Daily Meditation: Who Knows Where Thoughts Come From?

“Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear!”

That’s a quote from Empire Records, a movie that came out over 2 decades ago (omg).

It stuck with me as a teenager, when my boarding school friends and I would watch it over and over again. We still quote the line to each other in our various Facebook activities.

It’s come up a lot in my meditation studies because the practice of meditation is basically side-eyeing your thoughts into oblivion.

In this seated meditation, you’ll learn how to label your thoughts.

Thoughts are either the past

  • memories

  • emotions

  • regrets

  • moments you’d like to experience again

  • attempts to understand the meaning behind things that happened

or the future

  • goals

  • to-dos

  • fears

  • moments you wish you could experience now

  • attempts to find to security in a plan of what’s going to happen

Label your thoughts.

Let them float on.

Until there are no more thoughts that come from the outside: the past, the future.

Then you can find peace in sitting still with only your intuition for company.