Overcoming the Impossible Task of Disengaging from Your Thinking to Take Charge of Your Life

In this episode, Sarah describes in detail the RAIN technique for disengaging from, separating yourself from and separating yourself from your own thinking.  If you learn and use this technique you won't feel as mentally drained and feel physically more energetic. You will feel as though you have taken back being in charge of your life, versus your mind and thoughts pulling you in a million directions. This technique involves four steps and will give you the teachings you need to enhance your understanding of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation.

Sarah's video course on Youtube This course is designed to work with coaching. Contact Sarah through her websites below if you are interested in coaching.
Sarah's list of types of thinking
Sarah's list of 300 emotions

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Important links:
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This episode is a meditation for beginners, and mindfulness for beginners resource. Intermediate and advanced meditators will also benefit. The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

The Aware Mind is produced by TSD Mindfulness, a virtual meditation center, offering mindfulness classes, certifications and private coaching for people with past trauma, anxiety and depression disorders, business leaders, and people who work in the helping professions (i.e. counselors, healers and yoga and meditation teachers).

Transcript

At this point, every information portal is saturated with mindfulness content.  But this show is a unique, unusual, curious take on mindfulness.  Some of what you hear will be completely new to you.  Let's dive in and take a look at the nature of the aware mind. I invite you to deepen your awareness, so that you may be liberated and inspired. 

I'm Sarah Vallely, professional coach. I help people overcome anxiety, heal from past trauma, improve their relationships, and maintain better work life balance. Welcome to the show. Today, it's just me. I'm going to be talking about stepping away from your thinking. About a month ago, I was invited to give a talk in front of a group at an organization about mindfulness.

At the end of the talk, there was about a 10 minute People were asking during that Q& A, asking me to explain to them how to step away from their thinking, how to interact less with their thinking, how to disengage from their thinking, separate from their thinking. I was taken off guard a little bit.  And feeling like this was an impossible question to answer, and these few moments that I had in between questions.

And I know that people spend years going to meditation retreats and working with meditation teachers to learn how to do this. It's not something that you learn overnight, and it's so much the core of the practice and the dedication. That's why we spend so many years. practicing so we can learn how to disengage and take a step back from our thinking, but definitely not something that you can learn during a Q& A session in between questions.

It's just, that's just not possible. So that's why I decided to record this episode to give my very best attempt at answering this question. How do we disengage from our thinking? So I'll do my best here. Here's the introductory to this. The first thing you need to do is wake up to the thinking. Basically recognize that you are thinking.

So none of these other techniques work unless you can take that pause and recognize, yes, in this moment right now, I am thinking. I am thinking. The next thing you can do is to allow the thinking to be there. It's not a practice in pushing away the thinking. It's not a practice in clearing our mind. It's nothing like that.

We are allowing the thinking to be there. And then the next thing is, is to be curious, to inquire about the thinking. And in this way, we identify what kind of thinking we're engaged in. There's all different types of thinking. And then the last thing that I'm going to go over is naming the thinking. Give it a name.

We might name it rumination. We might name it worry. We might name it self devaluing. Those steps make a little bit of an acronym, which is RAIN, R, recognize your thinking, A, allow the thinking to be there, I, inquire about the thinking, and N, name the thinking. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through each of these steps in detail and give you lots of tips on how to do this.

You might want to take some notes. If you want to take a moment to get some pen and paper, that might be very valuable. So here are some tips for waking up to the thinking, recognizing that you are thinking. So again, this means that we take a pause and we say to ourselves, Oh, I was thinking about what I said at the meeting.

That simple, just recognizing that you're thinking and maybe recognizing what you're thinking about. Meditation practice is an Excellent way to get better at this because in our normal lives, unless we have training or, you know, we've, we're doing some type of practice, we don't generally just take these pauses to notice our thinking.

So a meditation practice is a really great way to get better at taking those pauses. And the reason is, is when you practice meditation, the kind of meditation that I teach, the kind of meditation that insight meditation teachers teach, Vipassana. When we practice that type of meditation, what we're doing is we are focusing on something, maybe we're focusing on our breath, and then we lose that focus, we lose that concentration, and we get caught up in some type of thinking, and we kind of zone out, we kind of lose this type of focus.

present moment consciousness. Practice is, is then to wake up. It's kind of like waking up from a dream. You just wake up and notice, Oh, I'm lost in thought. And then you bring yourself back to whatever it is you're focusing on. Maybe it's your breath. Maybe it's your body sensation. Maybe your eyes are open and you're looking at something like stack stones.

So this practice of concentrating and then losing your focus, waking up to your thinking and then bringing yourself back, if you sit and do that for half an hour every day, let me tell you, you're going to get so much better during the day to just notice, Oh, I've really been lost in thought about planning for this party that I'm giving next week, you know, whatever it is. 

Silent retreats are also another great way to really dive in and get better with this practice. They call this noble silence. So when you go to a silent retreat, you check in, you get everything in your room, you might go have a meal, and then someone leads you maybe in the dining room and says, Okay, we are going to begin noble silence now.

And noble silence means there's no more talking. Whether it's a three day retreat, five day retreat, ten day retreat, whatever it is, there's no more talking during that noble silence, except if you are working one on one with your meditation teacher. They usually have little meetings where you're working one on one, so you might talk to your meditation teacher.

But other than that, there's really no talking. That means you are pretty engrossed in your thinking. There's nothing else to do. There's nothing else to do, but notice your thinking. So talk about, you know, waking up to your thinking. During Noble Silence, you're either lost in your thought, or you're waking up to your thinking, or you're focused on something, you know, for days.

So that's a really good way to get better at waking up to your thinking, recognizing that you're thinking and recognizing what you're thinking about. My video course that's on YouTube is also a great way to learn these techniques, and so I will leave a link for that in the show notes. Downloading the Mindfulness Bell app is another great way to get better at waking up to your thinking.

What this app does is it rings this mindfulness bell, actually. ring my bell right now so you can hear what a mindfulness bell sounds like. 

What that app will do is it will make that chime sound at a certain time of day on the hour. I like to set it to ring at a random time each hour. My mom actually sets it to ring Something like every 37 minutes, so then it kind of feels random. You know, there are different ways that you can work with that app, but the idea is when your phone makes the singing bowl sound, the mindfulness bell sound, you take a pause.

Tune into what's, what's going on? Are you thinking? Are you absorbed in thought? What are you thinking about? And maybe then taking a moment to tune into the sounds in your environment or the sensations in your body. Another strategy for getting better at waking up to your thinking is to designate a certain place for checking in.

So maybe this is a certain room in your house. Whenever you go into this room, you take a moment to check in with your thinking. Or maybe it's your garden outside, uh, whatever it is. And the last suggestion I have here is to do what I call mindful observation. And mindful observation is a statement, and it's a statement that you say to yourself, you can say it silently, that acknowledges that you're thinking.

So it might be, I'm noticing, I'm thinking about the meeting yesterday. The mindfulness observation should be neutral. It's not like you're putting yourself down at all. It's not like, Oh, I'm noticing I keep harping on what happened yesterday. No, it's, it's neutral. I'm noticing, I'm thinking about the laundry that I have to do.

It's very, very simple, but that can be helpful for that step in waking up to the thinking to, to make that acknowledgement. Here are some tips for allowing You're thinking instead of pushing it away. The Buddhist idea is that what we resist grows bigger, so we don't want to push it away necessarily.

Again, simply kind of talking to yourself, talking yourself through this is an excellent way to pull this off. You might say, it's okay that my thought about having to clean the house is here. You're just allowing it, allowing it to exist. I do have an exception to this, and that is self devaluing, thoughts about putting yourself down.

I teach that those thoughts we need to correct, or we need to replace with something more compassionate, because those thoughts of self devaluing can be dangerous. And so we could do the practice of allowing it to be there if we really are separating ourselves from the self devaluing, if we're really getting to a place where we know it's not true.

Like if you really can sit with that thought and know that it's not true, but if that's difficult, I think it's good to correct the self devaluing. It's like, actually, that's not true. I am really good at my job or giving yourself some compassion. So accepting the thinking, it's really allowing the thinking, I accept this worry thought about finances.

I accept that it exists. But acceptance does not mean that you have to accept that it's true.  So you might say something to yourself like, even though this thought might not be relevant in this moment,  It might not be true. It is okay that it's here. Acceptance doesn't mean that you accept the reality of it.

You don't, don't accept that it's true. You just literally accept that your brain produced this thought, maybe completely randomly. And this idea of acknowledging that the thought isn't true can be really helpful. If you have a thought such as, I should not have made that mistake, you can follow that up with, well, what if I didn't believe this thought?

Any thought? What if you just took a moment and said, well, what if I didn't believe it? And that's vulnerable. It's vulnerable because to get to this place. Or you realize you're thinking thoughts that aren't true is really admitting that you don't have it all figured out, that you are producing thoughts that aren't accurate.

That's vulnerable. That's really a good example of self vulnerability, meaning being vulnerable to yourself, which is so powerful. Here are some tips for inquiring, being curious, being curious. about the thought. So, so far we've awakened to the fact that we are thinking, we're recognizing that we're thinking,  then we're allowing it to be there, we're not pushing it away.

And on this third step, this is the inquiring in the RAIN, the R A I, inquiring, we might ask ourselves, What type of thought is this? And to answer that, you really do need to educate yourself on what all the different thought types are. So I'm going to share a few here. Projecting into the future.

Imagining how things will play out. That's a certain type of thought. I call it projection. Explaining, maybe you got an email from someone challenging something you did, challenging a decision you made. So in your mind, in your thinking, you might be explaining, justifying why you did what you did. So that's a certain type of thinking.

And the thing about these types of thinking is they can be very useful. So the mindfulness part is to determine whether in this moment it's useful. Is it useful or is it causing mental drain? Is it tiring you out? Is it causing stress? In that situation, you might have be overthinking it a bit, might be too much. 

Uh, putting pressure on yourself is a certain type of thinking, pushing yourself, self devaluing, devaluing yourself or devaluing someone else. That is a type of thought. I'm not good enough. I make too many mistakes. I need to get better at this. I don't like the way I look. Things like that would fall into that category of self devaluing.

Very dangerous. Really important to be aware of that type of thinking and come up with some strategies and practices for healing through that.  Rumination. Another type of thinking. When I use the word rumination, I was specifically talking about the past. So that is when we are replaying something that happened in the past.

We are evaluating it. We are picking it apart, maybe our actions or someone else's actions. So that would be rumination. Thinking about tasks that we need to do, planning.  Worry is another type of thought, so that's about the future. Thinking about how might something play out in the future in a way that you're worried about.

You might have blaming thoughts or anger thoughts or resentment thoughts.  You might do a lot of problem solving, figuring things out, which again, that can be really helpful. Problem solving can be a very good skill, but sometimes it's overdone, it causes mental exhaustion, it's too much, it causes stress.

And you need a break from that sometimes, a mental break. We only have so much energy to use for thinking, for processing. So we need to be careful that we're not overdoing it so we don't go into mental drain, burnout. Fantasizing about the future is a type of thinking, desiring something, another type of thinking.

So, I just went through, not all of the different types of thinking, but several of them. And they are listed on the tool that I will link in the show notes called Curiosity in the Mental Field. You've already woken up to the fact that you are thinking, you've already allowed it to be there, and here you're inquiring about it.

What type of thinking is this? It might be more emotional, and that's something else you can inquire about. What is the emotion here? And I'm also going to link the emotional clusters 300 different emotions. So again, be curious, look at the emotional clusters and see what, what emotion is here. And then lastly, it's naming it.

That's pretty easy. Once you've figured it out, figured out the type of thinking or identified what the emotion is, you just simply name it. You name the thought rumination, for example. Idea here is you cannot be absorbed, engaged, Entangled in your thinking and name it at the same time.  That the fact that you are naming it is putting some space in between you and the thought.

You are stepping back. You're observing it. And you're naming it. It's really powerful, and you will feel different in your thinking in your head when you do this. So, there's the feeling that you get when you're just absorbed in thought, maybe you're worrying about something, maybe you're problem solving, your forehead muscles might get a little tight, your shoulders might get a little tight, but then when you shift and go more into this, Naming it, you'll notice that you relax a little bit, your forehead muscles relax, your shoulders relax because you've disengaged with it, you're not absorbed in it, you're not mixed up in it at all, you're not unconscious in the experience, you are conscious, you are completely conscious of what's going on in your mind and you're naming it, it's very powerful. 

And so why is it important to learn how to disengage, step back, separate yourself from your thinking? What's the purpose of that? Well, the purpose is that you are more empowered to lead your life instead of this unconscious part leading your life. You take the range, you take the power, and you decide.

You decide if you want to take a mental break and just kind of listen to the birds for a while, you decide if yes. This is something that needs to be problem solved. I'm going to spend the next 15 minutes problem solving on that. If I haven't figured out a problem, I'm going to take a break, sleep on it for a while, and maybe come back to it.

So you are in charge. You are in charge of how this is going to go. And when you're in charge, you are going to have so much more mental energy. You're probably going to have more physical energy. You're not going to get drained. From all that worry and all that rumination, and you're not going to have this lack of self-confidence because of your self devaluing, because you've taken the reins on that.

It's a completely different way to live your life. So it's very important to develop the skill of disengaging, taking a step back, separating yourself from your thinking and, and observing it, and you will learn so much about who you are and, and how you operate and what you think. And. That is so empowering to know that about yourself, you know, observing that, taking that step back.

All right. Well, check out the linked documents. I think it's going to really help you with this and good luck on your journey to disengaging from your own thinking. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend.  The Aware Mind Podcast is A TSD Mindfulness production. Please check out our show notes for upcoming events and links to additional resources.