Almost everyone who practices meditation or mindfulness encounters the phenomenon of the wandering mind – when, despite your conscious intention, your mind is filled with thoughts that have nothing to do with your current experience. You can employ various techniques to let go of the thoughts and “bring the mind back” to your meditative object or to the present moment, but often these techniques are applied as if all mind wandering was of the same nature. I investigate different reasons your mind wanders and how they call for different responses.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Wandering Mind in General
Naturally Noisy Mind
Negatively Preoccupied Mind
Excited Mind
Forgetful Mind
Avoidant Mind
Wandering Mind in General
There are many ways to describe the state of mind we seek to cultivate in meditation and mindfulness, but for the sake of this discussion let’s call it a “quiet” mind. This doesn’t mean a mind without thoughts, or even that we will be literally silent. Instead, it means our mind will be free from any extraneous thinking that has nothing to do with our current situation. We cultivate quiet mind not because there’s anything wrong with activity or thinking, but because we want to be fully present for our life as it unfolds. We’re not trying to be mentally quiet all the time, but we want to be able to become quiet at will, and to get used to being quieter in general.
Every person’s mind is different, and if you practice meditation or mindfulness you will end up discovering what kind of mind you have. For most of us, this is – at least at first – a rather shocking and unsettling discovery. Many of us find our minds are engaged in incessant chatter, very little of which has anything to do with our current situation. Or our minds get stuck in perseveration on subjects of resentment, fear, or worry, or lost in fantasies about subjects of desire or future activities. We may find we spend much of our time in pointless and random daydreams, the review of past experiences, or planning projects we’ll never get around to.
Once we identify our aspiration to live with a quieter mind, it’s tempting to set that aspiration up in contrast to our typical mind states. We may imagine that if we try very hard to apply Buddhist practices, our mind will quickly become quiet. This may indeed happen for the rare person, but the vast majority of us are surprised to find how little our efforts seem to affect the content of our minds – whether in terms of subject matter, the sheer quantity of thoughts, or the compelling quality of the thoughts. Unfortunately, this may lead us to conclude we’re no good at practice and then we quit. Or we resign ourselves to living with a noisy mind.
Fortunately, no matter the mind you have to work with, you are perfectly capable of practicing quiet mind. Or, more appropriately, you are perfectly capable of being quiet. Phrasing it like this emphasizes the choice to be quiet instead of applying a technique to achieve a quiet mind as judged by the number of thoughts going through it. Even if your mind is full of agitating thoughts, you can be quiet about that. You can refrain from adding any extraneous thoughts to what’s going on. You can observe your mind state as if it were just another aspect of your situation (which, of course, it is). If you get upset about your mind state, then be quiet about that. There is always space for you to choose silence.
What’s challenging is accepting and working with the mind you’ve got, rather than fantasizing about some calm, radiant, permanently thought-free state you imagine will bring you enlightenment, peace, and freedom from all agitation and discomfort. As I describe different reasons your mind might be wandering, notice if you recognize some of them from your own experience. Also notice if you feel resentment, frustration, sadness, despair, embarrassment, or shame about your experience. Know that facing such feelings and learning to compassionately embrace your own mind is the practice of being quiet. It may require you to let go of some cherished fantasies about what enlightenment should look and feel like, but the reward of this is fully inhabiting your own life.
I now will discuss five “kinds of wandering mind:” Naturally noisy mind, negatively preoccupied mind, excited mind, forgetful mind, and avoidant mind. These are merely convenient categories when talking about the many reasons our minds wander, and they are my own creations, not a traditional Buddhist list (although they bear some similarity to the Buddha’s Five Hindrances). You will probably identify with more than one category, and it’s good not to get overidentified with labels. Still, it can be fruitful to recognize a few of the ways you most often find yourself thinking about something other than what’s right in front of you.
Naturally Noisy Mind
I could start anywhere when it comes to describing the various ways our minds wander, but I thought I’d start with what I’m calling “naturally noisy mind.” I do this out of compassion for people who have naturally noisy minds, like me, so as the other kinds of wandering mind are described they don’t start to feel discouraged, thinking, “That’s not really my problem, and yet my mind is noisy anyway!”
Naturally noisy mind is perhaps best defined as a form of neurodivergence. In other words, for some reason some people’s minds are almost always crammed to the brim with thoughts. For some people the mind jumps randomly from thought to thought. For others, meditating feels like sitting at the side of a busy highway of thoughts, and you’re barely able to differentiate one thought from another. When I first started sitting, I remember it feeling like I was sitting in the middle of a blender.
What differentiates a naturally noisy mind from some of the kinds of wandering mind I’ll describe later (you can experience both at the same time) is that a naturally noisy mind has neither a positive nor a negative emotional valence. In fact, it usually seems quite disconnected from anything – the busyness has a momentum divorced from your desires, fears, intentions, or even how you’re feeling. It’s like you can tune into the radio station of this moment well enough if you care to, but there are multiple other radio stations coming in faintly at the same time.
You might think a naturally noisy mind would mean you’d never be able to progress in your practice of Buddhism or Zen because you’d never be able to meditate or practice mindfulness properly. I am living proof that this is not the case. However, those of us with naturally busy minds have to accept that our experience of meditation and mindfulness will be different. At times, it will feel more challenging and less rewarding than it appears to be for our fellow practitioners with quieter minds. However, because it is not easy for us to make our minds serene, we will be required to uncover the deeper meaning of practice, which is not a quiet mind for its own sake. Becoming quiet about having a noisy mind is a profound and transformative act of letting go, a transcendence of your small sense of self. And then you can realize it only takes an instant of true quiet to perceive what is most true.
Negatively Preoccupied Mind
The next kind of wandering mind is a negatively preoccupied mind, and this category includes many different negative preoccupations. No matter the cause or subject of our thoughts, this kind of mind state is characterized not so much by wandering but by the relentless return of the mind to its subject of preoccupation. It’s not necessarily that the subject itself is negative, but that the experience of preoccupation is negative.
I will talk separately about four reasons our minds get stuck on negative subjects because they call for different responses.
First, we naturally become negatively preoccupied when we are experiencing turmoil in our personal lives or witnessing it in the wider world. You may have experienced painful losses or be anticipating them. You may have difficult decisions to make or need to tolerate ongoing situations that are ambiguous or troubling. Trauma from the past may be causing problems in the present. Looking at the wider world you may feel disempowered and despairing.
If we’re able to set aside our concerns and practice quiet mind during meditation or mindfulness, we will find that doing so is incredibly helpful to our mental health and our ability to respond skillfully in our life. If we’re not able to let go of our worries, of course the first thing to do is be quiet about that. Then it may help to remind ourselves that allowing some space for being quiet will help us better deal with any problems we are facing, just as it helps to get enough sleep. Sometimes people subconsciously think of taking time for meditation or mindfulness as self-indulgent, and this is unfortunate because it often means they will neglect those practices just when they need them most. It may seem harder to be quiet when facing real turmoil in our life, but that’s to be expected. Being as quiet as we can manage can make all the difference.
Another reason we may become negatively preoccupied is because of physical or emotional pain. Our mind sometimes seems intent on keeping the cause of our pain front-and-center, as if it would be dangerous to lose sight of it. We mull endlessly over the pain in our knee and our efforts to relieve it or find ourselves yanked back into the distress of grief. You may experience significant pain in your everyday life, but many people experience it during seated meditation. Especially during a long meditation retreat, the body can become so uncomfortable it’s difficult not to dwell on it more or less constantly. Again, it’s possible to be quiet even about this – to relax our resistance to entire situation, including the pain, our reaction to the pain, and our desire to be free from the pain. As long as we’re not doing something that is actually causing us harm, we are okay and can take refuge in stillness, allowing everything to just be. This can be very difficult to do depending on our pain level, but it’s possible to at least momentarily touch a place that is untroubled by the pain.
A third reason our minds wander away from the present situation is mental illness. By this I mean unhelpful mental and emotional patterns that range all the way from something mild (the equivalent of a cold) to something debilitating that would benefit from medication and care from a mental health professional. To some extent almost all of us are affected by things like anxiety, depression, and trauma. When we’re anxious, fear feeds on fear until our emotional state is disconnected from reality. When we’re depressed, we perseverate on negative views until the whole world seems bleak and meaningless. When we’re traumatized, our mind recreates our past traumatic experiences in the present as if to keep us in a state of hypervigilance at all times.
If mentally unhealthy or destabilizing patterns are causing significant disruption in your life, don’t hesitate to seek medication or mental health care. Doing so can greatly increase the mental energy and space you have available for practice. Once you’ve done that, or if you don’t think that’s necessary, the primary practice when your mind wandering is characterized by anxiety, depression, or trauma is to break out of the negative mental loop and ground yourself in the present moment and in your body.
Of course, “breaking out of the negative loop” may be easier said than done! One approach that may help is identifying the negative thinking as the demon Mara, who came to discourage the Buddha when he was seeking awakening in meditation. Mara threw stuff at the Buddha, threatened him, tried to tempt him, and disparaged him. The Buddha sat calmly through it all, saying, “I see what you’re trying to do, Mara!” Similarly, we can learn disidentify with our harmful mental and emotional patterns and recognize how they are trying to disrupt our practice and peace of mind. There’s no need to judge or even reject these patterns; it was enough for the Buddha to recognize Mara – he didn’t need to return the attack.
The fourth reason our minds become negatively preoccupied is dwelling on thinking tinged with afflictive emotions like anger, resentment, jealousy, envy, competitiveness, paranoia, pride, or hatred of self or other. In Buddhism, such emotions are called “afflictive” because they tend to be self-perpetuating and harmful. It’s natural that these emotions arise in us and there’s no use in beating ourselves up about that. It’s when we dwell on them and feed them that afflictive emotions become a problem. We can waste an entire meditation retreat mulling over a resentment based in a past experience, or comparing our practice to that of others.
When we’re caught up in afflictive emotions, we need to recognize that we are clinging to a narrative about our life. No matter how intense the feelings involved, no matter how convinced we are that we are right, it’s just a narrative. We call this, “contriving reality for the self.” A story about our life may contain some truth, but it never contains the full, lively ambiguity of living. In fact, the more afflictive emotions involved, the more skewed and deluded our narrative is likely to be. The very fact that our mind won’t let the narrative go is evidence that some part of us knows our narrative isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The first step to letting go of a preoccupation with afflictive emotions is trying to convince ourselves that we are, indeed, just dwelling on a narrative, and that narrative is not synonymous with reality. In fact, it is obscuring our perception of reality (not to mention ruining our appreciation of the present moment). The mind will usually not be ready to let go but will argue that we can’t possibly let go of this incredibly true and relevant situation we have discovered. It isn’t easy to let go, but it’s a start just to say to ourselves, “Ah, getting all caught up in that narrative again.” Then we can be quiet about getting caught up. When the narrative drops away in a quiet moment, it can be a profound lesson in emptiness.
Excited Mind
The next kind of wandering mind is excited mind. Our minds wander away from our current experience because – to put it simply – there’s something we’d rather think about than our current experience! We may be anticipating something pleasurable, interesting, or stimulating. We may be daydreaming about the subject of our lust, a new house, cooking an elaborate meal, or spending time with loved ones. We may be planning a wonderful vacation, a rewarding project, or creative endeavor.
In some ways, mind wandering due to excitement is harder to let go of than negative preoccupation. At least with negative preoccupation we can stand back and recognize the results of the mind wandering are generally unpleasant to experience and unhelpful to our life and practice. When we realize we thinking about happy things, though – what’s the problem there? We may hold some idea that our mind is supposed to be quiet and readily admit we’re not fulfilling that ideal, but part of us doesn’t care. It’s natural to want to enjoy this life, and thinking about the things we enjoy seems like a harmless and pleasant pastime.
The thing is, even happy thoughts interfere with our full appreciation of the present moment when they have nothing to do with our current situation. Even pleasant or creative thinking is not the practice of being quiet. I won’t go into the importance of quiet mind here, as I’ve talked about it recently (see Episode 290 – Realization: Direct Experience of Reality-with-a-Capital-R), but basically it’s a pivotal part of our practice to spend time being quiet. Hopefully, if you’ve practiced for a while, you will have some taste of why. You may even have had a profound realization of why it’s important to be quiet sometimes… but then we forget.
When we are preoccupied with our pleasures, we are like the children in the Mahayana Buddhist parable of the burning house, from the Lotus Sutra. In the parable, the father of the children calls for them to come out of the house to safety, but the children are so caught up in their play that they ignore his calls. Only when the father promises the kids that even better toys can be found outside the house that they come running out.
It may seem negative to compare the joys of our human lives to playing with toys in a burning house, but this analogy reflects a truth that we often choose to ignore. Our lives are shockingly short and ephemeral. They usually don’t seem so as we go about our daily lives. Sometimes we even wish time would pass more quickly so some anticipated event will come about. But when we finally face death or profound loss, the almost universal human response is, “Already?” Caught up in our responsibilities and projects, we also tend to see them as having enormous significance. When we momentarily gain a larger perspective – when faced with death or loss, or maybe just when we’re able to be really quiet – we may realize our priorities have been out of alignment with what really matters to us.
If we want to be quiet at times despite our excitement about life, it can help to remind ourselves of impermanence, imagining what our mind-state would be like if we knew we were going to die tomorrow. Or we can try to remind ourselves of our deepest aspirations by studying Dharma teachings or recalling some profound moment of stillness we have experienced. We might think of the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh, who pointed out that if we can’t mindfully eat an orange, enjoying each moment of the experience, we can’t really enjoy anything. We might even be able to get ourselves to run out of the burning house for a while if we promise ourselves spiritual goodies like enlightenment experiences – heck, whatever works!
Our life may call us to go back in the burning house and continue with our activities, but it will best for ourselves and others if we don’t forget our true situation.
Forgetful Mind
The fourth kind of wandering mind is forgetful mind, where we are unfocused and think aimlessly about this and that. This kind of mind wandering lacks the frenetic quality of naturally noisy mind, the obsessions of a negatively preoccupied mind, and the anticipation of an excited mind. We are forgetful of any intention to be quiet, mindful, or appreciative of our current experience. Instead, we rehash the plots of TV shows in our head, speculate pointlessly about subjects we know nothing about, or come up with creative solutions to problems that don’t even need solving.
Psychological research has shown that we engage in pretty much ceaseless mental activity unless we’re actively paying attention to something like entertainment or a demanding task. When our mind is chattering on without a direct relationship to our current experience, it’s called our “default mode.” Much of our default mode processing can qualify as negative preoccupation or excited anticipation, of course, but even once the mind has exhausted or let go of that kind of thinking it seems compelled to stay busy. Some theories pose that at least some amount of default mode activity allows us to process things, but we don’t really know why our minds work this way.
In any case, what can we do about forgetful mind if we would like our mind to be quieter? This is a very tricky question. After all, our mind is wandering because we have forgotten to be quiet. The part of us that can choose where to direct our mind has fallen asleep the wheel.
It’s important not to get upset about forgetful mind. That’s the opposite of being quiet, but it’s easy to convince ourselves we need to berate ourselves or try even harder to control our mind. For the rare person such an effort works, at least for a while, but it may have side effects like dissociation. For the rest of us, it’s fruitless to try remembering to be mindful more often through sheer force of will.
Getting upset about forgetful mind is not only counterproductive, but also uncalled for. The kinds of thoughts we experience when we’re simply forgetting to be mindful have very little emotional charge. We let go of them easily once we reconnect with an aspiration to engage a particular situation with mindfulness. To use the analogy of sound, if we are hoping to cultivate a quieter mind, forgetful mind thinking isn’t all that noisy. It isn’t especially frenetic, compelling, engaging, self-perpetuating, or exciting. Input from the present moment breaks through the static of our garden-variety default mode fairly easily.
Instead of setting up an internal struggle to become more mindful, we can take a larger perspective. It’s delusion to identify with either the forgetful mind or the mind that remembers. Instead, we can consider the whole situation quietly. What will help us remember more often? It’s certainly not going to help to have a negative response each time we realize we’ve been caught up in the dream of thought, whether that involves impatience with ourselves, a rejection of the thinking mind, or a stern determination to exclude all extraneous thoughts.
Instead, we can be grateful that we have remembered to be mindful and throw away self-centered thoughts about how well or how poorly we are managing to do this. We can focus positively on enjoying what we are currently doing or experiencing. If we can’t bring ourselves to “enjoy” it because we find our situation unpleasant, then at least we can appreciate simply being alive to experience anything at all. Enjoyment and appreciation of our life becomes easier over time not only because we practice meditation and mindfulness, but also because we make peace with our life through other aspects of our practice. Very naturally and gradually our interest in what’s happening here and now grows, leaving us less inclined to get absorbed in mind wandering.
Avoidant Mind
The fifth and final kind of wandering mind I want to discuss is avoidant mind, where we find ourselves thinking largely because of our fear of emptiness. This usually happens within the context of silent retreat, although it may happen during our regular meditation practice. As we approach inner silence and stillness, our fears of what we think emptiness is, or what it will mean to us, inspires our mind to jump away to random thoughts, or to get fixated on some subject we know full well is utterly irrelevant to our efforts and current situation.
I remember sitting in zazen and designing elaborate shelving to organize cluttered areas of the Zen center – all in my mind. I never once followed up and built any of them. It was as if my mind couldn’t bear the silence and needed to fill it with something, anything, to avoid… what? Essentially, part of me resisted letting go of my mental map of reality in order to experience things directly and intimately. All my life I had relied on my mental map, and the oceanic spaciousness of direct experience seemed scary, overwhelming, or at least very unfamiliar.
When we realize our mind is resistant to letting go completely, it’s good to be patient and compassionate with ourselves. I once heard a teacher describe our effort to become more familiar with emptiness as being like working up the courage to swim in the ocean. At first, we dip our toe in and then run back on the sand. Then we get wet up to ankles and need to retreat. Gradually we wade further and further out, eventually allowing ourselves to float and be carried up and down by the waves.
Avoidant mind arises because we don’t yet appreciate what emptiness really is. When we gain some personal experience of it, we realize it isn’t a threat. In fact, it is a wonderful return to our true nature. To gain this personal experience, all we can do is gently encourage ourselves to embrace quiet mind and open ourselves up to the adventure, building up our courage over time.
