The Wandering Mind

You sit down to meditate. You direct your attention to the breath. For approximately four seconds, the attention is on the breath. And then, without announcement, without permission, without any decision on your part, you are thinking about something you said in a conversation three days ago that you wish you'd said differently, and the attention has been on this conversation for an unknown period of time before you notice that it's there, and now you notice, and you return to the breath, and for approximately six seconds the attention is on the breath before you are somehow in the middle of a fantasy about a conversation you haven't had yet, and then you notice, and you return, and so on.

This is what meditation is like. Not just at the beginning, not just when you're distracted by something external, but regularly and persistently throughout the practice, for beginners and for people who have been practicing for decades. The mind wanders. This is what minds do. It's not a malfunction. It's the normal activity of a mind that has spent its entire existence going wherever it goes without being asked to stay somewhere specific.

Most people who try meditation and stop do so because the wandering mind convinces them they're bad at it. They assume that the goal is to prevent the wandering, that the good meditator's mind doesn't wander, that the persistent wandering of their mind is evidence of a particular incapacity for this particular practice.

None of this is true. And understanding why it's not true changes the entire relationship to the practice.

What the Wandering Mind Is

The wandering mind is not an obstacle to meditation. It's the teacher.

The practice of meditation with the breath as anchor is not the practice of maintaining unbroken attention on the breath. It's the practice of noticing when the attention has wandered and returning it. The wandering is what makes the noticing possible. Without the wandering there would be nothing to notice, and without the noticing there would be no returning, and without the returning there would be no training.

Each time the attention wanders and you notice that it has wandered and you return it to the breath, you have done the practice. Not partially. Not imperfectly. Actually. The noticing is the practice. The returning is the practice. The wandering is what makes both possible.

This reframe is more than a comfort for the struggling beginner. It's an accurate description of what the training actually is. You're not training the mind to not wander. You're training the noticing, the quality of awareness that can observe where the attention is rather than being entirely inside wherever the attention is. And the wandering is what gives the noticing something to notice.

The Default Mode Network, Again

We've discussed the default mode network in other contexts, but it's particularly relevant here because the wandering mind during meditation and the default mode network are closely related.

The default mode network is the brain's resting state network, the constellation of brain regions that becomes active when the mind is not engaged with an external task. It's associated with mind-wandering, daydreaming, self-referential thought, planning, rumination, and the kind of narrative thinking that takes you to the conversation from three days ago and the fantasy about the conversation that hasn't happened yet.

In ordinary life, the default mode network runs most of the time. The mind is only fully engaged with an external task for a fraction of waking hours, and the rest of the time the default mode network is running, producing the continuous stream of thought that characterizes ordinary consciousness.

Meditation is one of the few activities that makes the default mode network's activity directly observable. When you sit down to meditate and direct attention to the breath, you're asking the default mode network to quiet, and it resists, and the resistance is the wandering. You can see the default mode network's activity in a way that ordinary life doesn't allow, because ordinary life provides a constant stream of external engagement that keeps the network's activity less visible.

This visibility is part of what makes meditation valuable. You start to know your own default mode network, to recognize the specific patterns of its wandering, the particular themes and preoccupations and worries and fantasies that your mind returns to when it's left to its own devices. This knowledge is not always comfortable, but it's consistently useful.

What the Mind Wanders To

One of the most informative aspects of a regular meditation practice is simply noticing what the mind wanders to.

The themes are usually consistent for any given person, at least over any given period of life. The specific worry that keeps returning. The relationship that's unresolved. The creative problem that's active. The opportunity being anticipated. The resentment that hasn't been processed. The plan for something that hasn't been made yet. The regret about something that was done or said.

This material is the active content of the mind, the things that have a charge on them, that are generating enough energy that the mind returns to them even when you're trying to attend to something else. The meditation session that involves a lot of wandering to a particular theme is telling you something about where your psychological and emotional energy is currently concentrated.

This information is worth having. The creative person who keeps wandering in meditation to a particular project that hasn't been started yet may be receiving information about where the genuine creative energy is. The person who keeps wandering to a relationship that's unresolved may be learning something about what needs attention in that relationship. The person who keeps wandering to a worry that turns out not to be particularly significant may be learning something about what the anxiety is actually organized around.

The wandering mind is not just an obstacle. It's a survey of the active interior, a map of where the psychological and emotional energy is currently concentrated, and reading that map tends to be useful for anyone trying to understand themselves and their creative lives.

The Quality of the Noticing

Not all noticing is the same quality, and the quality of the noticing matters for what the practice builds.

The noticing that's accompanied by self-criticism, the mind wandered, I'm bad at this, I can't even stay with the breath for thirty seconds, generates a secondary thought stream about the wandering that's itself another form of wandering. You've noticed the first wandering and immediately generated a second one, and the second is often more sticky than the first because it's about the self, which the mind tends to return to more persistently than almost any other subject.

The noticing that's clean and neutral, the mind wandered, return, generates much less secondary content. It's an observation without evaluation, a noticing without judgment, and this quality of noticing is one of the most significant things the meditation practice is trying to develop. Not just the noticing, but the noticing without the immediate evaluative commentary on what was noticed.

This neutral noticing is sometimes described in contemplative traditions as the witness, the quality of awareness that can observe experience without immediately evaluating it. The witness sees that the mind wandered without judging that the mind wandered. The witness notices the emotion without immediately identifying with it or fleeing it. The witness is present with what's arising without being pulled into it.

Developing the witness through the quality of the noticing in meditation practice has significant implications beyond the practice session. The witness in the creative session noticing the inner critic's commentary rather than identifying with it. The witness during feedback noticing the emotional activation without immediately acting on it. The witness during the shame storm observing the experience rather than being entirely inside it.

This quality of witnessing observation is one of the most significant and most transferable things contemplative practice develops, and it develops specifically through the quality of the noticing during the wandering mind's activity in practice.

Working With Recurring Content

When the mind wanders to the same material repeatedly across multiple practice sessions, this recurring content is worth working with more deliberately rather than simply noting and returning.

One approach is to set aside time at the beginning or end of a practice session to deliberately attend to the recurring content, to give it conscious attention rather than waiting for it to arrive uninvited. If the creative project that keeps appearing in the wandering receives some deliberate contemplative attention, the mind may stop returning to it during the practice because the need that was generating the returns has been met.

Another approach is to get curious about the recurring content when it appears rather than immediately returning to the breath. Not to follow it into elaboration and narrative, but to be briefly present with it, to notice what the quality of its arising is like, what it's actually about at the core rather than in its elaborated form, and then to return. This brief curious attention is different from following the thought, and it sometimes produces more useful information about the recurring content than the automatic returning would.

And sometimes the recurring content during meditation is pointing at something that needs attention outside of meditation, something in the life that's generating the signal that keeps appearing in the practice. The relationship that keeps surfacing may need an actual conversation. The creative project that keeps appearing may need an actual decision about whether and when to start. The worry that keeps returning may need to be actually examined rather than simply noticed and returned from. Meditation practice doesn't replace engagement with life. Sometimes it reveals where the engagement is most needed.

The Mind You Actually Have

There's a specific kind of suffering that meditators, both beginning and experienced, inflict on themselves by comparing the mind they have to the mind they think they should have during meditation. The mind that wanders constantly compared to the mind that stays with the breath. The mind full of mundane preoccupations compared to the mind that accesses deep stillness. The mind that gets pulled into drama compared to the mind that rests in equanimous presence.

This comparison is the mind wandering to a self-critical fantasy about meditation rather than doing the actual practice of meditation, and it's particularly pernicious because it feels like it's about the practice when it's actually another form of the wandering it's ostensibly criticizing.

The mind you have is the mind available for the practice. Not the mind you wish you had, not the mind you imagine the people who are good at this have, not the mind that would emerge from the practice after some unspecified amount of time. The mind available right now, wandering and distracted and preoccupied with mundane concerns and resistant to staying with the breath.

This is the mind the practice works with. This is the mind the practice is for. This is the teacher.