Keeping Your Head: Remembering to Think in Mindfulness Practice

It is an axiomatic in secular mindfulness that to become present is to direct attention away from thinking to physical sensation. While this can be a useful strategy to manage depressive rumination, as an automatic default position, it risks demonising our fundamental human capacity to purposefully think about the causes of suffering and how to reduce it. Many approaches within Mahayana Buddhism in particular explicitly use reflection on key ideas as necessary pre-requisites to meditation, and in these traditions, thinking is fundamental to our ability to move beyond limiting notions of ourselves and others into a more liberating vision.