Thinking in Stillness

Thinking in Stillness: Can the Mind Meditate and Think Together?

By Aurelio Ortega, Work/Study staff at Shoshoni Yoga Retreat, Rollinsville, CO

Can we think and meditate at the same time? When I started meditating, that was one of my greatest questions. At first, I found the idea of being present incompatible with thinking or writing. If meditation consists of observing our thoughts without engaging with them, it seems that meditating and thinking can’t happen at the same time.

So, what about writing or speaking?

When we put our thoughts, feelings, or emotions into words and sentences, the mind is choosing, judging, remembering, projecting, imagining, and so on. In other words: the mind is doing something when we think, write, or speak, which is antagonistic to the idea of simply noticing or observing.

I’ve noticed that we can stop paying attention to the mind during deep moments of meditation, but I would be cautious about saying that mental activity stops completely. I think there are compartments of the mind, like those that collect information from our senses, that never stop—whether or not we are aware of them. The mind is always there, maybe less active in meditative states, but always waiting for a simple moment of distraction to take control of the show.

Returning to my initial question:

I don’t know the definitive answer, but I personally see meditating and thinking as two different processes that don’t always need to be in conflict. We can use our consciousness—our awareness—to understand, to see things as they are, and we can use our mind to translate those realizations into ideas. I love thinking of poets like Rumi, capable of seeing deep truths and expressing them with such unique grace.

Thinking with intention or purpose seems to me the closest thing to thinking and meditating at the same time. But thinking from a place of awareness requires a trained mind in order to be mindful and selective with our thoughts. Most of the time, this is difficult because the mind is one of the most impermanent and easily influenced forms of matter. So, if we don’t have any control over it, it’s not surprising that our mind produces only mental flames shaped by our patterns or tendencies—like craving or aversion. In general, I feel that when we speak or think, we are often just reacting, usually as a way to preserve the idea we have of ourselves, which is often only a creation of the mind rooted in fear.

I think meditation is such a powerful tool that offers to humanity another way to speak or think—a way to pause before we act or respond, and to do so with intention and purpose.