Watch and Release Disturbing Thoughts

When your disturbing thoughts are tempting you to jump in and to get out of some jam, remember to do nothing but watch.

Release Yourself from Disturbing Thoughts and Feelings

All of our life experiences have been trying to teach us a specific grand lesson: Liberation from our captive condition (whatever that may be in the moment) cannot come by further deliberating it. On the contrary, we can see the wisdom in doing nothing toward our disturbing thoughts and feelings when we realize that the only way not to be dragged under by these negative states is to stay out of their life.

In many ways, this kind of watchfulness is a meditation. It involves our willingness – wherever we are and in whatever we’re doing, and regardless of what that moment maybe that brings up in us what it does – that to do nothing in the face of those reactions is the beginning of a new relationship with them, the beginning of the next level of meditation.

Because you see, meditation isn’t just sitting someplace with our eyes closed, quietly contemplating something of a spiritual nature, or doing whatever discipline we do to make the mind be still. No. That’s not meditation, at least not the next level that we’re looking at together.

Meditation is a direct relationship with the sum of ourselves in the moment, where we stand as a witness to what moves through us instead of becoming its captive through our reaction to it. In other words, meditation has nothing whatsoever to do with reconciling some disturbance in our lives. Instead, meditation is our agreement to allow that disturbance, whatever it may be, to reveal to us something about ourselves that we don’t know yet. That revelation is the same as a release.

And that is the heart of meditation – being released moment to moment from a sense of self that doesn’t know what it’s clinging to.

When it’s time to step back from some reaction that’s tempting you to jump in and to get out of some jam, remember to do nothing but watch.

This means whether you’re in your car, at work, at home, talking to your husband, your wife- be as inwardly still as you can be toward what you see in front of you. Why? Because what you see in front of you is always your reaction to what something in you perceives as the source of the disturbance outside of you.

The next level of meditation is to understand the disturbance is never outside of you but within a level of consciousness that has constant disturbing thoughts and then ceaselessly seeking a solution to its disturbance.

You don’t need to do anything else. Don’t fall into that fitfulness that’s pulling you left and right. Don’t accept the sound and fury of those ten thousand thoughts and feelings coursing through you as being the proof that somehow or other you somehow must protect yourself from them. Just watch it all, and you’ll soon understand the goodness of that kind of stillness, of that the next level of meditation.

This article is excerpted from “Take Meditation to the Next Level,” an audio program by Guy Finley

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About the Author

Guy Finley is an internationally renowned spiritual teacher and bestselling self-help author. He is the Founder and Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center for spiritual self-study located in Merlin, Oregon. He is the best-selling author of The Secret of Letting Go and 45 other books and audio programs that have sold over 2 million copies in 30 languages. Guy holds regular in-person classes at Life of Learning Foundation, including two free talks each week live-streamed www.guyfinley.org/online. These classes are open to all. For more information about Guy Finley and Life of Learning Foundation, visit www.guyfinley.org