Categories: Maintaining Mindfulness
May the blessings of the Triple Gem be with you all!
Today, as you continue your journey of spiritual exploration, we will delve into the nature of the thoughts that arise in your own mind. Specifically, we will address the common experience of feeling tormented by your thoughts. For those of you who have begun to put these teachings into practice, you are already gaining first-hand experience of your mind’s nature and the behavior of your thoughts. You are beginning to understand.
Someone recently shared with me that they are being tormented by their own thoughts, particularly those from the past. They explained that these recurring, troublesome thoughts constantly plague them, leading to a state of mental breakdown. For a person who hasn’t practiced what we call Sati, or mindfulness, it’s difficult to even recognize that it is a thought that is causing the suffering.
This is the state of what is known as a puthujjana, an ordinary, unenlightened person. This is the common human condition. When we live without mindfulness, we don’t realize, ‘It’s just a thought that is hurting me.’ Instead, the painful experience becomes our entire world, precisely because we are not mindful.
How Your Mind Creates Your World
Even for those of us who are practicing, we can still get lost. There are moments when we allow certain thoughts to become our entire reality. The Buddha taught that the world itself is found within us. We can see this clearly when we examine how we experience life through our senses: the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. All the data we collect through these senses is translated into a thought in our mind. What we perceive as ‘the world’ is actually this stream of translated thoughts.
If we are not mindful in that moment, we become completely lost. Think about something you strongly desire. You can get lost in the thoughts about it, submerged in the data from your senses. By ‘getting lost,’ I mean you are completely immersed, unmindful. You might find yourself staring blankly, lost in a daydream. At that moment, that thought has become your entire world.
You can test the truth of the Buddha’s words yourself. If we look with mindfulness, with sihiya, or clear awareness, we see that in every moment, we are turning each thought into a world. This happens naturally; it’s a process the Buddha called Paticca-samuppada, or dependent origination. It is a natural law of cause and effect. However, as we practice mindfulness more and more, this habit begins to fade. It feels as if it’s disappearing, because we are becoming more aware.
The World of a Single Thought: The Example of Love
As long as we remain unmindful, we use our five senses to create a world, claiming it as ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ or ‘my self.’ If we were to break down our experiences like science breaks down matter into atoms, neutrons, and electrons, we would see that our ‘world’ is constructed from these very things: the information from our senses and the thoughts that arise from them. This collection is what we designate as our world.
Consider love, an experience most people cherish. Observe how in that state, you are completely attached, clinging, greedy, and veiled by delusion. In that moment, are you not lost in that thought of love? You might be suffering because of it, or you might be experiencing happiness from it. In either case, apply this mindfulness training and see what the Buddha meant. Is your world at that moment the pain disguised as love, or the happiness disguised as love? That is your world. This is how we use our five senses to construct our reality.
The Key to Freedom: Recognizing a Thought as Just a Thought
This might sound like a deep or complex topic, but as you practice, you will begin to catch it in your own experience. You will see, ‘Ah, in that moment, I made that my own. I defined it as me, mine, my self.’ This insight comes naturally with practice; you don’t need to force it. It is something you begin to notice as you cultivate mindfulness.
You can apply this same technique to the troublesome thoughts that plague you. These thoughts can be of many kinds. It could be a mistake you made in the past. Something you did or said to someone. For some sensitive people, even having a negative thought about someone can become a source of torment. All of these can become troublesome thoughts.
If a thought is causing you pain, it almost always belongs to the past. Even our anxieties about the future, a car we couldn’t buy, a marriage that didn’t happen, a worldly goal we failed to achieve, are rooted in the past. We regret not being able to achieve it, and we feel pain that we are still striving and haven’t reached our goal.
This, too, torments us as a thought. But to truly see it *as a thought* is only possible for someone who has practiced what the Buddha taught: Vipassanā (insight meditation), the Satara Satipatthāna (the Four Foundations of Mindfulness), or simply Sati-Sampajañña (mindfulness and clear comprehension). Without this training, many people don’t even know they have thoughts, let alone a mind. The majority of people in the world live this way, unaware.
The Practical Method: How to Face Your Troublesome Thoughts
This teaching is here to guide you in your practice. If a thought is tormenting you, if it comes back again and again, breaking down your mental state, making you unable to eat, forcing you to lie in bed all day, preventing you from eating at the right times, or stopping you from working with a happy mind, then there is a problem. The issue is a lack of understanding about these troublesome thoughts. You haven’t grasped their true nature.
Here is what you must do: if you don’t understand the thought that troubles you, the very first step is to establish mindfulness on it. Give it your full attention. When you do this, you will begin to understand. These thoughts are fueled by the three unwholesome roots: lobha (greed or lust), dosa (aversion or hatred), and moha (delusion).
Whether your regret is about your child, your parents, your spouse, your job, the people at your workplace, or financial problems, these troublesome thoughts can appear in many forms. If a thought repeatedly attacks you, leading to physical ailments and mental collapse, you must try to understand it. The very effort to understand it will cause the thought to recede and eventually be abandoned.
Watching the Thought: How Observation Dissolves Its Power
This process happens through mindfulness. Let’s say the thought tormenting you is about a past lover who left you, the current economic situation, or a degree you couldn’t complete. Whatever it is, when the thought comes and repeatedly torments you, your task is simply to keep watching it. How? With mindfulness. (If you are new to this practice, please explore our other teachings on how to maintain mindfulness, especially the one on silently watching the mind, which explains this process in detail).
As you continuously watch the thought with full, unwavering mindfulness, you will start to see things clearly. You will notice the headache it causes, how it prevents you from eating properly or completing your work. You’ll see just how much this thought is bothering you.
Then, you will have more insights. You’ll notice: ‘This thought is much stronger than other thoughts. How did it get so strong?’ You’ll realize, ‘The weaker I become, the stronger it gets. The more I fear it, the more powerful it becomes.’ You will see, ‘As long as I avoid looking at this thought directly with mindfulness, it grows stronger and stronger.’
You will begin to catch these details. As you see them, you will understand the factors that empower it: your own weaknesses, your emotions, your desires, your attachments and aversions, what we call the defilements of lobha, dosa, and moha.
From Understanding to Wisdom: The Birth of Inner Confidence
This understanding is, in one sense, self-understanding. On another level, it is the growth of your paññā, or wisdom. As you understand yourself, your wisdom grows. You gain insight. As this happens, your self-confidence increases. If you lived in a state of unmindfulness, you may have distrusted yourself, and that very self-distrust fed the power of your troublesome thoughts.
So, for any kind of tormenting thought, your practice is to simply watch it with mindfulness. As you keep watching, the thought will gradually begin to weaken. The weight of it, the pain of it, whatever it is, will diminish until it is completely abandoned and destroyed. Continue this practice. The day you correctly understand the nature of that thought, it will never trouble you again.
Facing the Bully in Your Mind: Gaining Mastery Over Your Thoughts
Think of it this way: a bully only comes to hit us when they know we are afraid. If they realize we are not truly scared, if they understand that we are more skilled or stronger than them, they will never attack us directly or indirectly. It is the same with your thoughts. If a thought is tormenting you, remember this: you have not yet properly understood it. As long as you don’t understand it, it will continue to cause you pain.
Whether your pain is about love, a worldly goal, your education, your job, or money, if the thought torments you, it means you lack proper understanding. For instance, if you were cheated out of money by a fraudster and you are now filled with regret, and you can’t escape that tormenting thought, it simply means you haven’t understood it yet.
If you maintain mindfulness and look only at that thought about the financial loss, day after day, with full awareness, you will start to see: Which part of this thought is hurting me? How strong is it? Why isn’t it just a normal, passing thought? You’ll realize, ‘If this were a normal thought, I wouldn’t be suffering like this.’ Through this understanding, your mind becomes clear and free. In that period, the thought about the money problem was the biggest source of your suffering. The same applies to all other troublesome thoughts.
The Lasting Peace: Transforming All Troublesome Thoughts into Ordinary Ones
If you maintain your mindfulness and just keep watching, over time, as I said before, you will begin to understand its strength and its mechanisms. As you understand it, its power fades. You will see exactly which part of the thought, which associated defilement, the feeling of ‘I have no money,’ or the feeling of ‘I am helpless’, is making you weak. When you understand that, you become a strong person. You become a true man, a true woman. You become someone with a spine.
To become that person, you must continue this process of understanding. When you practice this for a while, this tormenting thought will become like any other ordinary thought that comes and goes without causing any trouble. The day it falls into that category, you will feel an incredible freedom in your head, a mental release, an amazing lightness. You will realize that this lightness cannot be bought with money. It becomes a permanent state of ease.
For someone who practices this, even if other, similar troublesome thoughts arise later in life, they will know how to face them based on their first experience. That new thought will also be subdued and kneel before them. This is the practice you can continue, again and again.
Remember, if you truly understand your first major troublesome thought, any similar thoughts that come later will not be able to break you down mentally. You will look at them with the same wisdom, and they too will quickly become ordinary thoughts without a long struggle. This is what happens when you do this practice correctly.
I don’t need to extend this further. I believe I have provided the necessary understanding in this teaching. Put this into practice. Let your experiences become your wisdom. Understanding this, I will conclude this teaching on how, if you understand your thoughts, they will never torment you again.
May the powerful blessings of the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha, the Triple Gem, help you to realize these matters practically and clearly.
We invite you to walk this path with us. Read our teachings, and most importantly, apply them practically in your own life. as you practice, questions will naturally arise. Please feel free to share your experiences and questions in the comments below, via email or contact form. I will do my best to offer guidance in future talks based on your progress. For now, begin this practice with an open heart and a mind free from expectation. Cultivate it correctly, and may you find the clarity and peace you seek.
Thank you for joining us. We hope this blog will be of great benefit to your spiritual journey.
May you all be well and happy.
May the blessings of the Triple Gem be with you all!
