stopping negative thoughts vs accepting the bad ones

[rko_]

Hello all, I'm new to the forum and been practising mindfulness on and off for a couple of years.

I follow the everyday mindfulness on twitter and thought about one of the tweets recently that stated "If you don't like where this train of thought is taking you, then get off." I compared this to the other side of mindfulness that tells us to "accept the negative/bad thoughts as well as the good". This got me thinking - if I don't like my current flow of negative thoughts, the first thing I'd want is to go "right, stop thinking negatively, be mindful" - but how do you go about this if you have to accept the good and the bad?

I just wondered what you all thought about this? My educated guess would be that, I'm aware I'm thinking negatively - I'll be mindful of these thoughts, see them for what they are...just thoughts. But at the same time am I not just labelling these thoughts as negative, therefore my aim is to get rid of them?

Hope you have some good answers for me

Cheers,
Garry.

[JonW]

"My educated guess would be that, I'm aware I'm thinking negatively - I'll be mindful of these thoughts, see them for what they are...just thoughts. But at the same time am I not just labelling these thoughts as negative, therefore my aim is to get rid of them?"
Your guess is spot on for me. Mindfulness really isn't about getting rid of thoughts, it's about relating to them in a different way. If we aim to get rid of them, they have a tendency to come back with a vengeance. We also have a tendency to want to keep the pleasant thoughts and eradicate the negative/difficult thoughts. But we can't pick and choose like that. Mindfulness is about relating to all thoughts in a different way - that's to say, recognising them purely as thoughts - not solid facts. What tends to work for me is not seeing them as pleasant or unpleasant thoughts. They're just thoughts. "Mere secretions of the mind," as JKZ puts it. As soon as we label a thought as "unpleasant", maybe there follows an impulse to be rid of it. And the merry-go-round continues.
In my opinion, and it's only my opinion, the expression ""if you don't like where this train of thought is taking you, then get off" is rather misleading. It implies that we can shut off thoughts like a tap. If only it was that easy!
Mindfulness is more subtle than that.
Good things, Jon

[James123]

You fall asleep on a train. You wake up and realise you've gone way past your stop and it's taking you miles and miles away from where you should be.

You can either stay on the train heading further and further away, or you could mindfully decide to get off at the next stop and head back to where you should be going.

In other words, if you continue following that train of thought you'll end up at the wrong destination. However, if you accept the thought for what it is, just a thought, you'll be on the right tracks.

Clear as mud? Well it kinda makes sense to me. Sort of

[JonW]

"You fall asleep on a train. You wake up and realise you've gone way past your stop and it's taking you miles and miles away from where you should be."
That's a brilliant analogy for how our minds usually work.
And let us not forget that the average person has 78,000 thoughts a day. That's a lot of wrong trains.

[FeeHutch]

Welcome to the community Garry.
James, I love that way of describing it too, I can really relate and it just helped halt a run away thought I was having

[Gareth]

I wrote the tweet.It does work if you take it the way that James has taken it. We can take my day today as a case in point.

I am in the middle of an MS relapse\bad patch at the minute and feeling pretty awful. I had a doctor's appointment about it this evening. In the past I've had bad experiences with doctors, and all day my mind has been hurtling forward to this appointment, and playing out possible scenarios. As soon as I have noticed this train of thought, then I have got off. That is the point of the tweet.

It is the noticing of the thought that is the key, and this only gets better with practice.

[JonW]

Apologies, Gareth.
Language can be so confusing and subtleties can so easily be lost in translation.
Sorry to hear things are so tough right now.
You are an inspiration, always.
Good things, Jon

[betty.etal]

I like the idea of getting off the train of thought - isn't this where we are being mindful in the moment, rather than just during meditation. Obviously while during formal sitting meditation, it would be a matter of getting off any train of thought by coming back to the moment - via the senses. But in our every day life it would be about the particular thought - I've been working with this lately and finding it to be really helpful - if I am going about my day and notice my thoughts drift onto something that is not skilful (worrying etc), then I note where my thoughts have gone, then come back to the feel of my feet on the floor, my clothes on my skin, tune in to what I can hear, see, smell etc - which is exactly that - getting off the train!

Betty

[James123]

Tell you what I'd absolutely love... To spend just one day or even an hour in the head of someone like Jon Kabat-Zinn to see exactly what goes on in there when it comes to being mindful.

Although I understand the concept, well as much as I can after a few short weeks, I genuinely think it would be light bulb moment.

[Gareth]

The thing is James, JKZ is probably just the same as you or I.

He meditates every single day because he knows that our minds are just built like this and for a very good reason. They go to the future, they go to the past. All we can do is bring them back and continued mindfulness practice makes it easier to do this.