Most people experience thoughts all day long and rarely discover a moment without thoughts.
So naturally, thoughts are one of the biggest distractions during meditation practice.
When we sit down for meditation, we can quickly become overwhelmed as soon as we notice just how many thoughts are whizzing through our minds.
The Buddhists call this “Monkey Mind,” which has been taken to mean any one of the following terms: Unsettled, restless, capricious, whimsical, fanciful, inconstant, confused, indecisive, and uncontrollable.
Yet quieting the mind is the great aim of meditation practice.
So the question is this: How do we manage our thoughts such that we quiet our minds?
I want to propose two approaches to managing our thoughts, and you must perform both approaches in tandem, as if each approach occupies a separate end of a scale…
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