By Naomi Matlow

In the words of Dharma teacher Rev. Keiryu Liên Shutt, “In Buddhism, we learn to see that a thought is just a thought.” As a result of this, a thought then is not inherently dangerous, powerful, or necessarily true.  However, they can still be painful, disruptive, and difficult to bear—as those who suffer with sticky thoughts, frequent ruminations, or have an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder diagnosis know very intimately. 

This is why I wrote my newly released handbook, “A Thought is Just a Thought: A Buddhist Guide to OCD.” It is an expanded version of my Masters thesis from Lesley University’s Mindfulness Studies program and it is inspired by my lived experience with OCD and what I have learned about training the mind to help alleviate unnecessary suffering. 

I was originally curious about the Buddhist roots of mindfulness meditation because the images of monks and statues of the Buddhas, sitting contently with their own minds while smiling, seemed like a far off fantasy to my OCD-inclined mind. One’s capacity to smile even with a busy mind is what Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Exposure and Response Prevention—the gold standards of OCD treatment—will ultimately show you, but what I would come to learn from the Buddhist wisdom tradition is that actively smiling at those very unwanted thoughts decreases their power and makes way for even more freedom. 

The Buddha taught that there is always the capacity for more expansion and ease. The mind is naturally peaceful, but fighting with the objects that enter it makes it a battleground. We learn through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Exposure and Response Prevention that the baseline for a mind is not to be rid of unwanted, sticky thoughts but rather to practice not clinging to them  so tightly with the compulsive need to mine them for truth. Once that baseline is practiced and lived, there is much more freedom. 

I have personally found the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, tried and true for centuries, to be one of the most reliable ways to experience this freedom. And while I’m still learning every day to release the gripping and habitual rigidity around my own mind’s thoughts (it’s called “practice” for a reason), I’m glad to be able to share insights from my ongoing journey here in this excerpt from “A Thought is Just a Thought: A Buddhist Guide to OCD.” I hope you enjoy it!

The Creation of Thought: From a Buddhist Perspective  

From a Buddhist psychology perspective, asking “why does the mind think?” is akin to asking “why do the eyes see?” or “why does the mouth taste?” According to Buddhism, there are six internal sense doors or sense mediums. They are: “The eye-medium, the ear-medium, the nose-medium, the tongue-medium, the body-medium, the intellect-medium” (Thanissaro Bhikku, Trans., 2003). Even though thoughts may appear to arrive in our intellect fully formed, they do not belong to us any more than a  sun beam to our eye door or a bird call to our ear door. The term “door” is as common a translation from the Pali language as the word “medium.” Thoughts are phenomena too, though Western society has conditioned us to deem them more important or indicative of truth than other phenomena. 

Additionally, our thoughts are not “us.” When in the midst of an OCD thought spiral, it may feel like the hardest thing in the world to not follow those thought trains and hop on board, but recognizing the passing nature of thoughts as phenomena, rather than something that reveals who we are internally, is something that we can practice. In the words of the legendary Ram Dass, “Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story instead of the actor in it.” This may be new to you from a Buddhist psychology standpoint, but it is not too dissimilar from the key assumptions of which all of cognitive therapy, the umbrella of new wave psychotherapies that CBT, ERP, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) fall underneath, is based.  

Cognitive therapy is based on a recognition of the cognitive distortions we carry in our minds. I believe the Buddha would call our creation of self and the inclination to cling to our thoughts, in the words of Dr. Aaron T. Beck, the founder of CBT, “cognitive distortions.” Cognitive distortions are delusions of the mind, based on our previous perceptions and life experience. They are not necessarily based in truth.  

Remember, the goal of meditation is not to clear your mind, but rather to become aware of the thoughts that are present within the mind and let them be. Focusing on the physical sensations of the body, the sound of the breath, or noises coming through our hearing ear door is how we practice doing this. 

When we practice being aware of our thoughts, we can begin to see how we create our own reality. In Buddhist psychology, in order to be free from unnecessary suffering, one must understand the construction of one’s experience and the way we individually play a part in that very suffering. We choose, and most often rather unconsciously, what sense experiences we cling to—and then decide what is worthy of our attention, what needs a closer look, or what needs to be reviewed a