Meditation isn't really about getting rid of thoughts, it's about changing the pattern of grasping on to things, which in our everyday experience is our thoughts.

The thoughts are fine if they are seen as transparent, but we get so caught up judging thoughts as right or wrong, for and against, yes and no, needing it to be this way and not that way. And even that might be okay except that is accompanied by strong, strong emotions. So we just start ballooning out more and more. With this grasping onto thoughts we just get more caught, more and more hooked. All of us. Every single one of us.

It's as if you had vast, unlimited space- complete openness, total freedom, complete liberation- and the habit of the human race is to always, out of fear, grasp onto little parts of it. And that is called ego and ego is grasping on to the content of our thoughts. That is also the root of suffering, because there is something in narrowing it down which inherently causes us a lot of pain because it is then that we are always in a relationship of wanting or not wanting. We are always in a struggle with other people, with situations, even with our own being. That's what we call stress. That's what we experience as continual, on-going stress. Even in the most healthy, unneurotic of us, there's some kind of slight or very profound anxiety of some kind, some kind of uneasiness or dissatisfaction.

When Trungpa Rinpoche came to the West and was teaching in the early days in Vermont at what used to be called Tail of the Tiger (now Karme Choling), he used to tell the students: "Just sit and let your mind open and rest-- let yourself be completely open with an open mind, and whenever you get distracted and find yourself thinking-- in other words when you are no longer fully in the present and are carried away-- simply just come back again to resting your mind in an open state."

But when he began to realize is that for most people it was just chatter, chatter, chatter constantly, and there was no openness or stillness. We were practicing with our worries and concerns about our jobs and relationships and everything. And the average experience was of no openness at all, just a lot of noise. So we sat down and rested our minds in talking to ourselves. . . The instruction wasn't doing what it set out to do. It was actually a more advanced instruction than we were capable of following.

So Rinpoche drew from the tradition and gave us more of a form than just this "Open your mind and let it rest there." He said, "Relate to the breath; go out with the outbreath." He gave us an object of meditation. It's very significant that it's only the outbreath that we attend to. This isn't easy to say that we don't breathe in and out. We do, of course. But what it's like saying is more like: get the sense of emphasizing the outwardness, because that's as close as you can come to just resting your mind in its natural state, since the breath naturally goes out and dissolves into space.

I was reading an article recently on meditation which he had written in the early days, which is kind of transitional instruction. In it he told us to start with attending to breathing in and out, but he said, "The key thing here is, try not to watch the breath, but try feeling in go in and out, so you feel one with the breath. Just see if from the beginning you can minimize that sense of heavy-duty watching it, and just feel the breath going in and out." And then he said, "Then start to emphasize the outwardness and the space that the breath goes into, and emphasize that more and more. And then just see if you can let that sense of outwardness and space begin to pervade the whole practice more and more."

Once I was describing this technique to a friend of mine in another Buddhist tradition which emphasizes a strong focus on mindfulness of the breath, and I said, "We emphasize the outbreath, and then we're told to just wait. As the breath is coming in we are told to just wait, and then go out again, and then wait again and then go out again." She said, "No, that's impossible." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "Well because there's a whole part of meditation there where you don't have an object-- there's nothing to concentrate on, there's a whole part there where the point is nothing to be mindful of." And then I realized that was the point. I had never before realized so clearly that that was actually the point.

This space between outbreaths is sometimes called the *gap.* It points toward some gap in the internal chatter, some experience of spaciousness. It may take quite a long time for the beginning meditator to have an experience of that gap or space, and that's okay. That is why the other part of our meditation instruction is to label any thoughts we have as "thinking" and just let go of them and come back to the outbreath. That instruction encourages us to interrupt the constant barrage of talking to ourselves. And even if we do that only once *there is already some kind of gap which underlies remembering to come back to the sense of the outbreath going out.* We may not be aware of it as "gap," but it is already there as the basis of the process of remembering to label thoughts thinking and come back home to the present moment.

Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, "The technique leads us towards opening and doesn't have any hang-ups of something we have to undo later." With this technique you can't get attached to having something to hold on to all the time. You could say it's sort of a *death* there– the breath goes out, and then what? Then the breath goes out and out and out and then what? Sometimes people will panic when their breath goes out because of the fact that there's nothing to hold on to. We don't want to encourage panic, but when that happens I always know that the person has actually connected with what it's all about.

This open state which we connect with is the true nature of mind and is often described as like the big sky. It is described this way in both the Mahamudra and Dzogchen traditions and is similarly described in the Zen tradition. The true nature of our being is not really so much this embodiment, this corporeal form which is transient and is always in a a state of changing and decaying. From the moment of birth to the moment of death it's going through a process of wearing out. But what is always accessible to us in any moment as our birthright is actually the completely open and vast nature of our mind. And what we call ego is narrowing it down and grasping on to small parts, which is our personal experience is saying, "I want this and I don't want that," "I like this and I don't like that." We are grasping onto our limited thinking instead of staying with what's really possible for us.

So I think it's helpful to know that the history of the technique because it clearly points to the true nature of mind, which is unobstructed and really vast. And that is the true nature of all reality. But we have a very strong habit of always wanting to hold on to things, even if we label it "mindfulness." We want ground under our feet. This technique is weaning us from that towards a much more liberated and vast way of living and being. It also isn't getting rid of thoughts so much as letting thoughts play in the vast space of which we are a part, if we could only realize it.

- Pema Chodron on What is True Mindfulness?

More here: http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/