Page 88 - Advance Copy: Todd Kaufman, Author

TODD KAUFMAN
interest? Armed with that metacognition in the moment, you would then be able to choose another thought, and perhaps not say those words. You could really keep yourself out of trouble and create moments of pleasurable experiences!
This kind of external reflection or observation we all do naturally, just usually after the fact. How many times have you slapped your forehead the next day and said “I can’t believe I said that/did that!” This is called retrospect. Sometimes it comes after a good night’s sleep, and sometimes just moments later. For me, a quick retrospection came when I said to my partner as we headed out the door for dinner, “Are you going to wear that?” Lesson learned! And the lesson is this: The more we close the timing gap between our retrospection and action, the less painful the potential outcome. My evening would have been much more enjoyable if my fly on the wall had poked me and said, “Hey buddy, the thought you are having about that outfit – drop it fast!” (I can be a slow learner sometimes, because I can get lazy with the Repetition part, but this one stuck pretty quickly!)
What if you had a way to close the timing gap on your ability to gain retrospect? Wouldn’t retrospect in the moment be handy? If you could notice your thoughts as they arise, then you’d stand a chance to make a choice. Meditation is how we learn to notice our thoughts in order to do this.
So let’s get started.
Focal Point Meditation
For this exercise, it might be helpful to imagine an invisible, huge, infinite river of thoughts flowing above your head; a “thought stream,” so to speak. Like catching random fish, thoughts drop out of the thought stream and into your head. Mindfulness is the ability to see a thought dropping in and make an instant de- cision to keep it or toss it back into the infinite river from where it came. Since the thoughts are random, and you invest no time in them, they are neither good nor bad, just thoughts.
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