🦉 The Wisdom School
The Wisdom School is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project, an organization dedicated to providing tools for the art of living. Here, you’ll find short clips from the In Search of Wisdom podcast and selected readings from ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions.
Observing the Mind with Jamie Kreiner
In this episode of The Wisdom School — I share a short clip from my conversation with Jamie Kreiner (author of The Wandering Mind). You can expect to learn what monks can teach us about observing the mind and avoiding distraction.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What did the monks mean when discussing “thinking about thinking”?
Jamie Kreiner — It roughly corresponds to reflecting on your thinking as it goes and sort of your executive functioning, like the decisions you make about what to do.
Pay attention to and deal with. So on a most basic level, thinking about thinking could be as a thought arises, you watch it come up, you track it, you just see that it occurred to you. It could be more involved. You make judgments about those thoughts and decide you're going to ignore some and really dig into others.
It could be moving from there to taking stock of what you've done over the whole day. Or deciding you're going to intervene as your thoughts come up and sort of change your mental framework about them.
For example, if you're praying and you're doing kind of a bad job concentrating on God, you might say, well, what if I imagined myself sitting in a courtroom in front of a judge instead?
Or what if I was in the presence of the imperial entourage? I obviously would want to pay attention in those situations. I wouldn't be distracted in a trial or when I was on trial. What if I made that kind of cognitive adjustment? Would that help me think better?
There are also motivational strategies they used.
I could think, I'm going to reorient my thinking more effectively because I'm going to contemplate at the same time that my life is finite and either just the sheer fact of your mortality makes you prioritize certain things over others, or, you know, fear of punishment. […]
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Thank you for listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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