Clouds, waves, and other metaphors for thoughts
If you have been to a yoga or meditation class, you have likely heard this: “Close your eyes. Imagine your thoughts passing by as clouds in the sky.” What is the point? In this article, I will describe basic concepts about our ability to think and different approaches to cultivating a functional mind by changing how we relate to our thoughts.
What is thinking?
Humans, with their ability to use language and plan the future, can think. Its basis comes from our large and densely connected prefrontal cortex (in our forehead). This allows us to plan, set goals, use words to speak, or hold a phrase in memory. Thinking can be what we all recognize: a voice in our head. We use this inner speech when preparing a talk, recalling conversations, rehearsing the shopping list. People are different in how much they experience inner speech. However, it is familiar to most of us. Vygotsky describes it further as “a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought”. But thinking can also be images, or music/voices. Thoughts mostly arise from spontaneous neural activity, involuntarily, transitioning from one to another without deliberate direction. Thus, treating a thought as a deliberate verdict about reality can be problematic.
Often we experience our thoughts not as passing mental events, but as truth, as reality. Our thoughts are very interesting and attract our attention partly because they are about us. We discover hidden meanings about who we are in them. We dig into the most interesting story, our story.
What is more interesting than a cinema that constantly plays movies with you as the main actor? We fuse with these stories. We deeply believe in them, and our identity can be formed through them.
Imagine you suddenly think, “No one loves me.” Recognizing that as spontaneous brain activity, instead of a conclusion, has a different impact on you. In the first case, you can get curious: where did that thought come from? Did I think that before? Or maybe you notice a pattern triggered by certain situations. In the second case, if you take this thought as literal insight, it can spiral into a stream of negative emotions, reviewing past situations under this “insight” that no one loves you.
Defusion
Noticing thoughts without being fused with them is a useful skill to cultivate, and does not come naturally. It can be practiced through different techniques. In therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy emphasizes the importance of defusion in connection to other processes oriented towards a meaningful life. Defusion allows us to pause our automatic problem-solving and gives us more flexibility about what to act on. It also helps us tolerate negative emotions as parts of a path that we chose to commit to according to our values in life, instead of avoiding them.
Defusion is a skill valued in Eastern cultures, as in Buddhism. For example, Shinzen Young argues that the ability to investigate, to break down your experience into components of seeing, hearing, and feeling, can be called sensory clarity and is the essence of meditation practices. However, he emphasized that we are usually preoccupied with the content of our experience, pointing to fusion. That being said, fusion is also adaptive in certain situations, such as on important tasks that require thinking. It is not to be completely eliminated but to be more aware when it happens and judge if it is helpful during a certain situation.
How to practice
This is a short cognitive defusion exercise inspired by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The aim is not to laugh at difficult thoughts or make them disappear. It is to notice that a thought is a set of words that can be viewed in more than one way.
Use gently: Choose a mildly difficult thought, not your most distressing one. Skip any style that feels uncomfortable, and return to ordinary text or stop at any time.
Then reflect: With this thought being present in your mind, what is your next step? What is a small thing you want to work on? This helps creating awareness of thoughts while still being able to go on our usual everyday tasks.
Takeaway
Thoughts are not always reality, they often arise spontaneously.
Defusion helps us observe thoughts without being controlled by them.
Awareness of thoughts can lead to greater emotional flexibility and well-being.
Clouds, leaves, waves - the metaphor doesn't matter much. What matters is the process it points to: from being swept along by every passing thought, to being the sky they pass through. That shift is defusion, and in a world that never stops handing us more to think about, it might be a survival skill.
Sources
Vygotsky, L. S. Thought and Language. Translated and edited by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar, MIT Press, 1962 (revised edition edited by Alex Kozulin, 1986).
Young, S. (2016). The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works. Sounds True.cmc.marmot
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. Guilford Press.scholarsarchive.library.albany+1
