Working With Difficult Thoughts

Recorded June 10th 2026 ❤️SUBSCRIBE❤️ to Zuisei's channel for more teachings. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zuisei is a writer and Zen teacher based in Panama City, Panama. To attend her weekly meditation or retreats, or to join her next dharma talk live on Zoom visit https://www.oceanmindsangha.org . If you benefit from Zuisei's writing and teaching, please consider supporting her work by offering a donation. Even small one-time or recurring gifts make a world of difference to her and OMS’s work. Thank you, always, for your practice and generosity. https://oceanmindsangha.org/giving ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For teachings via email and/or to learn about ways to join Zuisei and the Ocean Mind Sangha live: ❤️SIGN UP❤️ for Zuisei's newsletter. https://vanessazuiseigoddard.substack... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For teachings via podcast ❤️SUBSCRIBE❤️ .▶︎Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... ▶︎Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0uHHZfb... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ❤️CONNECT❤️ • Instagram: @zuiseigoddard • www.oceanmindsangha.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For full transcript visit: https://oceanmindsangha.org/talks-2/d... Tonight I want to speak of the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, the sutra of the “Removal of Distracting Thoughts." I’ve touched on it in the past, but I want to go a bit deeper into it here, because of its importance for our zazen and for our lives in general, particularly on the heels of speaking about concentration as one of the links on the chain of transcendental dependent origination, and also because some of you have asked recently, What is stopping me? Really, what stops all of us from seeing clearly are our thoughts—specifically, distracting thoughts of greed, anger, and delusion, the three poisons. Thoughts of "I want this" when we see something we don’t have. Thoughts of "I don’t want this" when we’re faced with something we don’t like. (Think of anger as an extreme form of aversion.) Thoughts of “Things are this way,” when they’re actually otherwise. This sutra, the Vitakkasanthana Sutta, lays out very precisely five ways to work with these types of thoughts or signs (nimitta), as the Buddha calls them. Nimitta are images or mental signs, they stand in for an object, giving us its generic appearance, which we then take to be real. I take my image of person, for example, to be real and inherently existing. Or I take my image of an object—money—and imbue it with a kind of solidity, a kind of existence, and then go chasing after it. To clear up this confusion, we have to train the mind, we have to see the signless. There’s another sutta, called the Nimitta Sutta, in which the Buddha speaks of three wholesome signs: concentration, energy, and equanimity. If you want to train your mind, he says, you need these three signs, because if you just focus on one—for example, concentration—then you might get lazy. You could get very focused and yet not be engaged with the thing you’re focusing on. You become very good at seeing a thought, letting it go, and coming back, without realizing that there are certain thoughts you need to look at, before you let them go. With this type of concentration, we become a bit blind. If, on the other hand, we just develop energy, then we could get restless. This happens particularly during long retreats. We’re building samadhi, and if we don’t know how to harness that energy, then we get really antsy. My first full sesshin at the monastery, I ended up doing sprints after supper one night. No one said anything to me. They probably thought, “Oh poor thing, let her tire herself, get some of that energy out.” But after sitting and sitting all week, it was too much energy for me to hold. I didn’t know how. Then the last one—if we just cultivate equanimity, then we might not garner enough concentration. We kind of flatline: it’s all cool and calm but nothing’s really happening. We’re not getting any clearer. We therefore need all three—concentration, energy, and equanimity—to gain the higher mind, the Buddha said, the higher mind being the eight jhanas that lead to insight and liberation. It’s called “higher” because it’s higher than the good mind that practices the precepts. If practicing the precepts is like building a raft, training the mind is learning to navigate. The first will keep you afloat, but it’s the second that will take you where you want to go. It’ll take you all the way to the end of suffering, dukkha. Now, the early sutras sometimes