Defusion of Thoughts in Meditation
Welcome back to our weekly blogs discussing mindfulness and wellbeing.
In the previous series, we discussed the practice and technique of mindfulness meditation, including the different types of practices which fall under mindfulness, and how to physically perform the practices.
This new four part series will cover the types of experiences we should expect to have while performing the mindfulness practices. This also ties in closely with the theories, mechanisms and evidence for why mindfulness might produce the effects that it does. We will cover these — the ‘science’ of mindfulness — in the next series.
Let’s get into it!
Defusion of thoughts
Rethinking ‘I am not good enough’
People often find that mindfulness helps them get some ‘distance’ between themselves and their thoughts. For example, a common thought that someone might have is ‘I am not good enough’. What modern psychology — and mindfulness — assumes is that there is a difference between a ‘thought’ and the person ‘thinking’ the thought.
Separation: a liberating insight
Someone can think a thought so much that they can no longer see the difference between the thought itself and the person (themselves) having or thinking the thought. They end up in a sense fusing with the thought so that they end up thinking that they are the thought — that they and the thought are the same thing. They see themselves and the attached statement — the I am ‘good enough’ or the I am ‘not good enough’ as being the same thing as the ‘I am’. This can be a subtle insight and yet through practice people find it can be extremely liberating to realise that the ‘I am’ is separate and sovereign to whatever labelling statement is attached to it.
Who, in fact, am I?
Psychologists will say that the practices of mindfulness, by shifting attention to different parts of our body and experience, helps to open up that ‘gap’ between the person thinking the thoughts and the thoughts themselves. This process is called defusion or cognitive distancing. Sometimes, mindfulness practices can help us have new thoughts altogether — entirely different shifts and modes of mind which can open up new and exciting avenues for us to follow. It also of course can lead to the question of ‘Who am I?’ If I am not my thinking, if I am not equal to thoughts, and similarly if I am not labels — which can include all the ways we categorise, define and label ourselves (like by our job, our success, our religion, our qualifications, our gender, our belief systems, our nationality, our political affiliation, our name — just to name a few) then who, in fact, are we? As they would say in Zen — ‘What was your original face before your parents were born?’
‘Falling awake’ into a bigger container of awareness
An extension of this is that during meditation people can experience a particular type of defusion which is more like a dropping or falling away from thoughts altogether, into a bigger container of awareness. In mindfulness practice, this is said to be ‘falling awake’. ‘Thinking’ is often narrow and likes to separate, label, define and put things in categories. This type of falling away into a larger, more whole, container of awareness can be exciting, profound or even scary for some people, particularly if we have spent much of our lives primarily in the narrow ‘thinking’ domain of mind. There are vast inner resources within our own mind which are accessible to us through the practice of mindfulness.
That’s all for now — stay tuned next week when we cover ‘Wise Mind’. And remember to join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 19:30GMT in the Secondary School FocusRoom (we use this as a combined session for both rooms) for live and free mindfulness sessions. We look forward to seeing you there!
