Everyday Mindfulness

When I'm doing sitting meditation in silence and with my eyes closed it is usually very easy for me to still my mind. I just feel like sitting in a big dark cave, where nothing moves except my breath and maybe a fleeting thought passing by now and then.

Mindful walking is a completely different experience for me, I have noticed that I can keep a very keen eye on my surroundings while chanting a mantra and still have a continuous semiconscious narrative running in the back of my mind - and noticing all of this is happening simultaneously. How many different threads can people usually keep in their head?

'How many different threads can people usually keep in their head?'

If I'm meditating, whether sitting or walking, my intention is to maintain a single pointed attention - on the breath, on the sounds of nature, whatever. If I notice thoughts bubbling up, I'd simply register that, then return my attention to my chosen anchor. That's my meditation.
It's not a question of how many 'threads' I can keep running at once. That's not meditation.
Jon

No, no. I was not trying to describe anything I try to achieve as a meditation practice, just how my mind goes running wild on its own.

OK. So, during meditation, what happens next when you notice that your mind is running wild on its own?
Jon

During sitting meditation it is quite easy for me to do as you say and register the thought and then return to the anchor. But when I try mindful walking it is almost impossible for me to keep focused, so I've started to "double anchor" with a mantra and simultaneously focusing on what I see,or sometimes on feelings in the body. So those two are what I am returning to.

The walking style meditation may be slightly different to yours. My experience is really similar but also different... I normally focus on my feet the same way as I would the breath, so every time I'm pulled away I try to come back to the feet. I find there's lots of stuff going on mentally and at times around me that is distracting. At times I have to lower my gaze or do some slow blink type stuff to get my focus back to the feet.

I also count the footsteps like the breath as they pass... so 1-2-3-4... up to 10.

I don't have really have a place to do the slow style walking meditation other than in my garden which again is a different experience altogether.

But yea I focus on my feet mostly just as I would the breath. More recently I experiment with noticing things visually and bringing curiosity to them as I've never seen them before but at the moment I think I get more out of trying to focus on my feet.

The Narrative, the bloody narrative,... how can I loose it (or don't I need to)?

Very typical experience for me today. I went on a quite unplanned walk in a nearby area I have not visited before. The terrain was quite demanding and my shoes were not chosen for the occasion, so I had to put a lot of concentration just on how to move safely, a quite exciting and pleasant experience. But then at some point I came to think of writing about my experience here or on another forum, and that's where it started. From that point on I could not stop my mind from making a narrative of everything I experienced, putting everything into words, carefully formulated and reflected on, so as to fit in a forum comment or a blog text. The language I used in my mind even changed based on the language of the forum I was currently thinking of writing to (English is not my first language, but I think fluently in it). And this mind-tape just went on and on, swapping story focus to accommodate the different audiences on different forums, but with me completely incapable of stopping it, even though I was fully aware of what was going on.

Do other people have similar experiences and what do you make of it?

I still get carried away by the thought stream from time to time, usually when I'm facing some challenging life event. I always come into my body. Works every time.
Jon