Thoughts are not your enemy in meditation. If you’re getting distracted while you meditate, that’s not necessarily a problem. Thoughts are natural. They’re always going to come. The point is not to clear the mind and to magically eradicate all thinking, the point is to have a different relationship to your thoughts. 

When we’re not mindful of our thoughts, they march into the room, tell us what to do, and we act them out, reflexively, habitually and automatically— like puppets on a string. Our guest today, Dharma teacher Tuere Sala, is going to talk about how to cut the strings of what can often be a malevolent puppeteer.

Sala is a Guiding Teacher at Seattle Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Retreat Center. She’s a former prosecutor who has practiced Vipassana meditation for over 30 years and is especially focused on bringing the dharma to nontraditional places. She is a strong advocate for practitioners living with high stress, past trauma and difficulties sitting still. 

In this episode we talk about: 

• Why we get caught in our thinking
• Understanding that our thoughts are not who we are
• How to direct our attention away from negative thoughts
• How the idea of permanency causes suffering
• Using thinking itself as the object of our meditation
• Noticing mind states
• Relative reality vs. ultimate reality
• The eight states of mind and their felt sense in the body
• And Sala’s definition of true liberation

Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/tuere-sala-507

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