This investigation activity is designed to help you experience what it is like to relate to a false thought free of identification. You are free of identification when you don’t believe the thought, take it personally, or relate to it with aversion.
Investigating and Experiencing Disidentification
To boost your mindfulness, take a 10-breath-cycle mindful pause. Then use your direct experience to observe and directly experience the answers using your mindful, nonconceptual awareness. Then, use your direct experience to put the answer into words. For questions 1-6 answer “yes” or “no.” For question 7, follow the instructions. Answer honestly and genuinely. Whatever your answers are, honest and genuine answers are the “correct” answers when doing investigations.
Think, “I am a giraffe.” When you think this thought, does it generate any mental or emotional disturbance in you?
When you think “I am a giraffe,” do you take this thought personally? Do you see the thought as “your” thought or invest it with a sense of self?
(NOTE: When we take thoughts personally, we view them as “my thoughts,” and/or we invest them with a sense of self. The thought “I am a giraffe” is one we asked you to think. You didn’t choose it on your own, so it is not really “your” thought. And you are certainly not a giraffe, so you most likely don’t see yourself in this thought.)Do you consider this thought to be important?
Do you fear, hate, or dislike this thought?
Does this thought generate any behavior impulses in you? (Such as a desire to run away, fight, collapse, or turn towards worldly sense-pleasures?)
Think “I am a giraffe” and mindfully notice how you head, heart, and body feel as you relate to this thought. Gently notice this. What feelings or sensations do you feel? What are the feeling tones of those sensations (are they pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral)? Are those feeling tones worldly (sense-based) or relational (not sense-based)? (You may have a hard time distinguishing between worldly and relational feeling tones at first. That’s OK. Just do your best. This will become easier with practice and the insights that these investigations generate.)
If you answered “no” to questions 1-5, then the answer to number 6 gives you a felt and experiential understanding of what it is like to relate to thoughts with full mindfulness and zero identification with them.
Journal Activity
Answer this question in your journal:
Did you disidentify from the thought “I am a giraffe”?
If you experienced disidentification, what did it feel like in your head, heart, and body?
What insights did you learn from this investigation?
Summary
When you fully disidentify from your thoughts, you only feel pleasant feelings because your mindful discernment sees how the thoughts are untrue, unkind, unhelpful, impersonal, and safe to allow.
With the mindfulness practices you learn during the Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course, you will eventually be able to disidentify from false thoughts more and more. This means you will deactivate your belief, aversion, and personalization of them.
However, identification rests on a spectrum. This means that some thoughts that you fully identify with, you feel the suffering of them at full power. The less and less you identify with them, the less and less you suffer. We will learn more about that in the handout Testing the Effectiveness of Our Investigation which is part of mindfulness mission 3.03.
Additional Resources
If you are not already, consider taking our Mindfulness Fundamentals 3.0 course which helps you develop a daily meditation and mindfulness practice.
Read Investigating Self-Judgment to learn how to see how self-judgments are untrue, unkind, unhelpful, impersonal, impermanent, and safe to allow.
Read Testing the Effectiveness of Our Investigation to learn how well your investigation deactivated your identification with a false thought.
Read Investigate Thoughts to be see clearly what a thought is, and learn how to relate to them more skillfully.
Read Disidentifying from Form for additional helpful information on how and why mindfulness helps us disidentify from our thoughts, and eventually, all forms.
Banner photo credit: Jeremy Thomas @jeremythomasphoto