The Chattering Mind

Many of us are really attached to the way we talk to ourselves. We feel that if we weren’t talking to ourselves, we’d lose control of things. We might even not exist. But then you look at your inner chatter as you’re trying to get the mind to settle down, and then there’s the big question, “Who’s in control?” If you’re not in control of your chatter, what’s happening? Who’s talking to whom?

What we’re trying to do as we meditate is to get some more control — skillful control—inside, because the chatter is part of the way we put together the present moment. The Buddha identifies three kinds of fabrication that go into taking the raw material from past karma and shaping it into an actual experience in the present. Your internal conversation is one of those forms of fabrication, and a large part of the meditation is learning how to do it well.

So capture your inner conversation and apply it to the breath. Ask yourself, “How’s the breath going right now?” When we talk about the breath, it’s not just the air at the nose. It’s the whole feeling of the breathing process throughout the body, and it involves the entire nervous system. So make a survey of how you feel the nerves in your body, how you feel the blood vessels in your body, and ask yourself what rhythm of breathing would feel good for them. Try to relax things from the tips of the fingers up the arms, then starting again at the tips of the toes, coming up the legs, up through the torso and into the head. Think of all the little blood vessels with all their little tiny muscles inside relaxing as you go through the survey.

You’re talking to yourself and you’re also employing other kinds of fabrication: the way you breathe, the feelings you generate in the body—and there are feelings that you can generate. You’re not totally on the receiving end of past karma. Then there are also the perceptions you hold in mind, the images you hold in mind. Learn how to capture these things and apply them to the breath.

Now, there will be other conversations going on in the mind, but that’s just teaching you a fact that’s been going on all the time: that there are many layers of inner conversation. There’s not just one you in there talking to yourself, or the two of you talking to yourself, the talker and the listener. There are multiple conversations about how things feel in the body, your feelings about yourself, your feelings about your friends, the world at large: all kinds of random stuff. So with that kind of conversation, if it’s really unskillful, you may tell yourself, “Do I really want to engage in that?” Sometimes we find that if we push against those conversations, they push back even stronger. So let them chatter away as they like. This is one of the Buddha’s techniques for dealing with distracting thoughts: They can chatter, but you don’t have to listen. You don’t have to get involved.

Think of your body being like a large room. People are chattering off in one corner of the room, but you’ve got work to do in another corner. Well, they can chatter as they like. We live in an imperfect world. We can’t have the world be perfect before we sit down to meditate. It’s the same in your body, the same in your mind: You can’t wait for your mind to be perfect and then get into the meditation. So create a little corner for yourself here. Bit by bit by bit, start reclaiming different parts of your body.

Here you’re going to be employing some of those other fabrications, getting more involved with the breath, getting more involved with feelings and perceptions—the feelings you create by the way you breathe, and the perceptions that help you breathe in ways that feel good.

As you continue your survey, you’ll probably find that there are parts of the body that tend to be neglected, that are not involved in the breathing process. Sometimes there are parts of the body that seem not to be there. You’re coming up the arm, and there’s nothing where the bicep is, or nothing where the shoulder is. So ask yourself, where do you actually feel your shoulder? It may not be where you think it should be. Your inner sense of the body can be kind of strange sometimes. Different parts can be twisted up, scrunched up, or displaced. Others can be exaggerated. So explore what you actually feel. If you were to make a connection between how you feel in your shoulder and how you feel in your elbow—say that your upper arm is missing — is the upper arm right between the two, or is it outside of that line? Where is your sense of your upper arm? Explore what you’ve got, and allow your perceptions to change in line with how you actually feel things.

In this way, you’re trying to apply the chatter to the breath, and the chatter to the perceptions, examining your perceptions. Talk to yourself about your perceptions, trying out different ones, and bit by bit by bit you get to commandeer your inner conversations and apply them to the breath.

Some people think, “I’m supposed to be here with my mind really quiet. Why am I talking to myself?” Well, you first need to talk to yourself in new ways. Establish new topics of conversation inside, new ways of discussing things inside, to actually get some more control over this part of your sense of your own identity. We know we’re supposed to be seeing things as a not-self, but not quite yet. If everything turns into a not-self all of the sudden, you feel threatened and you deprive yourself of some important tools.

So allow yourself to be trained to find some satisfaction in breathing well. And notice what feels really good inside. How would you really want to breathe inside? How would your stomach want you to breathe? How would your lungs want you to breathe? How would your shoulders want you to breathe? Explore that. Try to see if you can satisfy them. Then, as there’s more and more a sense of gratification with the way you breathe, the chatter that’s not involved with the breath falls into the background, because there really is no need to chatter too much when you’re feeling really good. That’s what we’re trying to do here.

You devote your chattering to the breath, your perceptions, your feelings. Relate all of them to the way you’re breathing, creating a sense of well-being inside. Then you find that some of these fabrications begin to fall away. That inner conversation will have gaps. But you don’t mind, because you’re dealing with the other kinds of fabrication, i.e., the way you breathe, your perceptions, the mental images you have, what’s going on in the body right now, and the feelings you’re creating as you think of the breath energy spreading through the body, or as you make your survey, relaxing the different parts of the body.

Again, you can do that many, many times. You’ll find as different parts relax, that will send ripples of relaxing influence throughout different parts of the body. Some of the connections you might not expect. So you follow them. Release, release, release, relax. You’ll find that the chatter grows less and less as you need it less because that feeling of well-being begins to spread through the body. You realize that you’re still in the process of fabricating the present moment, but the chatter—the directed thought and evaluation, in the Buddha’s terms—grows less and less, and you’re depending more and more just on the breath, on the perceptions, on your feelings. And it’s okay. You don’t feel threatened anymore because you realize you have other tools to fashion the present moment, aside from chattering about it.

When things get really good, even the in-and-out breath begins to fall away. It gets lighter and lighter as it gets more and more diffuse throughout the body. What remains are perceptions and feelings, and those are enough to keep you occupied, fashioning the present moment, with a sense that you are in charge. That sense of control that you had with your scattered chatter before: You begin to realize that there wasn’t much control at all. This is better. And again, you don’t have to feel threatened, because now you’re the one who has mastered feelings, you’re the one who has mastered perceptions, connected to the way you breathe.

When things feel really good and the breath gets less and less and less necessary, you find there’s a sense of still breath energy throughout the body. Hold that as your perception. If the body needs to breathe, it’ll breathe. But if it doesn’t need to breathe, that’s okay, because you don’t feel starved for breath energy inside. It feels like the nerves are full of breath energy.

This is how you wean yourself off your unskillful chatter: by devoting your chattering mind to the problem of the breath, the problem of discomfort in the body right now, using the breath, using your perceptions, using your directed thought and evaluation to solve that problem. As you develop a stronger and stronger sense of feeling at home here, you feel less threatened when the chatter falls away.

So as you’re here in concentration, you’re still fashioning things, but you’re learning subtler tools for doing it. This is how the mind settles down in a comfortable way. You can stop the chatter without a lot of force, without a lot of conflict, without a lot of confrontation inside. And as you’re doing this, you’re beginning to get a sense of what the Buddha said, that we really do fabricate the present moment. We don’t fabricate it out of nothing. There are raw materials that we have to work with, but as you get a greater sense of the tools that you can use, you don’t have to rely just on the chatter. You can chatter about the breath, you can use the fact that the breath energy is an energy that’s diffused through the body, to create a sense of well-being. You can let a lot of that chatter go.

You’re gaining some insight into this process of fabrication at the same time that the mind settles down. That, the Buddha said, is the ideal way that insight and tranquility — or insight and calm—work together. You calm the process of fabrication.

So learn to master these other tools you have so that you can get some more control over this chattering mind—control, not in a “control freak” kind of way. Control in a friendly way where everybody’s working together. You can get everyone on board, and you feel at home being here.

That was the problem before: You kept chattering because you didn’t really feel at home in the present moment, because you neglected the way you were breathing. You neglected your perceptions and the amount of control that you could have over your feelings. Now that you’re more in touch with all that, you get a sense that you really belong. The insights you gain are a lot less threatening, because they can’t knock you off your center.