What is Not Moving?

  During the meditation sharing and discussion tonight, one of the participants was sharing about her sense of learning how to let thoughts come and go without clinging to them or trying to grasp them. It was moving for me to hear that the participant was learning how to function in practice so that she is not getting carried away by thoughts. I even started to reflect on how, when I first started to meditate, I had this tendency to try to push thoughts away using the method. I soon learned what a mistake it was to try to push away thoughts like this.
      Why are thoughts so problematic anyway? I found out that when my mind is clear and in a calm state, it seems to naturally gravitate to the method, almost like a kind of centripetal force. With that kind of momentum, there is a kind of pull that takes the power away from wandering thoughts. With this kind of momentum, I am often able to look at my thoughts with detachment and wonder why they had such a great influence over me that they did. In fact, what I learn is that thoughts themselves don't have so much weight, and it's really one's state of mind that gives weight and importance to thoughts. After all, thoughts are often just a string of words and images. Unless a person is decoding the strings and images in emotionally loaded ways, those random bits don't have much of a meaning at all.
   At that point when the method creates a place of calm, it even feels like there is no need to 'stop' the mind from moving, because even moving thoughts don't really affect the mind. The movement is a bit illusory. Can you stop and think: is there any thought that 'moves' you? In fact, the mind is not moving at all! So why do we feel moved?