Floating Down The River

Speaking of good and bad thoughts and the power to choose our actions…

The Trappist Monk Thomas Keating teaches this beautiful contemplative practice:

Imagine yourself sitting on the bank of a river. Observe each of your thoughts coming along as if they’re saying, “Think me, think me.” Watch your feelings come by saying, “Feel me, feel me.” Acknowledge that you’re having the feeling; acknowledge that you’re having the thought. Don’t hate it, don’t judge it, don’t critique it, don’t, in any way, move against it. Simply name it: “resentment toward so and so,” “a thought about such and such.” Admit that you’re having it, then place it on a boat and let it go down the river. The river is your stream of consciousness.

The writer, teacher and modern mystic Cynthia Bourgeault, offers this wonderful reflection on Keating’s river exercise…

No matter what path of meditation you practice, I think his basic picture here holds true. What he imagines is the river of consciousness – remember this? – and it’s flowing on downstream. And down this river of consciousness float boats. The boats being the thoughts that present themselves to us, that pop up in our unconscious out of nowhere….There are various boats, but what they all have in common is that in our normal life as soon as a thought pops up into our consciousness we find ourselves obligated to think it. There it comes and all of a sudden we get bound up with it. The next thing you know, we’re thinking it and responding to it and reacting to it as if we have no choice at all. Thomas says that what we do is whenever a boat floats down the stream normally we feel impelled to climb into its hold and examine the contents. And what meditation really teaches us is to be a little diver sitting down on a rock down at the bottom of the river of consciousness and just letting the boats float by. So the thoughts can come and go, but we realize that just because a thought pops into our consciousness, we are not obligated to think it, react to it, respond to it, get caught in it, float downstream on it.

Remember you’re not in the boat, you’re sitting on the bank of the river. You can just let all the boats (aka your thoughts) idly go by. One by one.

If at some point you get interested in one of the boats and want to jump in, go for it.

If you’d rather just keep watching the boats float on by, go for it.

Both are choices. Either choice is appropriate. And you have the power to choose.