How to overcome wandering "monkey mind"

Talk 3: Overcoming Thinking with British Theravada monk Ajahn Brahm

(BSWA Retreats 2011-15 & Media) May 10, 2014. clearmind4me.com. With kind support for practitioners' meditation and personal development, the authors of this channel are offering a free video on "Five Steps on How to be Free from Worry," guided meditation, and workbook: clearmind4me.com.

Thinking is good, just about the best thing but not when meditating. Then it's just about the worst thing. When it gets really bad, it's called "monkey mind," pointless discursive thinking, like a monkey going from branch to branch to branch, grasping and chasing cravings, first here then there -- restlessness at its worst. There are Five Hindrances to progress in meditation (stillness and insight or samatha and vipassana) -- sensual desire, anger, lassitude-and-sleepiness, restlessness, and skeptical doubt. Thinking and thinking, it's fruitless.

Let the mind be. Let it think. Ignore it and, eventually, it will stop. So long as it doesn't stop and can't be ignored, it's torment. Try it. Here Ajahn Brahm talks about how glorious it is when we finally get it to stop. It's peace, it's blissful, it's rest. Think afterward. Think before. Think the whole rest of life, but "meditation" (stillness or insight) won't happen so long as we are disturbed -- pulled in by greed, feeling aversion (including its manifestation as boredom) by wanting it to stop already, or getting confused by ignorance manifesting as wrong view.