Your mind was built to give you distractions and you can't tell it what not think. So, we just got our attention back to what we call an anchor. And no matter how solid or strong that anchor is, as real Rimbaud, Shay says, meditation. It's just one insult after another. And Dan Harris says, meditation is like being kidnapped by the most boring person in the world. Your thoughts are mostly redundant and negative.

So we're going to use this tool of meditation. To learn how to cultivate non reactivity, what we'll learn is that we have the ability to observe our thoughts and hopefully do that without the judgments that come in the judgment such as I suck at this. I'll never be any good at this. Why is it so easy for everyone else? The Buddha made a distinction between discerning And judgment. discernment is looked both ways before you cross the road.

Judgment is, all cars are dangerous, your mind was built to protect you. And as I said before it worked. Now we're going to have to look at the features of our mind that are constraining our way of thinking things. We're going to use meditation to get some insight into how our minds operate, so that we can eliminate those thoughts that are keeping us at the lower point of our happiness range. For our third meditation, we're going to learn how to observe our thoughts, and hopefully, release the judgments that come with those thoughts. To do that, I'm going to give you three different visualizations to try on.

The first one is the ancient Buddhist visualization of sitting at the bank of a river and there's a trade off The side leaves fall from the tree into the river. And when a thought comes into your head, I wonder who's emailing me. Now, you take the thought you put it on the leaf, and you watch it float down the stream. The second visualization I'll give you is clouds. So you imagine yourself sitting at the edge of a cliff, there are clouds going by in the sky, thought comes into your head, oh, I have to do laundry. When I get home, you take the thought, you put it on the cloud, and you watch it float through the sky.

And the third visualization I'll give you is your peacefully sitting at the bottom of the ocean. And there's a Snoopy Thought Bubble above your head. A thought comes into your mind. Oh, I have to fill up the car with gasoline later. Put the thought into the bubble and you watch the bubble float to the surface. So those are three visualizations that will allow you to The next five minutes to observe your thoughts.

Create the physical frame just as we did before. Shoulders over the hips, chin level, spine erect gravity, gently tug the flesh off the cheekbones, the jaw is on clenched and closed the eyes for the next few minutes when a thought enters your mind, place it on a leaf. You place it on a cloud. You place it in a thought bubble. And you watch it float through your mind screen and out. Another thought comes in.

You place it on a leaf or you can place it on cloud In a bubble, and you watch it float through your mind screen And we'll gently guide our attention back into the room.