Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting

a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about one of the

goals of meditation.

More to come on that in a moment, first let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so I came across this quote recently, it's anonymous, and it goes like this, the

goal of meditation isn't to control your thoughts, it's to stop letting them control you.

Now, I've talked about this sentiment quite a bit on this podcast that one of the ideas

we tend to come into a meditation practice with, and really any form of contemplative practice,

is that our piece is going to come from gaining control of the thinking mind.

And I would add some nuance to this quote, which is that there is a level of learning how to, I guess we could say, have some agency in relationship to the thinking mind that we're developing in meditation practice, which is that we do see, oh, I thought has arisen and the

lot of ways that I can relate to it, and that can sometimes include shifting the attention to something else.

And yes, even pushing the thought aside can be a part of what we're going to do.

And we're going to do this quote, which is that there is a level of learning how to, I guess we could say, have some agency in relationship to the thinking mind that we're developing in meditation practice, which is that we do see, oh, I thought has arisen, and there are a lot of ways that I can relate to it, and that can sometimes include shifting the attention to something else.

And yes, even pushing the thought aside can be a form of temporarily finding a certain kind of piece, or we could say, I would put that more in the category of compartmentalization, which can be useful in different aspects of our life.

But meditation as a long-term strategy, as a practice of waking up to who you are in the deepest level and actually accessing a deep inner freedom, that, yes, is not about controlling your thoughts.

It's learning to stop letting them control you.

And when we take that perspective and meditation practice, it just shift our orientation significantly, which is why this is a topic and an idea worth me repeating many times on this podcast, because we can hear it and still go into our practice with this idea of like trying to control the mind.

Rather than trying to access a place within us where what is arising isn't having the same charge on us.

And so this again is just more of an invitation to take into your meditation practice, this different orientation of instead of trying to control thoughts, what's it like to not let them control me.

And the way I tend to like to do that is just relaxing into my experience, quite literally relaxing my whole body. You could even do it right now, or moments after this podcast, where you just relax the jaw, the shoulder, the belly, anywhere in your body that might be tense, because usually if there is tension in the mind, contraction in the mind on some level, it will show up in the body.

So we can set the stage for a relaxed mind by relaxing the body and then going into the meditation practice with this very open, spacious orientation that is aiming to settle into the part of me that is big and spacious enough to hold whatever is arising.

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