It is very important as a beginner that you understand right from the start that meditation is about befriending your thinking, about holding it gently in awareness, no matter what is on your mind in a particular moment. It is not about shutting off your thoughts or changing them in any way.
Meditation is not suggesting that it would be better if you didn’t think and were simply to suppress all those sometimes unruly, disturbing, and disquieting, sometimes uplifting and creative thoughts when they arise.
If you do try to suppress your thinking, you are just going to wind up with a gigantic headache. Such a pursuit is unwise, pure folly — like trying to stop the ocean from waving. It is the very nature of the ocean for its surface to change as a result of changing atmospheric conditions. At times, when there are no currents or wind, the surface of the ocean can be mirrorlike, completely flat and calm. But usually, it is waving to one degree or another on the surface. In the midst of a storm, a typhoon or a hurricane, the surface can be ferociously turbulent. It may not even look like a surface any more. Yet even in the midst of the most ferocious turbulence, if you descend beneath the surface thirty or forty feet or so, you will find no turbulence at all … just gentle undulation.
The mind is similar. The surface can be extremely labile, changing constantly with the changing “weather patterns” of our lives: our emotions, moods, thoughts, our experiences, everything, often with little or no awareness on our part. We can feel victimized by our thoughts, or blinded by them. We can easily mis-take them for the truth or for reality when in actuality they are just waves on its surface, however tumultuous they may be at times.
The entirety of our mind, on the other hand, is by its very nature deep, vast, intrinsically still and quiet, like the depths of the ocean.