One of the easiest things to say that falls into the category, if easy to say, almost impossible to do is when people give the instruction, just pay attention to the breath,

and if a thought comes along, just drop it and bring your awareness back to your breath.

That was probably the easiest sentence to say

and the most difficult instruction to follow and in

many ways because the instruction is totally wrong and because also by the time all of us

reach adult life trying to stop thinking is about as easy as trying to stop swallowing or blinking or doing anything else that has become ingrained through years of repetition.

Thinking is not just one of the most important human faculties that we have.

It's how we make sense of our lives. It's how we communicate and

coordinate with each other. And in fact if we don't know how to think and we can't turn our experience into words and into ideas, then serious psychological situations result.

For example, when people have traumas in life.

An enormous amount of the clinical work that is done

is simply allowing people to access the memories that have been blocked so that they can turn the

experience into a narrative so that they can bring the experience, they can incorporate the experience into their lives and no longer keep it compartmentalized.

So thinking plays a absolutely vital significant role of the human experience

and pretending as I give you instructions that it won't be the dominant struggle that most of us will have

whose week is how do we relate to the thoughts that pop up in the mind, not just the memories,

not just the random images, but really the internal chatter trying to figure out label

narrate what we're experiencing. It starts out very young in life and at first as I was saying yesterday the inner

chatter we hear is an internalization of the language that caregivers speak to us with and is

essentially because of that known as a titrating quality. It makes us feel like we're not alone in the world

when we can think. When we face new experiences in life, we tend to think and try to make sense of it more, the left hemisphere pipes up

because that's what makes us feel less alone as we walk into new situations.

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