what reveals itself.

It’s a very simple instruction, and it applies universally to all thoughts. In fact, it extends to all content. But what often happens in practice is that certain thoughts, feelings, or sensations seem to demand your attention. They present themselves as though you need to do something with them or about them.

For instance, let’s say you’re feeling a lot of discomfort—it feels like you have to make that discomfort go away. Or perhaps there’s a thought about something unresolved in your life, maybe tension in a relationship. It starts to surface in your meditation, and it feels distracting.

You might feel the need to act, “I need to work this out. I need clarity, insight, or resolution. I need to deal with this now, so I can move it out of the way and get back to meditating.”

This can apply to all kinds of thoughts, arising in different ways and inner scenarios. The challenge—and the freedom and invitation within this practice—is that you can approach it universally.

Whether or not that issue with another person truly needs to be resolved, clarified, or worked out, the meditation practice invites us to take a different stance. Right now, in this moment, the directive is to leave it alone. Don’t give it attention. Don’t try to resolve it. Don’t seek clarity.

Just Let it All Be

This applies to anything that arises—just let it all be.

This perspective is incredibly freeing because it removes the burden of deciding which thoughts need attention and which can be dismissed. Instead, all thoughts are treated the same way. How freeing.

At the same time, I’m saying that this simplicity can also be challenging, especially with thoughts that feel particularly compelling or urgent. These thoughts seem to demand attention, making it harder to apply this universal approach.

But what we often discover, even after just a few minutes of genuinely practicing this letting-go, is an immediate sense of relief. There’s this realization, “Oh, I don’t have to do anything about that right now.”

And even though there might still be a time when you need to address that thought or situation, in this moment, you’re free from it.

I invite you to embrace the freedom of not knowing, of not needing to know, and of not needing to work out, or figure anything out, or solve any of your problems, or know anything at all. And hopefully, that can help you apply this sort of universally to everything that’s coming up.

Your Inner Narrator Is Not the Problem

HOST: Most meditators, from beginners to experts, are probably familiar with the inner narrator. It’s that voice that seems to be an almost constant companion during our practice, commentating on our experience. So what is that voice in our heads? Is it the voice of the ego, our higher self, or neither of the above? In this segment, Craig illuminates the true nature of these inner voices and how we can keep them from taking control of our meditation.

Question:
When I meditate, even when I’m feeling very spacious, I often hear a kind of voice that’s narrating my experience. Is that the voice of the ego? And how should I relate to it?

Answer:
Good question. It’s definitely not always the ego, at least in the way I use the term. People use that term differently in different contexts. When I talk about ego, I’m referring to a very particular kind of function in the psyche. I’m not going to give a big discourse on ego here, but I define it simply as our self-image, our self-concept, our story about ourselves that we defend against threat. We all have a story that we want to keep intact. We have this concept of who we are as a person that we use to navigate the world. So that’s what I mean by ego, and it’s a fairly conventional definition.

If the voice in your head is an ego voice, it’s going to be talking about you: How am I doing? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? Oh, look, I’m really enlightened. Oh no, I’m never going to get this right. Those are the typical ego voices. Things like, I’m great, I’m terrible, this means I’m great, this means I’m terrible. It’s all a me story.

So, the voices in your head during meditation aren’t necessarily ego at all. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. But the fact that those voices might not be from the ego doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the voices of your higher self. An inner voice is just one of the ways thought shows up. It’s one of the forms that thought takes. And it’s neutral. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. It’s indifferent. It’s anything and everything.

Don’t Pay Attention to the Voices in your Head

In meditation, the way I would encourage you to relate to any voice is the same way we would relate to any thought or feeling or sensation or experience: don’t make any meaning out of it. Don’t latch on to it. Don’t try to make it go away, but don’t allow yourself to be interested in it or try to engage with it.

Instead, you should assume a relaxed inner posture where you’re simply making room for everything. Sometimes a voice might say something that inspires you, or touches you very deeply. Maybe it will inspire creative ideas. When voices arise, you might simply say: “Oh, that’s interesting. The voice is saying those things. But what it’s saying is neither here nor there.” You just want to have space for all of it without getting attached.

The Contents of Consciousness Are a Neutral Medium

You can think of any content of your experience—thought, voices, imagery—as a kind of neutral medium that can be used by many different forces in the psyche. It can be used by your ego, it can be used by the highest part of you, it can be just a place where raw creativity comes through, or it can be a place where your deepest fears all suddenly blow up. It’s a neutral medium, influenced by everything.

That’s why, in meditation, we take such a neutral position toward that medium. If we’re anything other than neutral toward all that content, we’re going to spend our whole life just trying to interpret it: What does it mean? Was that my higher self or was that my lower self? Should I trust that? Should I not trust that? When we start to interpret all that content, we’re not meditating. We’re paying attention to all the ups and downs on the surface.

In meditation, we have this freedom to have no idea what any of the content means. We just let it all happen. We experience all of it without doing anything about it. It’s actually a rare privilege to be able to do this. In the rest of our life, we need to interpret those voices in order to figure out which ones we should listen to and which ones we should ignore. We need to know which thoughts are intelligent and rational, and which ones are totally bizarre. But in meditation, we have this freedom to just let it all happen. And taking that position opens the way to higher discernment, wisdom, and awakened clarity.

How to Keep Your Creative Mind Out of Your Meditation

HOST: Meditation requires us to find a way to disengage from our thoughts. But what happens when a flow of creative, insightful ideas suddenly emerges in the midst of our meditation? In this next segment, Craig answers a question on this topic, and explores the unique challenge of not engaging with the mind even when our thoughts are exciting, important, and deeply good.

Walter wrote in to say that he’s working on a book project that has him very intellectually stimulated and engaged. Because of that, he’s finding it hard to let go of the mind in meditation and is wondering how to deal with that.

This is something I can relate to because I spend a lot of time writing and working on creative projects. But this isn’t just a challenge for creatives.

This dynamic can happen for all of us, but it’s particularly challenging for anybody who has a lot of problems to solve.

For example, if you’re entrepreneurial and you’re trying to build an organization or a movement, you’re constantly bombarded with new ideas that you want to enact. This happens when you’re doing creative work, or for engineers who are trying to puzzle things out. I’m sure many different types of people experience this kind of thing.

The obvious answer to this question is also a simple answer. Having an active, stimulated mind is going to be more challenging when you sit down to meditate, because meditation is about not being involved in your mind. From one point of view, it’s about not engaging in thought, not knowing, and letting go of that whole world.

So of course it’s going to be challenging because you’ve got so much thinking momentum all the time. It’s harder. So that means you have to meditate more and you have to do it with more commitment and more humility and more determination and more intention to really do it.

Think about it. For most of us, meditation is really only something you do for half an hour a day or an hour a day. It’s this short period of time where you set your engagement with the mind and the world aside. You’ve got the other sixteen waking hours of your day to be engaged. Wouldn’t it be good to let it go for a little while? I think that’s probably pretty simple and reasonable.

That’s the simple, obvious answer, but my guess is that you probably want more than that.

We’re Ambivalent About Letting Go of the Mind

The challenge when we’re facing important creative problems or projects is that we’re engaged with them all throughout the day. And the reason that we find those projects extra hard to disengage from is because we’re ambivalent about really letting go of the mind.

Let’s say you’ve been working on your book all day, and when you sit down for meditation, you get a great idea. This kind of thing is very common, because there’s all this space when you meditate. Maybe you’ve been trying to figure out how to start a chapter, and bam, suddenly the answer comes. It could also be an idea about a life problem or work problem you’ve been trying to solve and suddenly the seed of an answer starts to germinate.

The trick is to realize that the reason you’re having such a hard time letting go is not because of the momentum of thinking. Rather, it’s that you’re really more invested in solving your problem or getting this creative work done than you are in discovering the mystery of your own true nature. You want to engage in your creative ideas more than you want to make room for something beyond all of that to begin to come through and animate you.

It’s All About Intention

It actually gets down to our core intention. Do I really want to awaken? How interested am I in what’s beyond the mind? How much do I care about the higher potential of all this? It’s in those moments that our true intentions are revealed to us. We might realize that we just want to solve our problem or get our creative work done. That feels like a higher priority in the moment, because we’re so invested in it. This isn’t something that should cause us to feel bad about ourselves. This is just the nature of what’s getting revealed in these moments.

There’s not some gimmick to overcoming this challenge. You can’t just, for example, take the creative idea and put it on a little mental piece of paper and then file it in your mind so you can come back to it after your practice.

The reality is that you’ve got to want to meditate a little bit more than you want to solve any creative problem or engage any of those ideas. This means you have to value the opportunity that your meditation time represents. If you really reflect on the significance of spiritual practice, you’ll eventually come to a place where you know that during this time that you’ve set aside for meditation, your practice is far more important than any great idea that might come to you.

Then you’ll be in a place where you can let go of even the greatest ideas that well up, because you’re more passionate about the unknown than you are about the known. It’s my experience that if you plant your stake in the unknown, you’ll find that the creativity and flow in your life begins to multiply and all of those creative questions and problems will get solved in their own way.