Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

habitual to the point of being imprisoning, and also
just plain wrong.
Another way to look at meditation is to view the
process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual
cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness, we
are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the
way you might find a van-tagepoint in a cave or
depression in the rock behind a waterfall. We still see
and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.
Practicing in this way, our thought patterns change by
themselves in ways that nourish integration,
understanding, and compassion in our lives, but not
because we are trying to make them change by
replacing one thought with another one that we think
may be more pure. Rather, it is to understand the
nature of our thoughts as thoughts and our
relationship to them, so that they can be more at our
service rather than the other way round.
If we decide to think positively, that may be useful,
but it is not meditation. It is just more thinking. We
can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive
thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be
confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-
serving, and wrong. Another element altogether is
required to induce transformation in our lives and
take us beyond the limits of thought.