Watching The Mind In Action
Resting in witness consciousness
Watching the Mind in Action
The other day, I went to check my water tanks. It had been a long time since we’d had rain, and with a busy weekend of yoga classes and workshops ahead, I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t run out of water.
When I checked the level, the tanks were almost empty.
I opened the weather report on my phone. The forecast showed 100% rain for the next four days.
“Yay! my mind cheered. Rain is coming. You won’t need to order a water delivery.”
Later that day, another thought appeared:
“Wait… I have long drives on the freeway this weekend. Rain means slippery roads. Trucks, traffic, and danger. Will people still come to the workshop?”
Suddenly, the same rain that had felt like good news looked like a problem.
Nothing about the situation had changed. Only the mind had changed its story about it. And in doing so, it attempted to rob me of my peace.
Anchoring Into The Present Moment
The pull into the past, the craving push for a future event, and the mind’s shifts can happen at any moment. As reality unfolds, what we experience in the outside world can have a neutral effect, simply passing by, or it can have a triggering effect, where something inside has a reactive, automatic response.
This is the moment where something deeper can be released. To see an underlying energy pattern literally arise so that you can be free from past baggage. Allowing it to pass, with some deeper breaths, especially into the heart centre, will give you the capacity to feel, stay present, and let it go, all in one simultaneous flow.
The Neutral Observer
Behind the noise of the thinking mind, the stories, preferences and fears of the future is an unchanging stillness, a state of pure observation, consciousness witnessing the movements of the mind.
Just as we can observe a beautiful flower or a restless spider weaving its web, we can learn to observe the beauty and restlessness of our own mind. But it does take practice, the practice being seeing and feeling what arises, without falling into it.
The push and pull of the mind’s thought patterns can be intense, and they can be subtle, so subtle that we barely notice them happening. That is why it is a practice, just like a fish doesn’t realise it’s in water, we begin to see the thoughts that have hijacked our clarity, and with practice, learn to rest as the witness of them.
Why Negative Thoughts Keep Returning
A few weeks ago, a podcast host asked me a question that many people struggle with:
How do we get rid of our negative thoughts?
My answer wasn’t a pep talk. Because the truth is, negative thought patterns are relentless, and for good reason.
Most people want to know how to “get rid” of these thoughts. But they aren’t something you can just evict. They are relentless for a reason. To deal with them, we have to look past the “positive self-talk” and perform a kind of inner surgery on the “me” that is actually feeding on the negativity.
Working with them requires awareness, patience, and a kind of inner inquiry that cuts through identification with the false self—the ‘I’ that is attached to the negativity.
There are three layers to this question.
At its heart, it asks what we can do about the mind's activity—especially when thoughts become painful, repetitive, and we feel caught inside them.
To work with this, we first have to understand what the mind is and how it functions.
The Nature of Mind
The mind is like a vast space where thoughts arise. Some might call it a thought-producing factory. It is a storehouse of memory (the subconscious mind), a tool for direct sensory perception (the conscious mind), and, when quiet, a beautiful, spacious field where creative insight and intuition can land.
The mind is either a compass or a cage.
Without awareness of its moment-to-moment shifts, we become prisoners of it rather than conscious participants.
The mind is the tool through which we experience and interpret reality. It creates the sense of a perceiver and something perceived—the basic structure through which experience appears. It allows us to participate fully in the game of life. But it is not the ultimate knower of truth.
Born of Māyā (illusion), the mind creates the appearance of duality—‘me’ and ‘you’, ‘us’ and ‘them’. The separation is superficial, a distortion of the underlying unity of consciousness.
Through the senses, the mind interprets the world of space, time, and cause and effect, allowing experience to take shape.
The aim is to play our unique and individual part with awareness.
The Architecture of Experience
The mind is the screen upon which all experiences appear, allowing us to play our part in the cosmic dance that we call life.
Information enters through the senses, and the mind, with its sophisticated faculties, interprets the experience.
It says things like:
Oh, that’s beautiful, I like it.
Or: That’s unpleasant, I don’t want it.
And: That’s my house, my friend, mine.
When you begin to observe the personal mind, you notice that most thoughts revolve around:
“I, I, I”.
The mind also holds buried impressions, most often the unpleasant experiences that we didn’t fully feel.
The Higher and Lower Mind
The higher mind is the space for abstract, creative and intuitive thought.
The lower mind is the conditioned personal mind—shaped by stored impressions from our past experiences, and driven by preference, fear and control.
The higher mind can lead toward clarity and liberation.
The lower mind, when dominant, often leads toward suffering because it tries to control life to fit a limited idea of self.
This effort to control is ultimately futile.
How Mental Habit Patterns are Formed
Over time, as we accumulate experiences, we begin to store these impressions in the deeper mind, particularly the ones we did not enjoy. Because we don’t want to fully experience what feels unpleasant, we push it down. These impressions do not disappear; they form what we call habit patterns, known as saṃskāras in yoga philosophy, designed to help us avoid discomfort and pain in the future.
The personal psyche (or the conditioned mind) is, in effect, the sum-total of these habit patterns. It is shaped by past experiences and primarily motivated by the desire to seek pleasure and to avoid pain and regret.
In this sense, it is born of fear —the illusion of separateness—and from this arises the need to control life.
The Mind’s Primary Job: Protection and Survival
It is important to recognise that the mind is not doing anything wrong. It has a job to do, to survive. Its tendency toward negativity is often a psychological response aimed at protection.
When this is clearly seen, the mind no longer needs to be recruited as a constant protector. Its role can be gently dismissed, or more accurately, refined—allowed to take on a higher function in the service of clarity, insight, and spiritual awakening.
The mind is doing exactly what it has been trained to do. Our work is not to believe every negative thought it presents. When seen clearly, such thoughts cannot be true, not because they are “bad,” but because they arise from fear and contraction. How could they be true when our deeper nature is whole and coherent—the eternal Ātman, a spark of the Divine?
Seeing the mind and its patterns clearly helps us respond more wisely.
This is not about perfection. We all drift off-centre and fall back into familiar patterns. What changes through awareness is not that this stops happening, but that we recognise it sooner and return sooner and more easily, back to centre.
Once we understand how the mind works, the real question becomes: how do we work with it and stay centred in truth?
1. Fighting the negative thoughts (not helpful)
We can battle them, but resistance feeds the very pain and negativity we are trying to escape.
2. Replacing them with positive thoughts (helpful)
Another approach is to create positive affirmations to counteract the negativity. If the thought is “I hate myself,” it may be replaced with “I love myself.”
This lifts the quality of the thought stream, but it can sometimes feel like painting over a crack in the wall. It works at the level of management rather than transformation.
3. Noticing what is actually happening (The ‘Surgical’ Transcendence)
A deeper shift occurs—a kind of surgical cut in our identification—when we begin to notice the arising and passing of thoughts without becoming identified with them.
We begin to see that we are the awareness aware of the thoughts, and not the thinker.
The mind’s flow of information is constantly changing. The negative thoughts we struggle with are not a present-moment reality; they are echoes of past experience replaying through habit and memory.
A familiar thought may surface during the day, while making tea, or sitting quietly on the lounge: Something is wrong with me, or I hate that person. When it is seen clearly, without engagement, it does not hold for long. It dissolves back into the background ocean from which it came.
Swami Sri Yukteswar described such thoughts as uninvited guests—when they are not entertained, they leave quickly.
What is seen clearly, without grasping or resistance, begins to release naturally, on its own.
You may notice a beautiful sunset and, for a moment, feel mesmerised by it. Attention naturally shifts into presence. The mind’s noise loses its momentum, not because it was forced away, but because something more immediate and alive has taken precedence.
Thoughts arise, linger for a moment, and dissolve.
In seeing this clearly, even the one who seems to suffer is revealed as just another thought—a fictional character formed in the mind — the “I” thought.
And in that seeing, awareness is simply aware.
Resting As The Silent Witness
In that clear seeing, the struggle with the mind and its negativity begins to soften. The ‘I’ thought, creating a fictional character that is suffering from the illusion of separateness, is seen for what it is: just another thought.
The struggle ends not when the thoughts stop, but when the identification with the false ‘I’ has subsided and the Witness is recognised as your true nature.
What once felt like a battle becomes something natural. Thoughts continue to appear and disappear, but awareness itself remains untouched—present as the silent witness in which the whole movement of the mind unfolds.
Beautiful. It's always about anchoring into the present moment, as you say. And I love how you go into depth with the yogic teachings here too!
Hi Jenni, I think this turned out to be a great article. You describe incredibly well what Patanjali called rāga and dveṣa—the mind’s attractions and aversions—as suffering-producing vrittis, or fluctuations of the mind. I hope your article reaches many people!
Tamás