How to Clear your Mind

 “I can’t stop thinking… It’s like my mind won’t shut off… My thoughts just keep racing. I lie awake at night, endlessly going over what I should have done or said…”

Sound familiar? If your thoughts keep you up at night or drive you nuts during the day, you’re not alone. The human mind has incredibly vast potential, yet many of us are tormented by incessant thinking, harsh self-judgments, an inner-critic, or tedious thoughts that repeat on an endless loop.

Whatever we do in life, wherever we go, our mind is always here. So it goes without saying that getting a handle on this mind and learning to use it well can improve our quality of life as well as our ability to excel in any pursuit.

Thoughts Are Not the Problem

If you want to clear your mind the first thing to understand is how expectations can trip you up.

Perhaps you’ve heard the meditation instructions to sit quietly and feel your breathing. It’s understandable that one would assume this means there is a correct experience to have: “My mind should be calm and peaceful as I feel each breath coming and going.”

The opposite is true. There’s no one right experience. In fact, the more you think there’s a right way of doing it, the harder it will be to relax and follow the instructions!

If you’ve ever tried to follow your breath for more than a few moments, you know it’s not so easy. Within seconds, your attention wanders: it gets captured by an impulse about something you need to do, lost in a memory of a conversation, preoccupied with anything other than the simple, direct feeling of the breath. One thought leads to another, and soon you’re lost on a train of associative thinking.

Thoughts in and of themselves are not the problem. It’s our relationship to our thoughts that is the issue. We become obsessed with our thoughts, engrossed in thoughts. We react to them, fight with them or suppress them. All of this takes energy, consuming our attention and exhausting our reserves.

The aim of meditation is not to stop thinking. It is to be more aware of thinking, so that our thoughts don’t control us.

Thinking is as natural to the mind as hearing is to our ears. If you believe that you’re supposed to stop thinking, then meditation will be a struggle filled with frustration and tension. However, if you understand that getting lost in thought and beginning again is simply part of the practice, then the whole process becomes more easeful and enjoyable.

How the Mind Settles

The Vietnamese Zen Master, poet and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh uses a wonderful analogy to describe the process of clearing the mind through meditation. Picture a glass of freshly pressed, raw apple juice mixed with pulp. If you want pure juice and you begin poking and prodding with a spoon, you’ll only stir up the pulp.

Instead, if you place the glass of juice on the counter and leave it untouched for an hour or two, all of the pulp will settle to the bottom on its own. When you return, you will have a glass of pure, clear juice. The settling happens naturally.

It’s the same with the mind. The more you strain and struggle to hold it still, the more agitated it will become. Every forceful attempt to calm down and stop your thoughts sends a cascade of reactions through your mind and body.

Meditation is the subtle art of allowing things to be just as they are inside, while staying gently but firmly present. How do we this?

Anchoring your Attention

Many meditation techniques use a reference point, called an “anchor,” to help steady the mind. This could be the feeling of your breath, the sensations of your body sitting, a mantra, or even an image like a candle flame.

To return to our apple juice analogy: the anchor is like the counter upon which the glass is resting. It’s a stable place where you can lightly rest your attention, allowing things to settle on their own.

Every time you return to the anchor, a little bit more of the mind’s power becomes available. One moment at a time, the inner fragmentation and scatteredness can be replaced by a sense of wholeness as the energies of the mind coalesce around the chosen theme or anchor.

Little by little, as you rest your attention in the present moment, you can witness each thought, mood and sensation as it comes and as it goes. The mind becomes quieter, things begin to unwind, and the agitation of its habitual movement towards or away from experience settles. The thoughts and preoccupations of the day are no longer so loud and bothersome. They become more like echoes in a quiet, open space and you can see yourself and your life more clearly. 

Learning to Begin Again

Of course, this takes practice. The bedrock of meditation practice is the ability to gently let go and begin again. The mind will wander. You will forget and remember over and over again, returning to the anchor many thousands of times.

Don’t lose heart.

Noticing that mind has wandered is not a failure—quite the opposite. It’s actually a sign that the practice is working! For in that very moment, you are once again aware. Mindfulness has returned. Rather than berating yourself, noticing the mind has wandered is cause for celebration. Creating this kind of positive feedback loop is the key to success.

It is in this very process of getting lost and remembering that the benefits of meditation take root.

If you pay close attention to this simple process, you will learn profound lessons about yourself, your mind, and the way life works. You may see how unnecessarily hard you are on yourself, how quickly you become impatient or frustrated, how much more easy and enjoyable life is when you are kind and forgiving, or how a light, steady attention is more sustainable than short bursts of intensity.

As you practice, observing these old habits with a kind and steady gaze, you begin to reshape your inner life. Dysfunctional tendencies are slowly replaced by new, healthier habits. Each time you wake up, you learn how to let go and begin again with more warmth and curiosity.

This develops patience, resilience and inner confidence—qualities that are essential for anything we do in life. When we can let go and begin again with no loss of enthusiasm, anything is possible.

An Art of Living

Learning how to clear your mind and allow things to settle renews the spirit and refreshes the heart. But this is just the beginning of the benefits of meditation.

Meditation isn’t about achieving some special state, but rather learning how to live well. Meditation provides a laboratory to study how the mind works. We clear the mind in order to look more deeply and understand the nature of life.

There are certain universal truths about life that we can come to know and understanding directly. Everything changes. Pain and loss are natural. We’re not in control. We are intimately and deeply connected to everything.

The more we understand these fundamental truths, the less we struggle, creating stress and hardship for ourselves and others. The less we struggle, the more we can experience a natural sense of peace and clarity.